To The Stars By Hard Ways (1981)

That was an excellent one.

Beautiful, moving film.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

You have to remember you're watching a low-budget Soviet Sci_Fi film from 1980. So yeah, it has that 70's/80's sci-fi look and some cheesy effects (which I actually prefer to CGI, personally). The English translation is decent and doesn't leave anything out.The section where she tries to live on Earth is a little slow and I did not really understand the connection to the film, but I enjoyed the opening bits and the parts on Dessa.The imagery of the destroyed space lab and then later the gas masks and the posters in the tunnels was definitely ahead of its time.Apart from the imagery which I enjoyed, the best reason to watch this film - is the prescient display of how people who make money off the destruction of the planet will fight to keep their wealth, even at the cost of the planet. We also see the politicians bribed with money and power to spread lies and fear in oder to fight any change. And even the average citizen can be preyed upon to work against their own interest.

Whenever there's a Sci-Fi/Fantasy film festival doing a special around virtually untraceable movies, in my case the Offscreen Festival in Belgium, you simply must attend it as much as possible, because where else will you ever be offered the chance to see titles like "To the Stars by Hard Ways". The festival scheduled a theme around Sci-Fi movies from behind the Iron Curtain and, amongst more commonly known classics like the original "Solaris" and "In the Dust of Stars", they showed this peculiar but strangely poetic and compelling space allegory that consists of three main chapters. The film is set in futuristic Russia, where stereotypical house robots stroll around bleeping and people go to their jobs on distant planets. An outer space mission brings back an intergalactic female immigrant who has curly white hair behaves very nervously. The lead astronaut decides to take her into his house for research and to introduce her to earthly hospitality. The first chapter of "To the Stars by Hard Ways" revolves on the girl, Niya, integrating with her new family. She becomes friends with the astronaut's mother and adolescent son and learns about jealousy when she meets his girlfriend. In spite of her relatively happy new life, Niya has unclear but nightmarish flashbacks about what overcame her on her own planet. The tone of this first chapter is moody but tolerably sentimental. It's like a futuristic soap opera, but from the Soviet Union. The second chapter depicts the space trip to Niya's home planet Dessa. The nightmares and flashbacks stimulated her to slip aboard as a stowaway during Stepan's first official mission as an astronaut. The second chapter really is nothing more than a transition between the sequences on earth and on a distant planet. The middle section is rather dull and contain quite a few irrelevant and unnecessary comical interludes, like dropping off a passenger on his home planet called Ocean. He's a watery blubber thing who lives in a washing machine and is petrified of cats. The third and final chapter is the most interesting for the fans, as it concerns pure and genuine Sci-Fi full of desolate apocalyptic landscapes, malignant looking alien races and uncanny atmosphere. Niya's planet Dessa has become uninhabitable due to a massive industrial catastrophe while the tyrannical rules, called the Turanchoks, are selling clean oxygen at high prices. The final chapter of "To the Stars by Hard Ways" is exciting, often unsettling and very absorbing. It's a bit of a shame that most comments around here (expect for those written by Russian users) are so harshly negative and mainly talking about the notorious MST3K treatment that the movie received in the late 80's. Now, I'm as much a fan of MST3K as anyone else, but there's a lot more underneath this film's campy surface and deserves some deeper analysis. People are complaining about the horrible dubbing, the terrible music, the cheap and campy special effects and the bad acting performances. I beg to differ on practically all points. Another major advantage about seeing this type of movies at a festival is that they respect cinema enough to seek for a 35mm version in the original language. Personally I liked the psychedelic music tunes and the special effects, well, … Naturally they're not very groundbreaking or on par with the contemporary super popular "Star Wars" franchise, but what do you expect from a film from a politically and hermetically sealed off country without much of a cinema culture. "To the Stars by Hard Ways" is primarily a very ambitious story-driven movie, from the hand of the acclaimed Russian novelist Kir Bulychyov and directed by Richard Victorov with great devotion and passion for Sci-Fi. The acting is terrific, especially from the central figure Yelena Metyolkina who made her first ever screen appearance in this film. "The the Stars by Hard Ways" definitely isn't without flaws, but it's a captivating experience that forces you to switch on your brain functions as well as all your senses. Recommended, but please watch the original version or the respectfully restored 2001 version.

Cherez ternii... was released when I was a boy of 14 living in the Soviet Union and hungry for anything sci-fi. Well, this one fit the bill perfectly. With a typical 1980s story (ecological catastrophe, hints on the "soullessness of the capitalist society") and special effects somewhat more advanced than those of the British Dr. Who series, it still was two heads above anything else released in the USSR until then.The film became an instant hit.Now, keep in mind that we could not see the Star Wars or any other of the many Western sci-fi flicks of the time, with rare exceptions. And the sci-fi culture of the "socialist camp" was, no pun, campy. Special effects were typically like those of the early Dr. Who series (not that we had heard anything of Dr. Who either), and the plot simple as a nursery rhyme. In this context, Cherez ternii was a star indeed.Plus, the nude scene, albeit short, was unusual for the Soviet cinematography of the time and rather attractive to the boys who had just advanced to the adolescent state.All this made the fan base of the movie as wide as the Soviet Union itself, which is about as wide as Russia is now. Speaking of which, those boys of 1981 are today grownups, and so they decided to re-release Cherez ternii, with an improved picture and sound quality and somewhat rehashed frame sequence. If you understand Russian and decide to watch it, you can order it online.As an adult, I would rate Chere Ternii k Zvezdam about the same as an average Star Trek episode, no better, no worse. Wish I could see Star Trek when I was a child.The director of Cherez Ternii, R. Viktorov, made two more cult sci-fi films: Moskva-Kassiopeya (Moscow to Cassiopeia) and Otroki vo Vselennoj (Youths in the Universe). Check them out if you feel like it.Oh, and btw, this Sandy Frank's version, Humanoid Woman, is total crap. But you knew that already, didn't you?

Cherez Ternii K Zvyozdam - a.k.a. Humanoid Woman is one of those films that you wonder why it was made in the first place. Soviet films usually consist of brightly-colored retellings of traditional Russian folktales and the like. They're usually obscenely cheerful and try to make you feel happy. This one doesn't. It has a surprisingly large budget for a Soviet Film (underwater scenes and using surplus cosmonaut stuff.) But that didn't save it. The whole plot is basically this: cosmonauts find a space station that has quite a number of clones on it. Taking the eldest of the clones back with them to their home, they try to accommodate her to life on earth. Seeing she won't fit in, they return her to her people. Upon arriving at her planet, they find that the place is in chaos. There was some kind of disaster that forced everyone underground. The final water supply for the people was poisoned, so when they cosmonauts try to do something with it, a large mass of white foam forms. Exciting in very few places, boring in most, this film is bad, but not the worst I've seen. I have to agree with Icehole's assessment of Niya: she's a brillo pad on a stick with bulging eyes. Worst of all is the incidental music, that sounds like a cat jumping around on a synthesizer in most places.Avoid this one if at all possible.