by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Fortunately the last film on the program, Journey to the
Far Side of the Sun, though also a Gerry
and Sylvia Anderson production, at least featured a live-action cast of real
humans, albeit not especially prominent actors. The star is Roy Thinnes,
playing American astronaut Col. Glenn Ross (apparently the Andersons liked to
recycle the names of America’s actual astronauts for their fictional ones),
who’s brought on a mission sent by the EUROSEC — European Space Exploration
Council — to explore a new planet supposedly just discovered by astronomers.
They have found that the new planet is the same distance from the sun as Earth,
follows the same orbit and has similar day-and-night rotation patterns, but
it’s never been observed before because it’s always exactly 180 degrees away from the Earth’s orbit and is
therefore invariably exactly opposite from Earth in space. They want the U.S. to contribute $1 billion
towards this project, and of course the lure they use to get the money out of
the American government is the prospect that a sinister secret power is going
to get to the new planet first, claim it for their own and use it either to
extract its resources or mount an attack on Earth. Journey to the Far
Side of the Sun was made in 1969, one year
after the release of Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A
Space Odyssey, which revolutionized the
dramatization of space travel on film and, among other things, raised the bar
on the actual depiction of spacecraft.
No longer could you just take a cigar or
saucer shape, have it jerk around or revolve on screen, and call it a
spaceship: thanks to Kubrick, Douglas Trumbull and their effects crew (and Gene
Roddenberry and his effects
people on the original Star Trek
TV show before them), you had to design a contraption that looked like, given
the right motive power, it could actually fly in space. Both the models of the
spaceship exteriors and the sets of their interiors are very Kubrickian and are done with an attention to detail
far beyond what we got in the sci-fi films of the 1950’s (though, surprisingly,
the terrestrial models of what the future Earth is supposed to look like are
almost as tacky as the ones in the Andersons’ puppet films that preceded this
one), and there are other 2001
quotes, including the reflections of the lights of the spaceship’s controls on
the visors of the astronauts’ spacesuits, the decision to put the astronauts
into chemically induced hibernation for the three weeks it will take them to
get to the new planet and the three weeks it will take them to get home, and
even the psychedelic images the Andersons and their director, Robert Parrish,
have the astronauts see while they’re in hibernation (it looks as if the mix of
drugs used to put them under contained LSD). The film takes up about half its
101-minute running time detailing the extensive training Col. Ross and his
co-astronaut, British astrophysicist John Kane (Ian Hendry), have to go through
to prepare for the mission, and also the soap-operaish complications of Col.
Ross’s love life: he’s married but his wife Sharon (Lynn Loring) is clearly
tired of him, especially his long absences while he’s in space, and he’s
clearly being cruised by Lisa Hartmann (Loni von Friedel), assistant to the
Eurosec director Jason Webb (Patrick Wymark). Both women are wearing oddball
dresses with so little holding them together one wonders how they stay on, and
there’s an early scene in which Sharon, having just come out of the shower and
not yet having dressed, confronts her husband over yet another spaceflight and
he responds by slapping her across the face. (Journey to the Far Side
of the Sun is one of those movies that got
a “G” rating when it came out but probably would be rated more toughly — PG or
even PG-13 — today.)
Once the rocket finally launches (after a lot of those shots Gerry Anderson so loved of various
components of it being driven across the spaceport to be assembled on the
launching pad) we heave a sigh of relief that all that tiresome exposition is
over and we can finally get to the meat of the sort of sci-fi action we came
for — only the astronauts return three weeks after they launched instead of the
six weeks that would have been needed to complete the mission, and Webb and his
colleagues at Mission Control accuse Col. Ross of having aborted the mission
and come home early. He swears he didn’t, and eventually he stumbles on the
truth when he sees a cologne bottle in his bathroom — only the label is printed
backwards and reads like a mirror image of the writing he’s used to. Eventually
the Andersons and their collaborator on the script, Donald James, explain that
Col. Ross actually landed on the parallel Earth while his counterpart, an
identical double, landed on the Earth from which Col. Ross left. Everything on
the parallel Earth is the same as on our Earth — down to the events duplicating
themselves exactly as they happen
on the Earth we know (so don’t get your hopes up for the existence of a parallel
U.S.A. of which Hillary Clinton is President!) — except that everything on one
Earth is a mirror image of what it is on the other: people shake hands with
their left hands, they wear their name tags and military patches on the other
side, and presumably their hearts are on the right sides of their bodies.
There’s one glitch; though at one point Col. Ross complains that a car that was
approaching him was driving on the wrong side of the road, the car that nearly
hit him head-on was still set up for the British system of driving on the left
(if everything on the new Earth was the mirror image of the old one, the Brits
would be driving on the right and we
would be driving on the left — I once met a British tourist who said he didn’t
want to drive in the U.S. because it would have been too much of an adjustment
for him to learn to drive on the other side of the road!).
As all this comes
out, relations between Col. Ross and the people at Eurosec (his fellow
astronaut John Kane was badly burned when his ship crash-landed and, though he
spends several days encased in a clear plastic breathing chamber, he ultimately
dies of his burns) deteriorate, and ultimately a crash takes out Eurosec’s
entire supply of rocket fuel and all the humans involved — except Jason Webb,
who ends up in a wheelchair in a mental institution, babbling away about a
cooperative European space program that he used to head, since the reaction of
the various governments that spent billions on this useless program has been to
cover it up and pretend it never existed at all. It’s the most nihilistic
ending I can think of in a science-fiction movie to that time — I suspect only X-Men:
Apocalypse comes close among more recent
movies — though it also seems to have been written as an excuse for the
Andersons to blow up all those pretty (but singularly unconvincing) little
models they had built to represent the headquarters of Eurosec and the rest of
what parts of their future Earth they chose to show. Journey to the
Far Side of the Sun is the sort of
frustrating bad movie that could have been good if its creators had been more
alive to the possibilities of their central premise; there’ve been other movies
about duplicate Earths but they’ve usually had at least some level of suspense
as the astronaut who ended up on a different Earth notices subtle
discontinuities — like the one shown on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 that, though generally tacky, had a nice moment like
the fact that the astronaut first realizes there’s something wrong when he
makes a joke about Paul Revere and the people treating him in the parallel
Earth’s hospital don’t know who that was.
