Ikaria XB-1 (better known as Voyage to the End of the Universe, 1963)

 

100 best science fiction movies from Slant Magazine

#94. Ikaria XB-1 (1963)

 

Better known by its English (and inaccurate) title “Voyage to the End of the Universe” this film is both fondly remembered and rarely scene. Fondly remembered because it is in so many ways unique, rarely seen because for the same reason -- you see it’s an adventure film that skillfully plays down its own adventure. Its goal wasn’t excitement, though excitement is thrown in, its primary goal was to be a Travelogue of things that haven’t happened yet. It proven hugely influential, echoed many of the films and TV series you most love. Like a Writer’s Writer, or an Actor’s Actor, it is a fountain of prosperity for others, if not for itself.

 

Loosely based on Stanislav Lem’s novel “The Magellan Cloud” (1955) it set two-hundred-years in the future (so less than one-hundred-fifty as we stand now) and about an improbably ambitious first voyage to the Star System of Alpha Centauri (the next-closest Star System to our own) on a Star Ship as large as an Ocean Liner. Though some of the science can be poo-pooed (Why no mention of Alpha Centauri being a three-star system? Why didn’t they send Robots first? Why such large a crew sent into a complete unknown? And what about the casual Artificial Gravity on-board ship?) the film mostly shows an admirable and quite rare adherence to Science (No FTL. An appreciation of Time-Dilation. Recognition that measuring instruments can only measure what they are specifically designed to measure and nothing else. A sensitivity to how protection from radiation is different under different circumstances.).

 

The film’s two most unusual elements are closely related: It is unapologetically Utopian and is deliberately (but deceptively) slow-paced.

 

Utopian SF is important to the development of our dreams of the Future, but a Utopia should be a calm place so it is often impossible obstacle for creating a compelling Drama. This is best demonstrated by the inherent contradictions in the “Star Trek” franchise (TV and film series, first aired in 1966), our cultures most sustained Utopian vision but also a near constant shoot-‘em-up, the more dark the story telling, the more exciting it is.

 

The original Czech version of this film clocks in at less than 1½ hours, the English-dubbed version is ten-minutes shorter and with an entirely different ending. This film is rigorously calm and demands that you embrace its leisurely pace, but them makes a lot happen when you are relaxed into thinking it will not. Though the opening scene puts us in the middle of a crisis, it then flashes back months earlier, and we get an unusually long introduction of a wholly new Environment and Culture. We meet a large number of quickly defined characters who are four months into a 28-month mission (eight months to get to the Alien Star-System, estimated fourteen months for Exploration, then eight months back). There’s also the issue that it is 28-months for the crew, but fifteen years for those left-behind on Earth (that’s the Time Dilation). Though everyone seems well-behaved, boredom has encouraged inattentiveness to duty, an actual danger that almost no other SF film dare speak its name.

 

Director Jindřich Polák, who co-wrote the screenplay with Pavel Juráček, showed great faith in the audience, allowing the less-plot-driven establishing scenes to go a full thirty minutes, while almost any other film I can think of would keep such things under fifteen. They hold your attention because it is so beautifully presented and so full of ideas. Then, with less-than-an-hour remaining, we get four episodes, each a crisis and/or revelation, each one enough for a whole, but lesser, film, all the while maintaining the mannerisms of a calm surface already established. There’s an encounter with a Ghost Ship. The challenge of a “Dark Star” undetectable by instruments until it is too late, crippling the crew. Escaping the Dark Star, the crew realizes that two members were more exposed than the others, and one them, now deranged, is threatening everyone. Finally, nearing their destination, they encounter evidence of another advanced, technological, but Alien, Civilization.

 

Gene Rodenberry, creator of “Star Trek,” and Stanley Kubrick, creator of “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) famously immersed themselves in the SF genre in preparation for those projects, and some of their influences are better documented than others. “Ikarie …” doesn’t make any of the official lists of influences I can find, but its importance is undoubtable and often commented on -- I’d go as far to say it was likely the most important of them all. Regarding “Star Trek,” there’s the over-all look reflected in specific props and sets and the Utopian ethos. Regarding “2001 …” I see it in how Kubrick rejected the newest FX technology (moving matting and chroma-key techniques) in favor of painstaking in-camera effects, plus a bold screwing-around with assumptions of how a film is supposed to be paced.

 

“Ikarie …” is an odd mixture of old-Cinema and new. It’s FX heavy and presents us with admirable tracking shots, but one couldn’t claim Polák embraced an “unchained camera”; his fluid motions came mostly from stationary cameras and the editing is restrained because Polák seemed to prefer longer scenes with fewer setups (Editing by Josef Dobrichovsky). Everything is as carefully composed as a W.S. Van Dyke or Yasujiro Ozu film, allowing the action to unfold before us without the camera being aggressively engaged. Consistent with that aesthetic, the lighting is exquisite, some of the most elegant and creative in a B&W film that you’ll outside Noir and Horror films obviously influenced by German Expressionism (Cinematography by Jan Kallis, a repeat collaborator with Polák, Lighting Design was uncredited).

 

The miniatures are excellently handled even if the Space Ship designs would start looking old-hat in less than five years as our vision of the Future represented on TV and in the cinema quickly mutated (the film had too large an FX team to list here). Maybe the miniatures no longer convince, but the massive sets are still gorgeous; I first saw this film on TV as a child and long-dreamed about the Star Ship’s interior spaces (Set and Production Design was by Jan Zázvorka, who worked mainly as an Architect, and Karel Lukas).

 

It is also subtlety, but aggressively, political. Its Utopia was Communalistic, and given that came from behind the Iron Curtain, I really should say “Socialistic” or “Communistic,” but it also defied some of the Soviet politics of its day because it was also so Pacifistic. Czechoslovakia was a country full of idealism when this film was made, and soon the Nation’s Official Policies were explicitly pursuing “Socialism with a Human Face.”

 

Unfortunately, five years after the film was released, Czechoslovakia’s Soviet allies decided they weren’t adequately obedient to Russian-Thug Leonid Brezhnev and, without any provocation, Soviet tanks rolled into the Nation’s Capital of Prague. There were surprising few killed during the Invasion because Czechoslovakia was so unprepared and so defenseless, but the Invasion trigged a huge Refugee crisis, with as many as 300,000 fleeing to the West (this was out of a population of less-than 10 million). About a half-decade of even harsher censorship followed which was crudely called “Nominalization.” During that time, the genre of SF all-but disappeared. Though Director Jindřich Polák didn’t suffer as much as many, when he finally returned to SF with “Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea” (1977) he’d replaced this film’s calm optimism with embittered humor.

 

(The original Novelist, Director, and Screenwriter, all embraced Communistic Utopias in their work, and all faced Soviet censorship at one time or other. Does this suggest Communists eat their own children?)

 

So, for the story. And a warning, there are lots of spoilers ahead …

 

The setting is 2163 and almost exclusively on the Star Ship Ikarie, which translates to “Icarus,” which might be imperfect piece of symbolism because there is a happy ending to this particular Myth. After the introduction with crazed Michal (Otto Lackovič) threatening to destroy the Star Ship, we jump back-in-time and learn a fair amount about several members of the forty-person crew. They are equally divided between male and female, and the female’s roles are meant to represent totally sexual equality in the future. (Note: all the top three Command Posts are still held by men). Despite the equality, there seems to have been no “sexual revolution,” romance flourishes, but is also quite chaste.

 

Though, on-the-surface, the crew seems mono-racial, that is largely a retrospective view. We now view race by phenotype (what you look like) but role the clock back long enough and race is what we now call Ethnicity, narrowly Tribal, and sometimes even National. Historian Noel Ignatiev powerfully argued that in the USA those of Irish decent didn’t become fully “White” until around the 1870s – 1880s. My personal experience suggests it took those of Italian descent took even longer to become White in the eyes of our Culture. This is a Czechoslovakian film, and its two main ethnic groups, the Czechs and the Slovacs, and both are White so I, personally, can’t tell the difference, but lemme tell you, they can.

 

Some Soviet SF films had strikingly multi-racial casts, but they tended to be produced farther East, where those Actors were more easily available (another Lem adaptation, “The Silent Star” (1960, AKA “First Spaceship to Venus”) is an example). Here, the Internationalism is best represented in character names: Captain Vladmir Abajev (Zedenek Stepanek), Mathematician Anthony Hopkins (Frantisek Smolik), Commander MacDonald (Radovan Lukavsky), etc.

 

Though Michal is ultimately the Villain, he really isn’t. Early in the film he’s short-tempered, but not deranged. He won’t go off the deep-end until he’s a victim of Radiation Poisoning. The culture of the ship is an extreme version of what some Critics call “Competence Porn,” a phrase used to contrast the Corporate perfectionism of the crew of Star Ship Enterprise in “Star Trek” with the squabbling Leathernecks of the Nostromo from “Alien” (1979).

 

As positive as the view of the future is, there are touches of darkness, some intentionally included but in some cases the filmmakers seem unaware of how casually they’ve embraced Authoritarianism.

 

Four-months into the mission, boredom is undermining efficiency. The warmly paternalistic Captain Vladmir throws a party to cheer everyone up. It proves to be a pretty formal affair, with white dinner-jackets and elegant dresses. The dancing would’ve looked almost normal in the court of King Henry VII. Soon the older folks leave the dance floor to the younger ones who like more up-tempo music. And older character jokes that the young people’s dancing as “jiggling,” but the second dance is just as Tudor as the first (Critic Glenn Ericson described it as “a subdued techno minuet.”). Apparently, in the future, you’re NEVER allowed to loosen up.

 

Electronic music was in its infancy in the early 1960s. Composer Zdeněk Liška was one of the pioneers in these new sounds, and offers us a lot of cool, futuristic melodies, but recognized the new instruments limitations and switches to more conventional music in more intimate scenes.

 

Cigarette smoking is gone, everyone has some kind of futuristic version of vapes that are presumably far-healthier; these SF vapes don’t deliver nicotine, they trigger memories through scent. At the party, a man offers a woman a small tube, "November," he suggests.

 

She sniffs, "Earth!"

 

Similarly, there’s a lot of drinking, but no drunkenness, I’m guessing this is akin the “Star Trek’s” Synthahol.

 

It’s probably not a surprise that a Starship would have an all-pervasive surveillance culture, but I’ve never seen the near-total stripping of privacy presented with such a sense of positivity.

 

We also learn that MacDonald (we’re never given his first name) is badly missing his family and increasingly insecure knowing he’s growing older slowly than they, how will he’ll fit in when he finally gets home? Then Vladimir admits to MacDonald that he’d been lied to from the beginning by his Comrades for the good of the Mission.

 

Near the end of the film, McDonald, the most betrayed, will save them all. Oddly, but effectively, his Heroism is downplayed. This movie has no one like “Star Trek’s” James T. Kirk (William Shatner), even though MacDonald’s humanistic courage in saving both the Space Ship and deranged Michal would be repeatedly echoed by the “Star Trek” Hero only a few years later.

 

This is a super-serious film, but not without humor. One of the nicest touches was Anthony’s cute Robot Patrick (voice actor uncredited). Patrick is technologically advanced for the audience because it’s from one-hundred-years into our Future, but an antique for the Crew, because it’s from one-hundred-years in their past. How far civilization has advanced is a theme that comes up again-and-again during the course of the film. Quoting Ericson again, “‘Ikarie’ invents the trappings of an entire future civilization.”

 

Electronic Computers came into being before the Space-Age dawned, but the height of the Space-Age was well before the Digital Age and when NASA started to hit its Glory Days, Electronic Computers weren’t very good. It was only during those years (1961 to 1972) that the word “Computers” stopped referring to a Human Job Title and became a common moniker for a Machine. Still, everyone already knew the Machines would transform everything, so most understood how Computer Displays would transform the Workplace even before those displays even existed.

 

There were various tricks used in films to create that illusion before the reality; “2001 …” was an exceptional good example of this. Probably the first use of real Computer Graphics in a SF film was “Star Wars” (1977).

 

“Ikarie … ” was generously budgeted, but not on the scale of “2001 …” so their Computer displays were oversized TV screens, done by rear-projection, and the fact that the film was B&W probably helped that illusion (in “2001 …” a color film, Kubrick found rear projection so problematic he avoided it entirely and at great cost of time and money). In other scenes, complex information is read off screens as if they were in text, but the actual displays only abstract, psychedelic, animations (a visual trickery that goes back to the 1950s and was later borrowed by “Star Trek”). In retrospect, this short cut offers great visual appeal in such a frequently somber film.

 

Another nice visual detail was that the shoes of the Space Suits have soles that light up with each step, a feature helpful when the spacemen must walk in darkness. Today, in the Real World, it’s a fashion statement for kids.

 

The story really kicks in when the Ghost Ship is encountered, this is rightfully the most-admired of the film’s episodes. When explored it’s discovered the ship is named the Tornado and had been launched from Earth in 1987. It proves to be a gambling casino that was inexplicably armed with Nuclear Weapons and Nerve Gas, oddly named “Trigger Fun.”

 

(OK, there were no Space Casinos in ‘87, but a still good year to pick for out-of-control Cold War lunacy).

 

Tornado’s long-dead Captain had faced a never-explained crisis, killed all on board, and then aimed the vessel for deep space. Did he go insane? Did he do it to protect to Human Race from someone else’s lunacy? The Tornado gives up very few of its secrets.

 

The utter contempt that the Ikarie crew holds for the brutality of the 20^th c, and how they’re mystified they are that the Human Race survived that ugly period, is the film’s most explicitly propagandist statement. It clearly rages against Western Decadence (in these scenes, the text is in English, so presumably the Tornado came from the USA) but also out-of-control Militarism, so perhaps the Russians are a target as well. We must not forget these ideas were expressed by a Nation that was aggressively de-militarized by other Nations, suffering under a history of Exploitation, Conquest, and/or Abandonment from everyone from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Western Democracies, the Nazis, and finally the Soviets, for the whole of the “Living History” that unfolded before the film was made. Also, Czechoslovakia bordered Ukraine, victim of one of the worst Genocides in human history under the hands of Soviet Monster Joseph Stalin, and one must assume that virtually every member of the film’s cast and crew were at least half-aware of that.

 

Next came the encounter with the Dark Star. A more intense version of the issues brought up during the first thirty minutes, the unexpected Celestial Body emits a Radiation that can’t be detected, only visible in its effect. The crew is becoming lethargic, unable to focus, some contemplate suicide, others mutiny. They’re effectively powerless and have to surrender to Anthony’s predictions that all they have to do is not screw up anything for 60 hours and they will all see it through. Another great scene, during the height of the crisis, has Robot Patrick wandering an empty corridor, plaintively calling out for its master, “Antony … Antony …Antony …”

 

When that crisis is passed, two new issues emerge. One, that the crisis passed more quickly than expected (and that is one spoiler I won’t divulge). The other is that though almost everyone else has recovered, two Cosmonauts doing EVA were more effected than the others. One of them, Michal, goes insane.

 

Then there’s the inspirational ending, radically different in the Czech and USA versions.

 

At the time, the film was a modest International hit but quickly slipped into obscurity. The year it was released, in Italy, at the respected Trieste Science Fiction Film Festival, it beat out that county’s own popular Alien Invasion/pro-Labor propaganda film, “Omicron,” Russia’s much lauded, “The Amphibian Man,” and, from the USA, Roger Corman's best movie, “X - The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.” That success led to distribution on 42 countries.

 

(Corman would prove to be this film’s USA distributor, so he’s why I saw it. In that frequently disdained version, the Director’s name is changed to "Jack Pollack").

 

It’s also notable that outside of speculative Documentaries like “Man in Space” (1955), this was an era when few of the USA’s popular SF films were set in Space, and fewer still had decent production values. Over the previous decade-and-a-half, only “Destination Moon” (1950), “This Island Earth” (1955) and “Forbidden Planet” (1956) really stand out. The influence of “Forbidden Planet” on “Ikarie…” is especially obvious.

 

Wrote Critic Alex Cox, the film is "beautiful and austere" and "remains one of the most original and exciting science fiction films ever made."

 

Wrote Trace Reddell, "the film is in fact a prescient instance of the maturing of the genre … ‘Ikarie XB1’ is intended to be sophisticated fare for adult viewers, a serious platform for a complex and critical set of intertwined stories about the various crew members aboard Ikarie XB1."

 

Trailer:

Ikarie XB 1 Trailer - YouTubeIkarie XB 1 Trailer - YouTube