As a film fan, I couldn’t be happier about living in this era.  Movies I’d seen many years before and hadn’t had a chance to see again are, to my delight, being released to home video.  A few weeks ago, for example, the for the most part forgotten 1979 thriller Firepower (read my review here) was released and I finally, finally got a chance to see it again after having originally seen it one time in and around the date of that original release.

Sure, the film didn’t hold up that well, but I was so damn curious to see it again.  For whatever reason, pieces of it stuck with me all these years and I just had to revisit the work, regardless of how it would come off to my much older self.

This week, a trio of interesting films I’ve yearned to revisit have been released to home video.  The first two, Hooper and Sharkey’s Machine, are Burt Reynolds vehicles that were available before but are now, for the first time, being released to BluRay (and, I hope, are finally being presented in their proper cinematic aspect ratio).  I had avoided the earlier releases of these films because people who saw these video releases said the image quality of each film was very poor, a debit I hope these BluRays correct.

The third film, the 1969 feature Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (aka Doppleganger), is a film I have the barest of memories about, having seen it (probably) on TV one day way back in the mid to late 1970’s and never again.

And yet, like Firepower, the film lingered in my mind, an itch I had to scratch and a movie I was dying to revisit.

Yesterday the BluRay was formally released and I eagerly put it into my player.

Would the film enchant or disappoint me?

As it turned out, it did a little of both.

For those familiar with their works, the names Gerry and Sylvia Anderson should set off certain memories.  The one time husband and wife duo were responsible for, among others, the TV shows Thunderbirds, UFO, and Space: 1999.  They are the ones behind Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (so I don’t go insane re-typing the film’s title, lets refer to it as JFSS from now on, OK?).

The plot of the film goes like this: In the near future, the European Space Agency sends an exploratory probe towards the sun but an unexpected magnetic draw shifts its position and it takes pictures of a mysterious, and surprising, object: A planet that lies directly opposite the sun!

This planet, it is found, rotates in the same orbit as our Earth but has never been seen by us because it is always opposite the Sun and therefore obscured by it.

What follows is a race to get a European spacecraft up and away to explore that mysterious planet.  Eventually, the ship is sent but the mysteries of this alien world are just beginning to be uncovered.

I won’t say more (for now) because I don’t want to spoil the story.  I will get into SPOILERS after the trailer, however, so for those who don’t mind a more in depth examination of the film, feel free to read on.

To conclude the non-spoiler part of this review, I’ll say the following: JFSS proved a far more positive experience to me than revisiting Firepower.  The film’s effects remain quite good although the story could have been a lot more focused (I’ll get into that below).  If you’re a fan of the works of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, picking up JFSS is a no-brainer.  If you’re curious to see an interesting and at times even haunting sci-fi mystery/thriller, you’d do far worse than check this film out.

Alright, there was the trailer.  What follows below are…

SPOILERS!

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

As I mentioned above, JFSS’s story could have been a lot more focused and this is my biggest complaint against the film.  And yet paradoxically let me state that while the story could have used more focus, the “extraneous” material was presented rather well.  The problem was that it didn’t really need to be in the film.

Which is my long winded way of saying that this is a film that could have used a few tweaks of the screenplay.

The movie’s entire opening act, for example, involves the attempts of the head of the European Space Agency to a) find a mole (Herbert Lom in what amounts to a curious, almost non-speaking cameo) and b) use the discovery of this mole to force his reluctant allies to fund the exploration of the mysterious planet on the far side of the sun.

This part of the film was well presented but left me baffled when all was said and done.  Why did we need to spend all this time on the funding of this space probe?  The writer in me would have excised this entire section of the film.  Why spend all that time there, time that could have been used more wisely getting our spacecraft up and into space and dealing with the movie’s central mystery?

But wait, there’s more!

After the head of the agency gets his sought after funding, we go through the next part of the film, which first involves figuring out who will fly this mission.  The United States, the main backers of this mission, insist their most experienced astronaut, Colonel Glenn Ross (Roy Thinnes) be the senior officer on the flight.  The head of the European agency agrees to the US terms and puts his right hand man (and friend) John Kane (Ian Hendry) to fly with Ross.

Having taken care of that bit of business, we then spend time following the grueling training of the relatively inexperienced Kane preparing for the flight along with some bits and pieces involving the rocky marriage of Colonel Ross.

Once again, this part of the film isn’t bad per se and is presented fairly well.  However, once again the writer in me wondered why we were spending all these precious minutes of film on these issues.  The Ross marriage, I suppose, did matter a little later on, but Kane’s training?  Not so much.  That could have easily been dispensed with and allowed more time for the space flight and the movie’s central mystery.

Anyway, once we got past all that, the film finally reached the point it probably should have forty minutes before: Liftoff and arrival to the mystery planet.

It was here where things got good and interesting and where my dim memories came roaring back.  Though I said I would get into spoilers, I won’t go into many more details here and leave the mystery for you to see.

I will say this much, though: I loved the film’s use of mirrors in this part of the film and felt the ending, and especially the denouement that makes us question whether what we’ve just seen was real or the ramblings of a madman, really made the whole thing end on a troubling yet satisfying note.

Again, I recommend the film despite the overly extraneous opening elements.