Most of the most innovative pictures leave a series of imitators in their wake, and it is inevitable the majority of those will be inferior. Consider the legacy of Pulp Fiction, where we had at least a decade of excessively verbose and profane ne’er-do-wells and chronologically jumbled timelines. Then there’s 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which resulted in all kinds of junk.
And it was an influence felt around the world, such as in 1970’s Signals: A Space Adventure, a production shared by East Germany and Poland. Try to imagine the product of that lineage before looking up a single image from the film. Admittedly, it had a pretty classy poster, images of which can be found online. It doesn’t directly emulate any of the other film’s artwork, but it is in the same gestalt and with similar fonts. In some territories, the title incorporated “MMXX”, suggesting this was a sequel taking place 19 years later. This wouldn’t have fooled anybody, even those behind the Iron Curtain who might have only been able to hear about Kubrick’s film.
But first, I actually want to give credit to the special effects. The miniatures of spaceships are nowhere near the photo realism of the older movie, but they do look good in wide shots. In closeup, not so much. The vessels also largely move in a manner that feels right, though there are a couple of missteps. One of those is only in dialogue, as somebody announces they are going to hit the brakes, when I assume they really mean something like “reverse thrusters”. Regardless, we don’t see what happens, so I’m imagining something akin to the “air brakes” from that Bugs Bunny cartoon where he uses those at the last second to keep an airplane from crashing.
We will see such a ship right after the opening credits, a craft that is orbiting Jupiter. Inside, there is a row of people seated at identical consoles that look like some sort of musical instrument of the future. I would have guessed this was Kraftwerk playing live, except for the absence of an audience and the surprising diversity of genders and races of those participating.
A surprise meteor shower hits the ship, breaking it into three pieces. Jump cut to the title a second time, which confused me. Then a cut from that to waves crashing on a shore and shirtless guys riding horses. Whoa…what?! There are other guys tumbling and doing cartwheels in unison. And we’ll see a lot of cartwheels, so I assume they had only just been invented. Also, I’m pretty sure the Soviet Union extensively persecuted gays, yet here is (and I don’t mean this in the pejorative) the gayest spectacle I have seen.
There will also be women there, but I got the impression they weren’t allowed to play with the boys. There’s also children, who are playing with remote controlled flying saucers and supposedly playing some sort of game in the air above them, something like soccer, but with balls that defy gravity (memo to self: if anybody ever tells me I have tiny balls, just tell them they are the balls of the future and are defying gravity).
Some of these adults are the rescue crew for that broken ship which is now orbiting Jupiter in pieces. One would assume this isn’t really a rescue, and instead a a post-mortem operation, as they will arrive there 300 days later. A complete absence of communications from the Jupiter vessel does not bode well.
And a whole lotta chatter does not bode well for the viewer. This is a long, dull slog of an experience. It is like a Communist filmmaker heard complaints that Kubrick’s film was too dull and saw an opportunity to achieve a strategic advantage in the “movie boredom gap”. I can hear somebody say, and likely in the voice of Boris from the old Bullwinkle show, “You zink you are bored? I vill show you true boredom…”
Our first stop is at a space station, just like a certain other film. But this one isn’t that double-wheel shape, instead opting for something closer to a roulette wheel. I wonder if there is legalized gambling there. If so, they doubtlessly call it “space gambling”, just as one character here actually says “space psychology”. That must be the field of study to understand and prevent that “space madness” from the best episode of Ren & Stimpy.
The crew on the space roulette wheel also wear jumpsuits which inexplicably have tiny zippers right where the person’s nips would be. Anybody who has wondered why men have nipples should be doubly confused as to why they would need to be accessed in a hurry. I’m going to call this innovation “nip zips”.
I’m not sure how long the trip takes in this film from the moon to Jupiter, but I felt like I watched it in real time and with characters having dull conversations for the curation. What is odd is the movie is somehow both dull and deeply inept, when the latter should have provided some amount of amusement. The editing is especially poor, with sudden detours to pointless bits like the zero-G exercise room. Yeah, they did a great job with the wire work to make them appear to be weightless, but this bit goes nowhere and didn’t even give me the feeling of having observed everyday life in space.
There is the potential for suspense once they arrive at the three parts of the dead ship. I wondered whether there was any possibility the components could still be in such close proximity in the vacuum of space, and I doubt it. The rescue ship picks up a signal, and three possibilities are presented. 1) There are still somehow survivors. 2) The signals were generated by “computers in sympathy with their dead masters.” Oh, yeah, I’m sure it’s that possibility. 3) Aliens are emulating the signals which had been sent from the ship at some point in the past.
Well, we already know at this point it is answer #1, because we have already seen the survivors. There is no suspense. We just watch the rescue team explore the first two big ol’ chunks o’ ship and rule out there were any survivors, before finally checking behind door #3.
Since the plot is quite thin, there is a great deal of inanity. One wouldn’t think so much weirdness could be so tedious, but nonsense without serving a larger purpose becomes tiring. There’s a robot with a single arm in the center of its huge orb of a “head”, and it looks like it is always flipping everybody off. There is an animated comedy segment which is stupid on its own, serves no real purpose and we don’t even see the conclusion of it. One ship has coffin-shaped doorways, which I doubt would inspire confidence.
All this quirkiness is especially irritating because there was the potential for a decent movie here. Models and wire work should have been the most difficult aspects of the production to do properly, and those are done well. Things like script, dialogue, pacing, editing and acting are all atrocious.
Heck, there’s even a element here I haven’t seen in a film of this vintage, and that is a bracelet that measures the wearer’s biometrics. Sure, it may just be a bunch of electrical crap glued to a bracelet, but this is essentially Apple Watch decades before it existed, but if that device had first been realized in the Soviet Republic and using pre-microchip technology. This film has ideas like that and is somehow still bad science fiction.
Signals: A Space Adventure doesn’t get a black mark in my book for being such a blatant rip-off of 2001. That is something every other sci-fi film would be doing for years, and some are still trying to harness some of that magic. The problem is the end product is exactly how I imagine such a film from that place in that time would be if I had never seen Soviet sci-fi. When all is said and done, both the best and worst thing I can say is, of all the clones of 2001, this is the two-thousand-and-one-iest.
Dir: Gottfried Kolditz
Starring…oh, come now, we’re not really going to go into this, are we?
Watched as part of the Eureka! UK (region B) box set Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA