Journey to the Seventh Planet

The film opens with an off-screen voice singing the praises of the human race (“The story you are about to see takes place after man has solved the complex mysteries of space travel. The year is 2001“), and then going on to cite their great achievement of harmony and brotherhood. This alone is enough to reveal that the film doesn’t intend to offer any of the serious sociocultural introspection or critique that should inspire good science fiction.

Next we meet the astronauts under the command of Captain Graham (sci-fi veteran John Agar has never looked so feeble and dazed), a collection of childish ignoramuses (the radar officer, Karl, doesn’t know the difference between “meteorites” and “asteroids”) that spend more time talking about women than science. The nonsense they spout is worthy of the theater of the absurd (gold medal goes to the notion that minds are “free and light” out there because of “the weightlessness“), and the expedients employed by our “heroes” to battle the monster (forging a weapon at the village blacksmith’s shop even though they know it’s simply a mirage) constitute an all-out declaration of war against reason and logic.

On top of all that, the story proceeds at such a weak, soporific pace that it becomes practically impossible to keep your eyelids from drooping. As for the plot, the situation is Kafkaesque to say the least. After the astronauts land on Uranus, they encounter a situation that’s basically a dumbed-down rip-off of a short story from Ray Bradbury’s classic “The Martian Chronicles” (1950), but the film fails miserably at matching the short story’s lofty metaphorical and poetic relevance. Additionally, certain elements of the film are similar to Stanislaw Lem’s then recently published novel “Solaris” (1961). (Graham himself ends up speculating about the possibility that “It’s as if we’re in the middle of a weird hallucination… Everything we see has been taken out of our minds… something, someone, has brought them to light“).

Shot in Denmark with a paltry budget ($75,000, a good portion of which was invested in a string of truly horrendous special effects), “Journey to the Seventh Planet” is definitely in the running as one of the most disjointed, incoherent, and sloppiest examples of sci-fi movies of its decade.

Never tiring of cinematic eyesores, the director’s prior “gems” include “The Angry Red Planet” (for which he wrote the screenplay as well) and “Reptilicus”. These aren’t so much films as they are potent sleeping pills.