SunnyHello Nice effects though.

GetPapa Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

HottWwjdIam There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Rainey Dawn WOW OK fast-forwarding already and the movie just began... this is Francis Ford Coppola & Roger Corman film?!! Originally a (boring) Russian film that is hacked to pieces, re-edited and dubbed over with a few new scenes added. Yet it's so boring already and awful looking I can't bare to watch anymore! What was so good about this original film? From what I can tell from this Americanized and dubbed over version it, the original film, was awful. Why bother to Americanize this?! I'm sorry I just do not find this film appealing at all.Well I'll chalk this one up to a 50-pack filler film. I acquired it in the Sci-Fi Invasion 50-Pack. Oh well, they can't all be winners.1/10

Max Nemtsov Like most soviet films of the period (and I watched the original version), in has no action whatsoever. The plot is stilted as statues at the People's Economy Achievements Exhibition in Moscow, and the story drags its feet to no end. It is a typical tableau vivant aimed at kicking imperialist America one more time, and at showing Russians (but mostly Ukrainians, as the film was done at the infamous Dovzhenko Studios, legendary for its spectacularly bad productions) at their best and foremost.However, this propaganda poster about how Soviets and Americans tried to prove to each other whose penis extender—pardon me, phallic symbol—is better, racing each other to Mars, of all places, is nicely illustrated with analog FX. The music is abominable, and is in place only in the scene of "space madness" of the one "bad American" they let out into space. The dialogue is absurdist and as ridiculous as the gadgetry shown. More than anything else, it reminds me of the old Chapayev joke: —Pet'ka, the apparatus. —Six, Vasily Ivanovich. —Six what? —Apparatus what? In some sense, it's just as silly as Gravity. Look how much time passed, and what has changed?Nevertheless, content-wise, the film's narrow-minded positivism and typical soviet jingoism is set off by one truly Pynchonian twist, and you can appreciate it if you read Gravity's Rainbow. The film has its own Gottfried, and there is the Gottfried glorious moment there. A-and Gottfried's name in the film is Grigory.

BA_Harrison 1997: after a catastrophic atomic war, the Earth has divided into two rival nations, the North Hemis and the South Hemis, both sides locked in a battle to be the first to land on Mars.Battle Beyond the Sun started life as a state-sponsored Russian sci-fi movie called Nebo Zovyat— a breath-taking, prophetic vision of the Soviet Union's journey into space; in the disrespectful hands of opportunistic producer Roger Corman and a young and eager-to-please Francis Ford Coppola, what was once awe-inspiring becomes laughable, the pair badly dubbing and drastically re-editing the original two hour epic to a mere 64-minutes of clumsy space melodrama (albeit it with impressive effects), 'enhanced' by silly inserts of space monsters that look suspiciously like genitalia.It's dull going as the two nations race to the 'Red Planet' only to fail with the finishing line in sight, and the feel-good moral of the tale—that rival nations must co-operate if they want to achieve truly great things—does little to compensate for the sheer shoddiness of the whole cut-and-paste approach and the frustrating fact that the wonders of Mars remain unseen.

dbborroughs The American version of this film concerns a race into space and was assembled by Roger Corman who cut up the original Soviet film and then added some footage of his own. From the looks of things Corman took a ponderous and very serious film about a trip to the stars and made it some what less serious. Certainly the gravity of the performances of the original remain but at the same time introduction of the battling monsters in the final twenty minutes changes everything. Honestly the only real reason to watch this sleep inducing film is the two monsters which battle it out while the astronauts watch. The creatures are nothing if not monstrous to look at and possess forms that are rather unique, namely less than the less than veiled shapes of genitalia. Clearly the filmmakers assigned by Corman were bored and I doubt they really ever thought they'd actually get away with what they did, but there it is on the screen, who monsters locked in a vicious battle thats in actuality a less than subtle commentary of the male female dynamic. I don't think I ever really paid any attention to their shape for the longest time, it wasn't until I had it pointed out to me that the film suddenly became so much more interesting. Unfortunately the monsters are only briefly seen at the end, but in an otherwise somber film, their inclusion is enough to watch the film if you are a monster nut like me.