Aelita: Queen Of Mars (1924)

Aelita: Queen Of Mars, directed by Yakov Protazanov and released in 1924, was not quite the first science fiction feature film and was not quite the first feature film to deal with space travel - the 1918 Danish film Himmelskibet (A Trip To Mars) has that honour. Aelita: Queen Of Mars is however a very early and very remarkable example of the breed. It was also the first Soviet science fiction movie.

The music to accompany the film was composed by Dmitri Shostakovich.

It was based on Alexei Tolstoy’s 1923 novel Aelita. It should be added that Alexei Tolstoy was a very distant relative of Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace.

Strange signals are being picked up at a Moscow radio station. They seem to be coming from Mars. They cannot be deciphered but they do suggest that there is an advanced civilisation on Mars.

Engineer Los (Igor Ilyinsky) is is convinced his wife is having an affair, which leads to unfortunate results.

Los is obsessed by those signals from Mars and he is determined to build a spaceship and travel to the Red Planet.

The Martians are meanwhile very much aware of the existence of an advanced civilisation on Earth. They have built an advanced viewing device (much much more than a simple telescope). Aelita, the Queen of Mars, is obsessed by what she sees of Earth society.

It’s a clever idea and Tolstoy’s novel is excellent. Unfortunately the movie does not focus sufficiently on the science fiction story. An enormous amount of the early part of the movie is devoted to tedious social drama. There’s also an attempt at satire, with corrupt bureaucrats being pilloried, which is interesting. This would hardly have been allowed once Stalin had consolidated his position.

It’s interesting that Alexei Tolstoy initially opposed the Russian Revolution but later became an ardent supporter of the Soviet regime. The novel has its political moments but they’re handled in an interesting way with some touches of cynicism.

The movie dabbles a great deal in politics and towards the end becomes crude propaganda.

The movie also adds an irrelevant subplot regarding a bumbling amateur detective.

A lot of attention is devoted to Engineer Los’s marriage. This is an important aspect of the novel, explaining much about Los’s motivations, but it is dealt with in way too much detail in the movie.

This is a movie that needed to be severely pruned. The first half of the movie could easily have been cut by 30 minutes. We get brief snippets of the science fiction plot intercut will long meandering stretches dealing in intricate details with a whole lot of stuff we don’t need to know and don’t care about.

While this movie does have some very real flaws it offers a lot of compensations. The art direction by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky is stunning. The sets are amazing. The influence of the Constructivist movement in the visual arts is very obvious - this is like a Constructivist painting come to life which is wild since Constructivism was an abstract art movement. Alexandra Exter’s costume designs are insane, but in a good way.

This is a visually magnificent movie which invents its own distinctive science fiction aesthetic, radically different from the aesthetic of Fritz Lang’s German silent science fiction films. There is no other movie that looks quite like Aelita: Queen Of Mars. In fact there is no other movie that looks even remotely like this one.

Yuliya Solntseva’s strange and exaggerated performance as Aelita works for me. It makes her seem genuinely alien. Aelita looks like an Earth woman but of course she comes from a radically different culture.

So there is much to admire here. The problem is that the narrative is a total mess and the ending is catastrophically bad. It has some of the most superb visuals you will ever see. But as a movie it’s simply awful. It’s difficult to know what to say in terms of a recommendation. The visuals are so good that anyone with an interest in cinema will want to see them. But it’s such a bad movie. It’s a terrible movie that looks fantastic.

The old Kino DVD offers a reasonable transfer. This is a movie that needs a new full restoration. Judging by the DVD the source materials are still in fairly good shape so a restoration should be possible.

I’ve reviewed Alexei Tolstoy’s novel Aelita elsewhere (and the novel is vastly superior to the movie).