Jindřich Polák’s ambitious science fiction epic has proved surprisingly influential, many pointing to its apparent influence on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Star Trek (1966-1968) in particular. The fact that Kubrick and Gene Roddenberry were likely to have seen the bowdlerised American release version which adds a ridiculous new ending is perhaps neither here nor there…

The plot is simplicity itself. In the year 2163, the crew of the spaceship Ikarie XB-1 (or Icarus XB-1, an odd name for a ship heading towards another sun given what happened to its namesake) are en route to Alpha Centauri around which orbits a mysterious “White Planet.” Though their immense speed (they’re travelling almost the speed of light) means that the mission will only take 28 months from the crew’s perspective, time dilation means that 15 years will have passed by the time they return home. This is just one of the many things the crew have to deal with on their journey – they investigate an abandoned spaceship armed with nuclear weapons, are caught in the gravity well of a “dark star” and one of the crew cracks under the pressures of the mission and threatens to destroy the ship.

Perhaps the special effects haven’t aged all that well (though they’re no worse than those seen in Japanese and Italian space operas of the 1960s) but Ikarie XB-1 isn’t a film that relies on its effects anyway so it scarcely matters. What has survived remarkably well are Karel Lukas and Jan Zázvorka extraordinary set designs (this looks like it was far from a cheap film), Jan Kalis’ luminous black and white photography and Zdenek Liska’s pioneering electronic music score, all of them outstanding.

Though he remains uncredited, it’s a 1955 novel from the Polish science fiction legend Stanislaw Lem, Oblok Magellana/The Magellanic Cloud, that formed the basis of Pavel Jurácek and Polák’s screenplay. Lem was one of the key figures in East European science fiction, author of many genre novels and short stories. When Ikarie XB-1 was shot, he’d not long since published his best known work, Solaris, adapted into a television film in 1968 by Boris Nirenburg and more famously as feature films by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and Steven Soderbergh in 2002.

While Patrick the comic relief robot is tad on the hokey side, straight out of pulp 30s pulp science fiction cinema, the screenplay is notably more “grown up” than usual for science fiction at this time. The pacing may sometimes feel a little erratic, but even without much in the way of conventional action, it still moves along at a fair old clip and it’s a commendably very serious (at times quite earnest) meditation on some of the big questions likely to face pioneering space travellers. Not the least of which is the question of time dilation, still a topic only rarely touched on by science fiction cinema even now. The scene where MacDonald talks with his wife on a large screen video link and realises that the daughter she’s about to give birth to will be 15 years old when he first meets her is unexpectedly touching, marvellously played in a very understated way by Radovan Lukavský. Indeed the crew are an interesting lot, neatly drawn characters with a nice range of personalities, well played by a cast no doubt unfamiliar to the majority of western audiences.

There are lots of little touches that are pleasing for all sorts of reasons – the shoes that light up when in contact with the floor for example, effortlessly suggesting the presence of that popular science fiction device “artificial gravity” without ever having to mention it – and there are even moments of humour among all the furrowed brow seriousness. There’s some silliness with the robot of course and the dance that the crew perform at their social gathering is eccentric in the extreme – first there’s a mannered set of moves to a dirge-like noise, then a more lively jig to some very 60s-like pop music.

There are moments of horror here too. The discovery of a derelict ship crewed by long-dead wealthy capitalists (now seemingly prescient given our real life billionaires gallivanting about in orbit) is marvellously creepy and possibly another one to add to the seemingly ever-growing lists of things that inspired Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). As the astronauts explore the wreck, their torches alight on the ghastly faces of the dead, a genuinely unsettling moment that comes out of the blue and is all the more effective for it.

The US version of the film, prepared by American International Pictures and retitled to the more mundane Voyage to the End of the Universe, which makes it sound like one of those cut-and-shunt space operas that Roger Corman made from other East European science fiction epics, has a new and entirely superfluous ending spliced in. In the original version, the astronauts complete their mission and the last we see of them, they’re descending to the surface of the planet which is showing signs of life. The American version cuts ten minutes from the film, dubs all the voices but worst of all adds a new shot at the end to show the ship descending on… New York City! It marks the first time that the Statue of Liberty turned up at the climax of a film as a twist ending – but of course, it wouldn’t be the last.

But in its original form, Ikarie XB-1 is a beautiful, intelligent, and serious science fiction film that finally got the wider audience it deserved when it finally started to appear on DVD from the mid-2000s. Ignore the compromised AIP version and give this marvellous and inventive film a try. It’s the sort of science fiction that remains even harder to find in these Star Wars/Marvel Cinematic Universe dominated times and as such is one to be treasured.

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