Moscow: Cassiopea (1974) User Reviews

Lost beauty

[romanro · 6 November 2002]

This film is a classic of sci-fi for my generation. We did not get a chance to watch Star Wars or Star Trek. We watched Moskva-Kassiopeya many times for its strong context, great adventure and clever dialogues. It has right mix of comedy and suspense, good characters and very strong plot.

This adventure tells a story of a group of young astronauts freeing civilization of one of the planets in constellation Kassiopeya from the empire of artificial intelligence - robots.

I may never see this movie again in my life. It's a pity that it is probably considered as an obsolete piece of the soviet propaganda. I never felt this from this movie and who has seen some masterpieces from soviet cinematography knows that all of them criticize regime in a very effective way.

Moskva-Kassiopeya is a great movie for all ages.

A nostalgic sci-fi movie of the time when they did not need cheap action.

[wodil · 9/10 · 10 June 2009]

I just read the other comment. I myself watched it on East German TV in the seventies. Now it came out on DVD in Germany, with a German soundtrack provided by the former East German DEFA. I still hope for a new Russian Release with the original soundtrack and subtitles. Great nostalgic sci-fi movie. It certainly is no piece of propaganda of the old regime. You have young people with dreams as the spaceship crew. It is a very quiet movie, the heroes being adolescents sent on the long way to Cassiopeia. But something goes a bit wrong ... no I will not tell you more. At least if you know some German, you can now watch it. As I know the Russians, they will probably have it out again on DVD pretty soon.

Soviet Star Trek

[shinobiivan · 10/10 · 13 April 2009]

This is, in essence, a Soviet rendition of Star Trek with a teenage crew. The story revolves around a project to send a manned spaceflight to Alpha Cassiopeia to investigate a signal received from there, and, due to the relative slowness of the fastest available engines, the trip is predicted to take something around 27 years in one direction. Therefore, a crew of teenagers is recruited - in hope than when they reach their destination, they will all be aged around 40 and capable of carrying out whatever adult actions necessary to establish First Contact. But, as always, things go awry... The storyline is split up into two parts - this is the first, dealing with the foundation of the plot and the ship's launch.

It should be noted that this movie is novel in several interesting ways, including but not limited to featuring its own equivalents of Trekker favourites such as a Holodeck, The Borg, Warp Drives and even our own Soviet version of Q! The sci-fi element follows the same ideas as Star Trek does - an as-real-as-possible (at the time) approach to showing the high-tech stuff, as well as an interesting look at how unexpectedly people making up the crew can act and interact under nominal and stressed-out conditions.

If you're even remotely interested in good sci-fi (and good OLD sci-fi specifically), you pretty much owe it to yourself to watch this, probably playing a drinking game along the notion of "Yes, this was in Star Trek only AFTER this movie was made".