Just what I expected

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

In the narration, the director declares that his movie was "murdered" back in '77. In this rare occasion, I find myself on the side of the producing party. "On the Silver Globe" is as ambitious as it is insufferable. Majority of the first act is shown as a collection of recordings by a group of astronauts getting to know their new habitation. This is all done in hand-held close-up, and it takes over an hour. Most of what is shown to us, is manic and deranged behaviour as the characters stumble into madness. (It has to be said, that these astronauts are a shame to their community. They should be men of science capable of analytical thinking, but instead they become mystics within five minutes from landing.) Very little of the dialogue is sensible in any way. That's a bit too much to ask of the audience. In my case, I could take about 80 minutes of it, then decided to try and spend my time better elsewhere. Zulawski is not without talent, by all means, but this project was misguided. I hope "On the Silver Globe" doesn't become a cult film - a classic it most definitively is not.

only a truly gifted artist could make something this uncompromisingly weird-it makes lost highway look like an episode of meet the press.okay,let's take a story about a few astronauts leaving earth and landing on a distant planet.the astronauts die off relatively quickly and their children grow up at an accelerated rate-the children spring into being btw,no copulation is ever hinted at much less shown-so quickly as to reach their tenth (or so) birthdays in a matter of days.the children welcome the next visitor,presumably from the planet poland,as a god...and i'm not sure what happened after that...that last sentence which probably took you about ten seconds to read is the only synopsis for this 2hr30min minute film i can muster.and i have no idea if what i wrote is even remotely accurate.to say i didn't really follow this movie is besides the point,its greatness lies not in its storytelling abilities so much but in the tough to discern netherworlds of aura and atmosphere.whatever the holy mountain,electra,my love,mulholland drive,blood of a poet or the other 2 giants of polish sur-reality,the saragossa manuscript and the hourglass sanatorium have-this movie has too.i lack the ability to describe sufficiently all the films i've just mentioned so all i can really tell you is that after i watched on the silver globe i knew that i had liked what i had seen.yes,it's totally insane but it's not bad...just don't ask me why....

I suspect this may be a kind of fake. It's all that remains of a film whose production was stopped in the middle: a science fiction film that, to judge from this paste-up, might have been something like Stalker done in the style of Weekend. Unfortunately, the sequences that were never shot included virtually all of the science fiction and most of the action, so that two-thirds of what's left concentrates on three people trekking through barren landscapes and going crazy into the camera, as in Blair Witch Project. I found it difficult to track the progress of their degeneration, which all seemed very much the same. Based on this, I'm not surprised the Polish film bureaucrats canceled the production, only that it took them as long as it did. Now the extant footage has been edited into what the DVD case calls a reconstruction. But is it really? Or is it a new construction using the old materials? What made me begin to suspect this was that throughout the film, while the director summarizes the unshot sequences in voice-over, the screen shows what seem to be outtakes, but the last of them closes on a shot of the director, taken contemporaneously. So were the other interpolated sequences shot then or forty years ago? And if forty years ago, were they to have gone in where we see them or elsewhere, and as we see them or in some other form? Or were they just scrap? Much of the rest consists of long tracking shots of scenery, which also look like outtakes. And the film is edited in a style now fashionable--with series of multiple cuts on the same angle, a few seconds apart--which I don't remember being the fashion forty years ago. This made me wonder whether the director had cut the film as he would today, rather than as he would have back when. I also wonder whether he had done so partly to disguise the incompleteness of the available material. And where did the music come from? If the film was never finished, it can never have been scored; and to me the music sounds new, too. So all in all I don't know how to judge the "reconstruction" on the basis of what it was to have been because I don't know how much I'm seeing of that. If the gaps could have been bridged with staged readings of the missing portions of the script, maybe read by the surviving actors, the film might come together into something; as it is, it seems to be little more than what another, better known film was deliberately intended as and named for: ashes of time.

first off, the copy of the film that i was able to track down, was in polish with a very difficult to follow English voice-over narration/dubbing that spoke everyone's lines. Yet, despite the tedious dubbing issue and the frustrating image quality on the bootleg i tracked down, the wonderfully unsettling lunacy of the whole affair was able to shine through and really hit home for me.One earlier reviewer, in an attempt to discredit the film, described the actors' performances as similar to the ramblings of mental patients. I thought about it a bit, and concluded that, yes, all of the performances did have an element of hysteria and frenzy that someone might attribute to psychotics, but for me, thats part of what made the picture so extraordinarily unsettling (in the best way). The point-of-view style of camera-work and delivery that carried the first half of the film was really unnerving. The entire thing had a dizzying sense of madness that threatened to crumble at almost any moment, but managed to hold together long enough (around 3 hours) to hit you with the savage power of its staggering ending.It had more going for it than simply being "crazy" though, as i felt it also offered a fascinating look at the cyclical nature of human civilization, and perhaps more so, the ultimate hopelessness of it. It is a terrifyingly bleak film.if you can track down a copy of it, and feel as though you can handle the often tedious viewing experience, its definitely worth it. There's nothing else out there quite like it.