Released just two years before Mariner 2 recorded the temperature on Venus for the first time, The Silent Star (Polish: Milcząca Gwiazda, German: Der schweigende Stern, also known in English as First Spaceship on Venus) is one of the last few works of speculative fiction (based on the 1951 science fiction novel The Astronauts by Polish author Stanisław Lem) to portray the second rock from the Sun as potentially habitable.
A cylinder, “extraterrestrial in origin,” is discovered in the Gobi Desert. Soviet Professor Arsenyev (Mikhail Postnikov) claims that the artifact is evidence that the 1908 Tunguska event “was likely the explosion of a spaceship from another planet.”
In New York, American atomic physicist Professor Hawling (Oldřich Lukeš) is asked, “How could the cylinder have landed so far away from the location of the crash?” Hawling answers, “We believe when the retro-rockets failed, the spaceship’s passengers tried to save what they considered most valuable.”
That’s rather smallminded of Hawling to assume, just because Earth’s spaceships use “retro-rockets,” that their spaceships would employ the same technology (and even if they did, that that was the specific malfunction), especially since the alleged ship apparently disintegrated entirely. Either way, it still doesn’t explain how the cylinder traveled the 2,285 km (1,500 mi) between the Podkamennaya Tunguska River and the Gobi Desert.
Adds Hawling, “I believe that this cylinder contains a magnetic recording of a document that was composed in a language unknown to us.” Lo and behold, so it does.
Chinese linguist Chen Yu (Tang Hua-Ta), whose “work in biology is as highly acclaimed as his contribution to linguistics,” and Professor Sikarna (Kurt Rackelmann), “a world-famous mathematician with the genius of Einstein,” are tasked with deciphering “this unknown language.”
That’s the most intriguing aspect of the movie, yet it gets the least attention. It would be virtually impossible to unilaterally (that is, with no input from a native speaker) translate an alien language without a key (a Rosetta Stone, if you will), and even then, it would take a very long time, whether or not you have “the world’s largest computer” at your disposal.
I’d really like to know how Sikarna and Yu managed to work around not having a frame of reference, but the screenplay doesn’t share my curiosity at all.
Meanwhile, Arsenyev is convinced that the spaceship “was launched within our solar system, from a position inside Earth’s orbit.” How he arrived at that conclusion I haven’t the foggiest, but I guess it might have something to do with our Sun’s habitable zone.
Indeed, Arsenyev rules out Mercury as the ship’s launching point because “no life can exist” on that planet, leaving Venus as the sole viable alternative. Little did the professor — or, for that matter, the filmmakers — know that no life can exist on Venus either. At least not life as we know it, which I suppose is the parameter Arsenyev used to disqualify Mercury.
Once upon a time, Venus’s dense, opaque, sulfuric acid-cloud cover meant surface conditions could be whatever science fiction writers wanted them to be — mainly, warmer than Earth but nonetheless livable — until the aforementioned Mariner 2 measured a planetary temperature of “about 500 degrees Celsius (900 degrees Fahrenheit).” That makes Venus the hottest planet in the solar system. Yes, professor, hotter than Mercury.
As we have learned ever since, Venus’s volcanic rock surface is “hot enough to melt lead … It might once have been a habitable ocean world, like Earth, but that was at least a billion years ago. A runaway greenhouse effect turned all surface water into vapor, which then leaked slowly into space.”
The temperate (86 to 158 Fahrenheit), acidic upper layers of the Venusian atmosphere, thirty miles up from the surface, could accommodate thermoacidophilic extremophile microorganisms — hardly the “highly developed beings” that Yu envisions.
When our clueless heroes — Arsenyev, Hawling, Sikarna, Yu, German pilot Raimund Brinkmann (Günther Simon), African communications officer Talua (Julius Ongewe), Japanese medical officer Dr. Sumiko Ogimura (Yoko Tani), and Polish chief engineer Professor Sołtyk (Ignacy Machowski) —, aboard the oddly named spaceship Kosmokrator (Greek for ‘Ruler of the World,’ an epithet associated with Satan), arrive in Venus, they find it to be a wasteland.
The barren landscape is not due to the planet’s harsh conditions (with which Earthlings were unfamiliar at the time), but the result of a self-inflicted nuclear disaster. The script is anything but subtle; the crew encounters the shadowy figures of former Venusians permanently burned onto the surviving walls of a charred city, and Sumiko name-drops Hiroshima.
Thus, the movie becomes a heavy-handed lecture on the perils of atomic weaponry. I’m sure director Kurt Maetzig’s heart was in the right place, although his brains seem conspicuous by their absence.
When Sikarna and Yu eventually translate the entire recording somehow, it turns out “the cosmic report was not a message to humans. It was a blueprint for aggression” describing a Venusian plan to irradiate the Earth’s surface to exterminate mankind and pave the way for an invasion.
The only thing that could stop the Venusians was themselves: “The lethal atomic power slipped from their hands, and a chain reaction ensued. They became the victims.” In other words, that same “lethal atomic power” saved the Earth’s ass. Talk about mixed signals.
Even the film’s wolf-dwelling-with-the-lamb message, wherein historical enemies (German and Polish, American and Russian, Japanese and Chinese, Black and White) work together to achieve a common goal (never mind that in the end that goal will be cleaning up their own mess after they inadvertently activate the Venusians’ Doomsday Device) is tainted by patriarchal gender politics.
When things start looking dire, Brinkmann tells Sumiko, for whom he has feelings, “When I heard you were coming, I was very happy. Now I wish you weren’t here.” When Sumiko rightfully reminds him that “I’m a scientist and researcher just the same as you,” he replies, “You’re also a woman … Your role is to preserve life, to bring a child into the world.” What a dick.