Review of Doppelgänger (1969) by Kong K — 16 Feb 2009

Being the sci-fi fan that I am, I've always been curious about this film. So I was excited to see Journey to the Far Side of the Sun finally get a new release on DVD (the previous print had been fetching $100 on eBay - I'm sure those people wish they had their money back - but more about that in a second).

Anyway, the premise of this film (just like the Twilight Zone episode "The Parallel") is that there is an undiscovered planet resembling Earth on the "other side of the sun". This planet is of course exactly like ours except that it's inverted. This basically just means all their letters and signs are reversed and people drive on the wrong side of the road.

Sound intriguing? Well, that's pretty much it for the plot. The first hour or so is dedicated to the preparations for the journey to this other planet. It's just tedious scenes of switches being pressed, exterior shots of the launching pad, banal dialog, etc. There's no point to it whatsoever. To help matters, Gerry Anderson somehow managed to find the most boring actors in the history of cinema to play these roles.

Anyway, once the crew FINALLY lands on the planet (after an interminable sequence of the astronauts sitting and literally sleeping in their spaceship), Roy Thinnes astutely notices the copy is all backwards on a bottle of cologne and hops back on another ship to tell people about what he has discovered. Oops he never gets to do it as he crash lands and dies. The end!

Oh wait, there's a bonus scene of one of the space executives hurling himself into a mirror in his wheelchair at the end. I guess he wanted out of this film too.

I'm really surprised a under-developed premise like this could get made even back in the 60s. It actually made me feel like I had to "make up" for wasting the 2 hours I spent watching it by doing something, anything more rewarding.