Moscow-Cassiopeia

Moscow-Cassiopeia (Moskva-Kassiopeya) (1973)

Runtime: 80 minutes

Directed by: Richard Viktorov

Starring: Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy, Misha Yershov, Aleksandr Grigoryev, Vasiliy Merkurev, Lev Durov

From: Gorky Film

If you are wondering why I watched an extremely obscure (at least in the Western world) piece of Soviet cinema made for children, it's due to Letterboxd. Someone I follow-because they followed me-calling themselves Reelz liked a review to a movie called Teens in the Universe. I had no bloody idea what that was, so I looked at the review, done by a dude named theNomad. His opening comment: “Imagine Stanley Kubrick had done massive amounts of peyote, learned Russian and for shits and giggles decided to make a 2001/Clockwork Orange hybrid to scare the crap out of kids.” As Buford T. Justice would say, “That's an attention-getter”. I didn't read any further as I wanted nothing spoiled.

I looked online to see if I could find the movie; I then discovered that it was a sequel to this film, which I figured I should watch first. There is a version of this film on Archive.org, but it's Russian with no subtitles, so that was a slight problem... I went to my secret place for watching all sorts of real obscure stuff and I was able to find it with subtitles. It's also on Mubi; it only costs a few bucks per month to be a member.

To steal the plot description from (redacted) and cleaned up by me: “An alarming radio signal from intelligent creatures reaches the Earth from the depths of the Universe. The project suggested by the young inventor Vitya Sereda should enable a spaceship to reach the planet. However the flight will last 27 years; that's why the spaceships crew is being formed up of schoolchildren. Everything has been thoroughly thought out but a mischievous Fedya Lobanov sneaks on board...”

Note that the “alarming radio signal” sounds almost exactly like Herbie Hancock's Rain Dance, a song from the early 70's and deep in his funk jazz fusion days. It's rather trippy, if you haven't heard it before. The theme in the opening credits sounds like lounge music. I can't explain why. The tale is rather wacky. A magical figure is involved-I heard him described as if he was an early version of Q years before he appeared in the Star Trek universe-as the young inventor is a genius and he comes up with that method to travel to the source of the signal. There's also the subplot of romance and who wrote a mysterious note professing love of Vitya... because of course, even in a tale involving 13 and 14 year olds.

Overall, while I understand this is the more “normal” of the two films, it's still rather odd. There's another element that was made famous years later by Star Trek: The Next Generation. There's actually a de facto Holodeck, of all things. Sometimes you get to see the world through a fish eye lens, and I don't know why. The score can be rather quirky at times, there's actually two folk-sounding songs you randomly hear in montages, the special effects are low-fi but they're unlike what I've seen before and thus I was charmed by them. I did enjoy the movie for what it was. It was nice how they didn't insult anyone's intelligence just because it was made with kids in mind. I appreciate such things.

I'll return tomorrow afternoon with what I've heard will be a real odd psychedelic experience of a movie.