To The Stars By Hard Ways, 1980 - ★★★★½

To The Stars By Hard Ways, 1980 - ★★★★½

REVIEWED

“We destroyed ourselves: no more rivers, no more animals, no more recourses, no more air. Every second child born deformed and we cover our faces with laughing masks.” - Ambassador Rakan (Igor Ledogorov)

Part 1 Neeya: Artificial Human Being.

Russian astronauts stumble onto a ghost startship. While searching the vessel they successfully find a living extraterrestrial humanoid among its many dead ones. The crew bring the female E.T. named Neeya back to Earth. As time passes by Neeya develops special abilities including ESP, telekinesis and how to teleport. As well as these powers Neeya also starts to have visions of her alien planet Dessa. It becomes clear shes a genetically developed clone made by Glan, the leader of a dying civilization who sent out artificial humanoids in the hope of finding help for the doomed planet.

Part 2 Angels of Space.

An elite crew of scientists are formed to aid Neeya on a humanitarian mission to help turn around the fate of Dessa, for its dwindling surviving residents. Instead of being greeted by universal praise for their efforts. Dessa's new head tyrant, a dwarf keeper of suppressed intelligence named Turanchoks tries to destroy the ecologists noble work.

Another hugely entertaining slice of retro dystopian Russian science fiction (*fiction not fact it takes a few liberties). 'To The Stars By Hard Ways' is a movie in two distinctive segments, thats equal parts thought provoking, oppressively bleak and outrageously silly. It was my third introduction to Richard Viktorov's movies within the space of a week. Showed more maturity than his earlier junior space cadet movies 'Moscow Cassiopeia' & 'Teens In The Universe' but kept some of their goofier charm.

Even though I really loved this, its such an hard one to rate. Theres times its tediously stagnant and drags, and to put it blunt moments that just do not work. Overall though its good far outweighs its bad. I think my passion for camp sci-fi stuff like 'Doctor Who' and 'Farscape' tipped the rating in its favour. The actings amazing especially Yelena Metyolkina as Neeya/Niyya.

[Personal Reasons For Remembering]

Turanchoks a weeman ahead of the times, if only he'd have waited till Game Of Thrones Tyrion made machiavellian midgets fashionable. Biomess The Blob-like organism. Glan who reminded me of Supermans Jor-El giving that creepy Aryan master race rally. And the WTF moment had to be Jim Henson muppet looking melted fish crew member (which I think was possibly called Crull).

AND SURE, I'm a perverted minded simpleton and far too often the only real reason I'll honestly remember a movie is for its boobs, this time its for a good reason. I know its like the age old why do males have nipples, even though they can't give milk argument. But why did Neeya an artificial human being have boobs ?

Originally taken from Letterboxd