The first non-puppet production from Thunderbirds creators Gerry and Sylvia Anderson,  this film set the stage for their later live-action TV series like UFO and Space:1999, and shows some of the same weaknesses that lead to criticism of those works as well.

     The film opens with a sequence that would be absolutely great in a Bond film, but, as it comes to very little in the course of this story, providing only some intrigue settled in the first ten minutes, it comes off as a bit wasted.  

     A probe, sent around the sun to the far side, has revealed the existence of another planet, in the same orbit as Earth, on the opposite side of the sun.  A manned expedition is pulled together between the Americans and European interests.  American Astronaut Glenn Ross (Roy Thinnes), along with European John Kane (Ian Hendry), is named as the crew for the outbound ship.  The two astronauts go through training, but it doesn't develop the characters or build drama--it shows a lot of spectacle, but seems to just be serving the purpose of filling time.

     There is also some conflict between Ross and his wife--it's stock conflict, and only adds some distracting soap opera.

     Finally we come to the launch of the mission forty minutes in,  and it is extremely well done technically.  The miniature work is of the same high quality as other Anderson productions (this may be one of the best modelwork rocket blast-offs ever, looking almost like actual NASA footage at many points),  but the slow pacing of the launch sequence fails to build much suspense since it wastes several minutes of screen time to various shots of technicians and people looking up, pensive, apprehensive, to no great effect.

     The astronauts leave Earth and enter three-weeks of deep sleep for the journey to the new planet.  They awake, and, reconnoitering the new planet, set out to land.

     They end up crashing their landing ship, and find, follwing rescue, that they are mysteriously back on Earth, facing the authorites who want to know why they've aborted their mission.  Things get even stranger as they find they have arrived on a duplicate Earth, a perfect mirror image, and the duplicates of their friends and co-workers believe they may be insane.

     Scientifically, the movie is, of course, a stretch.  The discovery of a perfect parallel Earth (mirror image, naturally) is more from the realm of fantasy than from science-fiction.  But even accepting the premise, the execution of what comes out of it is so unevenly done that it fails to develop much interest or drama.

     The model work and special effects are top notch.  The cinematography is sharp and lush. The characterizations, however, are a problem, the characters are flat and simplistic, and the pacing of the film is very slow--when something happens, it is shown in long and deliberate detail--when our astronaut pals move from their cockpit to their landing craft, the entire sequence takes over two full minutes of nothing but here-to-there movement!  Undoubtedly showing some of this as influence from Kubrick's 2001, released the previous year, it copies the slow pace of the space scenes but to far less effect. The same deliberate depictions of space travel and spacewalks are shown as in 2001: A Space Odyssey without Kubrick's flair for suspense.

     Humans are generally given less emphasis than hardware.  When they are, it is usually in logistical terms, not emotional ones, concentrating on the movement and plotting of characters, rather than in their internal workings.  It works on a level of melodrama, but it lacks enough subtlety to let it work as straight drama.   While the characters in Kubrick's 2001 are meant to be emotionally bland, almost robotic, the characters here are pointedly placed in emotional circumstances and react coldly, bringing about the human situation and then ignoring it completely.

     Music by Anderson regular composer Barry Gray, who also contributed to Space:1999, UFO, Thunderbirds and the rest.  Gray's work is booming, majestic, sometimes overbearing, but adds a lot of the larger than life drama that works well in these kind of larger-than-life fantasies.  Unfortunately, with such long sequences of deliberate, ponderous action, Gray's score comes more to the fore and overdominates. 

     Watch for appearances by actors Ed Bishop, George Sewell and Vladek Sheybal--they would be working in the Anderson series 'UFO' in the next year.   (And isn't that  Dr. Who's Nicholas Courtney in an uncredited role? Watch for him in a reflection in a control panel just before blast-off.)  Much of the hardware would show up in later Anderson productions as well.

     While the Andersons had very good mastery of the technical aspects of production, their handling of live actors after working with puppets for so long needed work.  They improved with 'UFO,' and further still with 'Space:1999,'  bringing together the high technical standards with more developed, emotive characters.

2 ½ rocketships (out of five)