The myth of Icarus isn’t about flight; it’s about falling. Daedalus’s callow son flaps too close to the sun; the glue of his wings melt, their feathers flutter away, and Icarus plummets seaward. He is the first to soar through the sky, but also the sky’s first victim. Personally, I wouldn’t name the first ship to traverse interstellar space after our fallen predecessor, but perhaps the people of the year 2163, as depicted in Czech director Jindřich Polák’s 1963 Ikarie XB 1, have conquered superstition. Or perhaps they’re tempting fate.
Polák sets his film, an adaptation of an early minor work by Polish master Stanislaw Lem, exactly two hundred years after the time of the movie’s production. American writers tended to imagine the Cold War continuing in perpetuity; more than one otherwise prophetic writer described the U.S. and USSR still at loggerheads several centuries hence. Ikarie, from Soviet Czechoslovakia, imagines that two hundred years is sufficient time for the world to transform. It’s implied that the world has come around to communism. The Ikarie has a global crew drawn from both sides of the former Iron Curtain: Everyone speaks Czech, it’s true, but they have names like “Macdonald” and “Anthony.” The peoples of the world are boldly going to Alpha Centauri together.
The story starts after Ikarie has departed Earth and ends, on the cusp of revelation, as it lands on an occupied planet. The threats and challenges faced by the Ikarie’s cosmonauts en route to their discovery are disconnected and occasional, not linked and cumulative. The investigation of an abandoned spaceship—it turns out to be full of dead twentieth-century capitalists who unwisely fled Earth with rather more atomic weapons than food supplies—doesn’t much relate to the ship’s later encounter with a pernicious “dark star” that induces catatonia or with a cosmonaut’s temporary madness. There are slight linkages between events, but the various near-calamities are more like episodes of Star Trek than a unified story.
I don’t know any other genre film that oscillates quite so starkly between wholly convincing and laughably unbelievable. The giant screens for video calls are appropriately futuristic, the outfits in the sleek co-ed gymnasium still raise eyebrows, and the sleek furniture in the common area made me long for yesterday’s future. In the film’s best joke, a crewmember’s ponderous companion robot, with its magnetic tape memory bank, halting voice, and family resemblance to Forbidden Planet’s Robby the Robot, is made fun of for being a relic of another era. Even the science impresses: Nearly sixty years on, time dilation remains ignored by most science fiction films, but both its physical reality and emotional effects are in play here. On the other hand, a late-breaking plot twist involving a new kind of radiation is unconvincing by even the lowest standard. Similarly, the production design is accomplished, except that the movie posits that fashion remains caught in the 1960s; a shipboard party scene—with its cocktail glasses, chic midcentury modern furniture, and evening dress—might almost have been interpolated from another movie.
Ikarie XB 1 is a good movie forever trying to cross the border into greatness. It doesn’t deserve its current obscurity, but, like the original Icarus, the film flew too close to the sun and vanished from sight. Two films melted its wings. The first is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, released five years after Ikarie. Kubrick watched Polák’s film and was not entirely unkind about it. Though that Daedalus of special effects can’t have been impressed with the scenes of the ship bleeping and booping—no Strauss waltzes here—across the screen on wires, he acknowledged that the ship’s angular and antiseptic interior corridors were echoed in the Discovery One sequences of Space Odyssey. The second film that doomed Ikarie to obscurity was Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Solaris, the essential Stanislaw Lem adaptation and one of the only science fiction films with ambitions approaching Kubrick’s.
I watched Ikarie XB 1 on a region-free Blu-Ray from British label Second Run. Much like fellow prestige labels Criterion in the U.S. and Arrow in the U.K., Second Run invariably produces a quality package. Second Run issued Ikarie on DVD in 2013, but this new release isn’t a simple upgrade to a higher resolution: It uses a newer 4K transfer that premiered at Cannes in 2016 and also includes new special features. The Ikarie Blu includes a booklet with an essay by Michael Brooke, a contemporaneous Czech short film about science, a video interview with SFF author Kim Newman, original and restoration trailers, and two brief excerpts from the movie’s American dub, Voyage to the End of the Universe. This last feature may be the most interesting. The first Voyage clip is the film’s credit sequence; in the classic mid-century American manner, everyone involved in the film has been given an American-sounding name to disguise the film’s origins behind the Iron Curtain. The second extract is the American film’s ending, which trades the mystery, expectation, and optimism of the original for an absurd paean to American democracy made all the more ridiculous by the film’s Soviet provenance.
Is Ikarie XB 1 the lost classic I’d hoped to see? Not quite. Every moment of sublimity jostles with minutes of tedium, and, though it’s a short movie, its longueurs are such that the sleeping sickness that assails the explorers may threaten viewers. But if you stay awake and stay alert, you’ll find there’s much to applaud and to admire—Ikarie XB 1 may not soar, but it remains airbound.
Matt Keeley reads too much and watches too many movies. You can find him on Twitter at @mattkeeley.
I’ve not read the original story but I suspect the “new kind of radiation” was a replacement in the film script for the crew cracking under psychological pressure. Mental illness was a delicate subject in the Soviet Bloc.
Thank you for bringing this back from the vault, Matt!
I watched this movie back in the day, in the communist country where I grew up, and it was a big deal for its time. Its sleepy place is par for the course; apparently, most Soviet Bloc movies of that era decided that the right pace range was from slow to lethargic. Anything faster than that was probably seen as capitalist decadence.
Funnily enough, we now perceive the cocktail party as pure ’60s fashion, but seen at the time it was off, more akin to the fashion extravaganza of French film Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? than to actual Sixties fashion.
There is a scene in the movie that has always intrigued me. During the dark star sleeping illness or whatnot, there is a female crew member who is confessing her love to someone. She is facing their communication device, which seems to be off, so we don’t know if she is talking to someone who is really listening or if she is just hallucinating. We never do find out.
I found it online and rewatched it a couple of years back, but now that I know it’s on DVD I’ll probably get it. Thanks again!
I think this is one of the greatest sci fi films ever, frankly – so glad to see it discussed just to get to a wider audience! So pioneering in so many ways – I think most science fiction films now haven’t even caught up with it’s maturity (if that’s what they’re going for, of course!)
While Ikarie indeed deserves all attention it can get, and it goes doubly for the Czech National Film Archive’s digital restoration whose premiere I had the pleasure to attend, this article is among the… less good of the few in English there are to be found. (“Soviet Czechoslovakia” and even “the film’s Soviet provenance”? Puh-leeze!)
Sophie Jane @1: I have read the “story” (i. e. Lem’s 1953/1955 novel): while it differs from the film in many aspects (among the most important, it features a semi-generation ship of “two hundred and twenty-seven people” and ten years of subjective travel time, just in one direction), the passage most corresponding to this scene has much of the crew losing faith and demanding irrational and even suicidal measures due to a combination of the subjective psychological pressure of isolation and, crucially, “certain effects of the theory of relativity, the influence of which to life processes [had been] quite unknown”, until it was researched that 180 thousand km/s is a “limiting velocity” causing “a mysterious phenomenon called wavering of consciousness”, i. e. “a strange blackout of the mind”.
Thank you for this review! I have read much of the Czech literature from the sixties, as well as seen the more standard internationally known films, by such artists as Milos Forman, Jan Svankmejer. I also have worked on plays from the former Czechoslovakia (which was indeed Communist) written from the twenties, through 1989, and up to the present.
The sixties saw, at the same time, some of the harshest repression and censorship (Havel in prison, uranium mines for prisoners) and the beginnings of what came to be known as the Prague Spring in 1968.
In a repressive system, all art must be viewed through the metaphor, the “read between the lines” kind of thinking. In order to say anything of substance, art work (including film) was couched in imagery, references, irony, that usually slipped past the (not very bright) censors. The main crackdown was on written literature. While Barrandov Studios was closely monitored, there were some forms that were considered to ridiculous to merit attention, i.e. science fiction, fantasy, etc.
I am so curious about this film, to see what refers to what, where the satire is, the irony, and the insanity of living under such a regime.
Thanks again!
Sorry again, but just to make sure – the factual assertions in @5 are in glaring discrepancy with elementary history that can be found even in English-language Wikipedia, let alone better sources: In the sixties Václav Havel was a rising star of the theatre and not “in prison” (his arrests came only after the Soviet invasion when he became a dissident organiser: for several months in 1977, again 1978, the longest one 1979–83 and briefly 1989). Similarly the system of uranium mine prison camps was the creation of the fifties; in the 1960es almost all political prisoners were released in a series of amnesties. In short, the sixties were the time of accelerating thaw that culminated in the Prague Spring (and was fondly remembered and contrasted to the neighbouring decades), certainly not ” some of the harshest repression and censorship”.
Also let me warn everybody that unlike much of Czech culture and even more specifically, fantastic films (including the the one that beat Ikarie to the laurels of the first Czechoslovak SF), Ikarie XB 1 has always been exceptional for having no irony, let alone satire; it is a completely earnest genre work.
Can anyone identify the source work by Lem? I know that some of the less well known novels, stories, and non-fiction are being issued for the first time or re-issued in the US.
Hello! Referring to my comments in #5 and the rebuttal in #7: yes, you are right about Havel’s dates of imprisonment and I apologize for that error. However, the mines were still open and operating under extremely hazardous conditions. I have family there, and in 63 things were still pretty grim: food lines, censorship, banishment from Prague for dissidents, samizdat. Yes Havel had his show at the Balustrade, but it was closed eventually. Theatre escaped some of the worst censorship. It all eased up briefly by 1968 but by 69 and the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops, “normalization”, it was closed down again (I had family in then).
To be honest I have never seen a film or work of art that, unless made by the powers that were, that was straightforward. I am working to get a copy of the film so I know bit more about the critiques of it.
NancyP @7: As even the Wikipedia notes, it is the second, and I think thickest, of Lem’s novels Oblok Magellana (see enwiki:The Magellanic Cloud for bare bones), “minor” only in not being available in American Canada (so to say) and later repudiated by Lem together with his other early work that succumbed too explicitly to Communist propaganda. I think it is still worth a translation (he reallowed them in his collected works, so no problem there), even though it would require a very foolhardy academic press, a personal grant from one of the Witcher millionaires or a similar miracle: It was is one of the few Soviet-bloc utopias that really work (in my opinion better than Yefremov’s somewhat stiltedly farfetched Andromeda Nebula that came two years later and was filmed in 1967), both as a convincing future and a great story with adventure, science, philosophy (of the variety accessible to thirteen-year-olds), heroism, sacrifice and a slingshot ending that woud make John Clute’s head spin.