How sad is this?

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Blistering performances.

To watch this movie today, you have to be serious aficionado of Science Fiction from the Space Age of the 1960's.If you're old enough and you were LUCKY, you might have caught it maybe once in your entire Lifetime on the Late-Late-Late Saturday Night Movie...and it was the bastardized, Americanized 'Voyage to the End Of the Universe' And from what I could discern, it was rebroadcast less than 3 times and then disappeared from American ken. I remembered the ship with the three flying saucers flying Swooooosh! through Interstellar space. It had Robots. It had flying saucers. It had Spacesuits. It had a scary derelict rocketship with dead bodies in it. And it had one explosion. Then My mother told me to go to Bed. Aaaaargh! Literally close to 40 years later, the memory dogged me to get a DVD of the full IKARIE XB1. And it was worth it.Remember: if you saw it as a Kid, you saw it chopped to fit on the square TV screen. This is a Full widescreen Movie Production. And it's Long.Caveats: No Monsters...other than the dead Capitalist kind (chuckle!). No Space Battles. No Alien Invasions. No Mad Scientists. And it's B&W.As other reviewers note-- there are segments where they go to explore a derelict ship, and an incapacitating flyby a 'Dark Star' and cope with temporary madness from Radiation. Kind of a prelude to the old Star Trek.The rest of the Movie is Life aboard the first Interstellar ship, everything from matchmaking, to a dance party (Which I thought to be endearingly comical, both the music and the dance steps!!!) to the birth of a baby.There was even a pet Dog onboard! The Departure from the usual run of American Space Movies also included female crew members who clearly had important roles on the ship, and were treated with unfeigned respect by the men when they were consulted for opinions and input.All in all, the movie spoke to me like an early version of '2001: A space Odyssey'. And even though it was made in Communist Czechoslovakia, beyond the rather pointed social hints in the derelict 'Tornado', there was no heavy handed proletariat propaganda.On the FX front, for 1963, the sets and setup were very high quality. The Spacesuits and the extra-vehicular saucers wowed me.Warning: There are probably several versions of this movie out there. One English dubbed version is actually partial. There are sections of the movie where English Subtitles appear and you hear Czech, then in the next scene, they flip back to English. And lastly, by today's hi-octane Hollywood standards, this movie is languid. But by today's standards, hallowed '2001: a Space Odyssey' would be called Boring.A Different milieu and a Different Cultural perspective. So have a little patience. This one is best for a Sunday Afternoon. Give it a try if you can find it....and yes, it's girlfriend friendly.

IKARIE XB-1 is one of the most compelling science fiction films ever made. Filmed in very Cold War era Czecheslovokia and rarely seen in North America in it's complete widescreen form, this is a movie that was so ahead of it's time that only 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY managed to raise the bar above what was set here with it's meticulous depiction of outer space vehicles in action.If there is any shortcoming to IKARIE it's simply that: The space ship model effects are somewhat awkward & unconvincing, a setback that the movie might not recover from in the mind's eye of viewers raised on 30+ years of George Lucas & Steven Spielberg special effects films. But viewers who are interested in a story will be more than rewarded with a complex drama about a group of humans off in search of a brave new world to populate, with an ending sequence that is perhaps the most provocative element of the entire film -- and would later find form again in Mario Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, albeit in a different manner. There is no doubt that the Italian master was influenced by this film.For me the most striking sequence is a daring, risky, and potentially scandalous commentary by these Soviet Bloc filmmakers when they have their explorers encounter a derelict craft floating aimlessly & without power in the empty nothing between the stars. A boarding party is dispatched to discover that it was an early Earth craft which had been dispatched during a nuclear conflict who's crew was made up of decadent aristocrats who had been attempting to escape the carnage back on Earth. They are long dead, mummified to the point where their bodies disintegrate when brushed against, and had apparently been killed off by the military flight crew when it became clear the oxygen supply was about to run dry. The quiet, calm horror of the scene is unprecedented even by today's standards, with the accidental triggering of one of the ship's obsolete but still functional nuclear warheads providing a nerve-shattering moment as the two hapless crewmen attempt to escape the airless, gravity deprived hell in space.One of the aspects that makes the scene so convincing was the space suit designs created by the artistic visionaries behind the film. They look even more functional, practical and "real" than the Mercury era space flight technology of the day: Bulky, armored, pressurized tin cans with knee joints, claw-like cloves, and magnetized boot plates. The scene of the two astronauts trying to run across the derelict flight deck for the airlock to escape the explosion is a marvel of not only applied science but choreography. In my opinion the film is worth tracking down for this one sequence alone.And now you can: The film was issued in 2005 on a marvelous Czech made PAL format DVD that shows the film in the correct 2:35:1 Techniscope widescreen format with the original, unaltered & un-messed with ending sequence intact. Any serious fan of Cold War era science fiction simply must acquire one. I will admit that some of the more talky middle "soap opera in space" segments sort of lag the pacing a bit, but the 81 minutes is over quickly and the impression one is left with is that the thinking behind the movie was miles ahead of anything that came out of the West at the same time. Along with the Russian PLANETA BUR and the East German/Polish SILENT STAR aka FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS, this is one of the most important & overlooked masterpieces of science fiction from the time when manned space flight was becoming a reality.All three films are grounded in actual science with impressive visual power that still has potency. What makes IKARIE XB-1 even more impressive is that it lacks some of the glory-boy propagandizing of the Soviet Bloc's entertainment machine, which was designed to enthrall the masses with depictions of glorious Soviet cosmonauts conquering the cosmos -- something that never really quite happened. Those movies were meant to placate the Proletariat and give them a reason to make do cheer for the genuine oppression under which they lived. By contrast, IKARIE is almost a work of pure artistic expression, which is in itself remarkable considering the conditions under which it was made.8/10

I'm one of those rare individuals who viewed Ikarie XB 1 ( Voyage to The End of The Universe) during it's original theatrical release in the U.S. I found the interpretation of dance in the future quite interesting. ( I wonder if the use of ribbons was foreshadowing of events to come in the Olympics?) I also recall the continued reference to the colonists reaching "...the Green Planet". In the version of the film I screened way back in the swinging 60's, the green planet was Earth! Early science fiction film efforts from other countries offer a window into the similarities and differences of varied ideologies in the world. They also show that everyone wants a bit of adventure on the "Big Screen". This film is recommended viewing for the nostalgic among us.

This is for sf-film completists. It seems to fill a gap between the late-50's style of sf movie and the forever-after effects of Star Trek and Kubrick's "2001." The only version you're likely to see is the American International release. The Encyclopedia of SF says the original film is in color, but AI's print is B&W, probably to save costs on the number of prints they may have made from a film I suspect they got for little money in the first place.The story is about a big "community" sized spaceship making a long journey to "the green planet." Another reviewer said the ship was faster than light, but a couple of references to time-dilation effects in the dialog make it more likely that the ship was a near-lightspeed model. This has an influence on the spooky atmosphere that pervades the whole film, making the crew/community highly insular, as they realize they are cut off completely from the lives they have left behind.The sfx are slightly better than Dr. Who episodes of similar vintage, with a couple of really good spacesuits and an unusual design for the ship itself. There's also a very, very neat shot of the ship in orbit around its destination that is a dead ringer for a similar moment in "Alien," and quite effective (in both films), in a way that most movies about spaceships seem to forego.Still, the story rambles and seems kind of shallow. The sets and sfx aren't bad, but don't make up for the weak script. I recommend this for true lovers of the form (as I am), because you just wouldn't want to be left wondering what might have been going on in sf films, even east European ones, in the early '60s. Here's your answer.