Original title: Doroga k zvezdam

The first half of Pavel Klushantsev’s film is a Soviet-leaning potted history of the space race leading up to the then still very recent launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957 (the film was released in the USSR in November so some of this material must have been shot very late in the day). After that, Road to the Stars departs for more fanciful though no less fascinating realms as it speculates on the future of space exploration.

The first half – which can tend to be a little dry with its lengthy though sometimes fascinating scientific lectures – is dominated by the presence and influence of the pioneering astronautics theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose work had also influenced the earlier Soviet science fiction film Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella/Cosmic Voyage (1936). The early part of the film is as much a biopic of Tsiolkovsky as it is a history of space travel. In the pre-Soviet era he wrote prolifically on all aspects of theoretical space travel, influencing many of the scientists who later worked on the Soviet space program. The failure to attract any interest in the metal dirigible he had designed led to him largely giving up on his researches at the start of the first world war and he devoted himself instead to the eradication of poverty. He returned to his original work in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, being appointed a member of the Socialist Academy in 1918 and spend his days teaching mathematics at a high school until his retirement in 1920.

Road to the Stars is a largely politics-free film – there are the to-be-expected peons to the Revolution but for the most part it’s less about proselytising than it is about educating. But there are a few notable barbs fired in the direction of those in the Tsarist regime who failed to acknowledge Tsiolkovsky’s genius and did nothing to put it to any practical use.

The second half of the film is more interesting from a genre perspective. It imagines the way that space travel will develop, suggesting a future in space powered by Soviet technology and know-how. There’s an exploratory three-man mission into space after which whole fleets of rockets are launched full of eager workers who risk life and limb spacewalking to build a huge permanent and manned space station in near orbit. Eventually it becomes the staging post for that most exciting of ventures – a manned mission to the moon. In its own way it’s a rather glorious vision. The special effects are extraordinary and paint a compelling portrait of a wonderful retro-future that seems to have leaped straight from the pages of a pulp science fiction magazine, beautifully realised by visual effects photographers Anatoly Lavrentyev and A.M. Romanenko and art director V. Shelkov. Various claims have been made over the years for Road to the Stars being an influence on Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and it’s not hard to see why, particularly in the space station scenes which are sometimes shot-for-shot virtually identical.

Even at just shy of an hour, Klushantsev manages to cram a good deal of information and speculation into the film. If the information overload of the first half isn‘t to your taste, stick around for the more fanciful second where Klushantsev’s imagination runs wild but still manages to create a future that feels plausible, even with all it’s small eccentricities (one of the crew of the space station has brought her cat with her). And remember that all of this was realised, with what appears in hindsight to be remarkable clarity, four years before Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.

Klushantsev was quite the space buff it seems. He’d previously directed a pair of short documentaries, Meteority/Meteorites (1947) and Vselennaya/Universe (1951) and the more substantial Tayna Veshchestva/The Secret of Substance (1956) and would go on to direct Planeta Bur/Planet of Storms in 1962, a more traditional space travel film (astronauts land on Venus and are menaced by monsters.) The latter was subsequently snapped up by Roger Corman and handed on to Peter Bogdanovich who shot new footage featuring Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue and released the resulting hybrid as Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1968). Klushantsev was back in Road to the Stars territory for Luna/The Moon (1965), Mars (1968) and Vizhu zemlyu!/I See the Earth! (1970).

Road to the Stars is a charmingly optimistic film, made in a time before we’d become jaded by space travel and where the possibilities of a future in space seemed not only impossibly exciting but actually within our grasp. It’s a crying shame that the future envisioned in Road to the Stars has now become a barely remembered past but for 52 glorious minutes, Road to the Stars is a reminder of that excitement and optimism.