Aelita (1924)

Original title

Аэлита

Directed by

Yakov Protazanov

Genre

drama film, fantasy film, silent film, science fiction film, arthouse science fiction film

Country

Soviet Union

Runtime

1h 51m

Rated

G+

Rating

5.9 of 10 from 79 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

An engineer builds a rocket ship and travels to Mars. There he joins forces with the Martian queen to lead a rebellion against the ruling elders. The story also follows the everyday lives of people in post-civil war Soviet Russia.

dreamlikevisually lushslow-burnromanticmelancholiccerebralwhimsicaldated

What happens

Aelita (Russian: Аэли́та, pronounced [ɐɛˈlʲitə]), also known as Aelita: Queen of Mars, is a 1924 Soviet silent science fiction film directed by Yakov Protazanov and produced at the Mezhrabpom-Rus film studio. It was based on Alexei Tolstoy's 1923 novel of the same name. Nikolai Tseretelli and Valentina Kuindzhi were cast in leading roles. Though the main focus of the story are the daily lives of a small group of people during the post-civil war Soviet Russia, the film's enduring importance comes from its early sci-fi elements. It primarily tells of an engineer Mstislav Sergeyevich Los (Russian: Лось) traveling to Mars in a rocket ship, where he leads a popular uprising against the ruling group of Elders, with the support of Queen Aelita who has fallen in love with him after watching him through a telescope. In its performances in the cinemas in Leningrad, Dmitri Shostakovich played on the piano the music he provided for the film. In the United States, Aelita was edited and titled by Benjamin De Casseres for release in 1929 as Aelita: Revolt of the Robots. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

More like this

• На крыльях ввысь (1924)
• Interplanetary Revolution (1924)
• Руки геть! (1924)
• Solaris (1972)
• The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924)
• The Space Voyage (1936)
• Долина сліз (1924)
• The Red Web (1924)