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Doppelgänger
AKA Journey to the Far Side of the Sun was Gerry Anderson's
first, and only, try at feature filmmaking sans marionettes. The
man behind such classics as Stingray,
Thunderbirds, and
Joe 90, Anderson decided that after eleven years of making
puppet shows on television for children it was about time to have a go
at live-action movies for adults. So, in 1969, in the wake of
the über-cerebral 2001: a Space Odyssey,
Anderson's Century 21 company released a space adventure
intended to cash in on the conundrum-posing metaphysics of Stanley
Kubrick's epic. Unfortunately, this turned out to be less a case
of jumping on a bandwagon and more of falling off and getting run over
by the wheels as audiences, somewhat unfairly, saw Doppelgänger
as a rip off of 2001 and left the movie with disappointing box
office returns.
On the plus side,
Doppelgänger was nominated for an Academy Award for special
effects in 1969 and in the decades since has become something of a
cult classic. It's also one of cinema's most interesting forays
into Future Past with a portrayal of the intrigue and espionage
plaguing a 21st century European space programme that pays
such close, yet restrained attention to technological details, that in
many ways it comes off as much more plausible than Kubrick's better
known and more successful work. Even though the second half of
the story is about as daft as a barrel of Euro MPs, one comes away
from Doppelgänger suspecting that if manned spaceflight had
kept its momentum after the triumphs of Apollo our present day
spaceships would look rather similar to those launched by Eurosec.
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