On The Silver Globe

On the Silver Globe (Na Srebrnyum Globie) (1988)

Runtime: 158 minutes

Directed by: Andrzej Zulawski

Starring: Andrzej Seweryn, Jerzy Trela, Grazyna Dylag, Waldemar Kownacki, Iwona Bielska

From: Zespol Filmowy “Kadr”

There is no shortage of interesting Polish movies I could have chosen for this month's viewing; in fact, one week or so in the future I'll have to devote it solely to watching motion pictures from that country. This one was chosen due to its high reputation... along with the unique backstory it has. Famed director Andrzej Zulawski got into trouble after his movie The Devil was released and it ruffled the wrong feathers. However, after he made That Most Important Thing: Love while on exile in France and it received critical acclaim, the government allowed him to make anything he wanted. Thus, he made one of the novels in The Lunar Trilogy, from Jerzy Zulawski... yes, that is his great uncle. Well, he got into trouble again and filming was stopped after only 80% of it was completed. I don't know the circumstances how but the film was saved and the gaps were filled in by Andrzej himself narrating what was missing over clips of late 80's Poland after Communism fell, as why the heck not? Perhaps that should have been done by Tomas Alfredson with The Snowman...

The story and how it's told: it will in high likelihood be what you expect from the man who gave us Possession during one of his periods of exile. You have astronauts in the future who land on an Earth-like planet to colonize it but the children there grow up faster than back home... they turn into a Pagan-like society, there are crow creatures known as Szerns, who also have weird telepathic powers. Eventually there are Szern/human hybrids, and years later someone from Earth (Marek) visits the planet & is seen as a messiah, which isn't as good for him as it may sound. To quote another European movie of the time also based on a novel and sharing some key themes-which was subsequently remade-it is hard to be a God. The movie is full of yelling and otherwise overly dramatic moments where dense, deep philosophical monologues are shouted at you and other themes include religion and marital issues, which was a real life problem for the director at the time. More than once, it did give me fatigue.

Very weird it is; it is also very good as the movie was done to a very high standard, both in front and behind the camera. Everything was so odd, it was an enthralling watch as I genuinely had no clue what to expect next or what bizarre scene would happen next. The score was pretty awesome, so I will give credit to Andrzej Korzynski. Furthermore, this was a relatively expensive picture, allowing this to be shot in Mongolia and what is now the country of Georgia, along with many native locations. It is always a nice movie to look at, even when the scenes that precede Marek's arrival are in a blueish-green tint.

To say that this is one of a kind is a massive cliché... yet it is true. A totally unique story that attempts to address mature topics while using an always-active camera, it is a crying shame it was never completed; in the middle of the film, you realize from a lengthy narrative dump that an important and long section of this is part of the missing 20%. It is a testament that this was able to be stitched together like Frankenstein's Monster to an end product I can still give high marks to.