Spaceflight IC-1 (1965)

The premise of the story is good but the execution is just awful - sets, acting, script. It comes across like a TV soap opera and quite low tech given the time when it was made. I could see this as a series given they were only 1 year into the mission. Except for the people in hibernation event that leads to the death of Mead, the remaining plot points could used in a western.Interesting, the guy with head in the glass had such a minor role. He was not allowed to talk to Earth -- why? In most sci fi movies these characters are the go to experts or the evil one but the majority of the action was not in the operation room. It was devoid of the usual meteor shower or other external threat found in many movies and focused on the personal conflicts.

I saw the title and brief description and thought this might be good. I could not have been more in error. Virtually nothing but talking heads, trying to be oh-so British while the non-existent plot labours forward. The alleged motivation for forming a new human colony on a distant planet fails to take into account that with a start-up population of four couples (along with three young boys and four unfortunates in suspended animation) there will be very little genetic variation in coming generations. There is a mutiny when the Captain (and we know this because he has his job title emblazoned on his chest, along with everyone else on the crew) forbids the other couples from "adding to their population". The aforementioned boys seem to be acting more like kids at a sleep-away camp than interplanetary explorers (even though they do have some kind of ESP powers). Their acting skills rank someplace south of a dead mouse. In the end, the Captain gets it by a berserk re-animate and our poor fish-bowl-headed cyborg just stands and rolls his eyes. 93 minutes that would have been better spent getting a tooth extracted.

Consider this is the same year that Star Trek began on NBC-TV. We may laugh at the funny SFX on TOS, but compared to this film (and several others made about the same time), it was downright modern.Also, consider four years later, Kubrick would make 2001: A Space Odyssey, which to this stay still looks fairly fresh. Check out the 1960s-era reel-to-reel tape recorder the "Educator" uses to record her lessons for the children. At least the Star Trek folks tried to simulate a technology 200 years in the future.The story-line is about par for the "sturm-und-drang" type of space opera of this time, but it is rather unrealistic to expect us to believe that this crew would be so misfit and unable to get along with one another. Considering the amount of rigorous psychological testing the early Mercury astronauts underwent just to orbit the earth, it's rather bizarre.

As earth has become more uninhabitable a desperation journey to a new planet that is going to take years to complete goes awry when the ship's captain becomes completely unreasonable. The crew is made up of husbands, wives, and children, picked out by earth super powers to start a new colony. As well, the ship also carries some other passengers who've been frozen, to be thawed out and revived when they get to their far off destination. The story goes in several interesting directions, with a mutiny led by the ship's doctor, the captain who's wife hasn't gotten pregnant (which provokes classic insecurity symptoms), not a good development for a captain of a space ship carrying humanity's last chance at avoiding extinction, the kids on board, the shifting allegiances between the crew, etc... However interesting the film is thematically, it suffers from a lack of resources, looks incredibly cheap, and has an unknown cast that utters a lot of bad lines.