La Planète rouge

Poster tagline: NATIONS RACING TIME AND EACH OTHER – TO REACH COUNTLESS MILES INTO SPACE... AND SAVE THE WORLD FROM TOTAL DESTRUCTION. THE STORY THAT COULD HAPPEN TOMORROW TO US!!! This thing is something incredible. In the basic outline of the plot, it's as if Robert Zemeckis had gone back 50 years and made a chatty, low-budget version of Contact, without any special effects, and all the surrounding dialogue and intellectual ballast seems to have fallen out of the speeches of zealous preachers of popular religious sects of the late 19th century, brimming with warnings of the flames of hell. And shining into the mix are sentimental shots of the apartments of peaceful, God-fearing families, the true bedrock of American society. Hallelujah! The incipient Cold War, Western society's fear of creeping Communism, and the first signs of an emerging McCarthyism are very much in evidence. Unlike some of the reviewers here, I was not offended by the portrayal of Stalin as a product of the devil and the ex-Nazi as an admirer of Satan, it was rather to be commended (Communists and Nazis should be punched all the time). The tearing down the portrait of Stalin by Russian men who "came to their senses" must have been a satisfaction in its time, but otherwise... otherwise, I'd blast the ardent Catholic fanatic to Pluto and let the ideological foul air out for a long time. The fear of Communism can also be approached in a tasteful and factual way, e.g. Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956, but that is not the case here, on the contrary, after watching it you feel as if you’ve just read a year-worth of “The Watchtower”. (21/06/2015)