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First Spaceship on Venus (1962)
First Spaceship
on Venus (1962)
In the not so distant future, Earth is peaceful, a
model of international cooperation. There is already a base on the Moon, and
scientists are preparing the Cosmostrator, a beautiful, four-spired Mars rocket.
Construction workers in Siberia unearth an artifact called a 'spool', that is
discovered to be of extraterrestrial origin. Linguist Tchen Yu (Tang Hua-Ta) and
mathematician Sikarna (Kurt Rackelmann) team with American scientist Harringway
(Oldrich Lukes) and nuclear physicist Orloff (Ignacy Machowsky) to study the spool. They decide that it was
part of an alien spaceship that exploded over Siberia in 1908, creating a crater
previously thought to be a meteor impact. The Cosmostrator is rerouted to Venus,
the source of the alien rocket, to investigate. Joining the group are four more
ethnically diverse astronauts: Cybernetics expert Dr. Durand (Michail N.
Postnikow) has a tanklike robot named Omega (pronounced with the accent on the
'O'). Talua (Julius Ongewe) is the voyage's communications expert. Sumiko
Omigura (Yoko Tani) is a widowed physician whose husband died on the Moon. Ace
American astronaut Brinkman (Guenther Simon), was the first person to set foot
on the Moon. He has a crush on Sumiko, and interestingly was the only witness to
her husband's accidental death. Avoiding a meteor storm, the Cosmostrator
lands on a bleak Venus of weird and unfamiliar sights. Brinkman discovers a cave
infested with metallic insects, that Sikarna determines hold recorded data. A
'vitrified' forest' is a tangle of radioactive trees that once functioned as
some kind of energy-projecting weapon. Like everything else on Venus, it appears
to have been partially destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, a theory borne out when
shadows of Venusians are seen burned into a wall, Hiroshima-style. Just as the
explorers are realizing that Venus was preparing to invade Earth, but destroyed
themselves first, a chain reaction of events throws their plans into chaos. A
black and red ooze pursues Omigura, Brinkman and Durand up the spiral ramp of a
conical structure. Durand fires a ray gun at it in desperation, a move which
saves the trio but upsets the balance of the giant machines that still function
on the dead planet. An underground power plant starts augmenting gravity with a
force field. To allow the Cosmostrator to blast off, Talua and Tchen Yu enter
the plant to try and reverse the process. Tchen Yu's spacesuit is punctured, so
Brinkman takes a mini-rocket in a rescue attempt. Talua's efforts succeed in
reversing the gravitation, which then swings to the opposite extreme - negative
gravity. The Cosmostrator is forced off the planet, while Brinkman is tossed
into the void. Poor Talua is abandoned on the surface. Back home, the five
survivors mourn their lost comrades but deliver a tale of world whose fate the
Earth will hopefully not share.