Earth II (1971) (TV)

User Rating:

5.2/10   

Director:

Tom Gries

Writers:

Allan Balter (writer)
William Read Woodfield (writer)

Release Date:

28 November 1971 (USA)

Genre:

Sci-Fi

Tagline:

Just 10 seconds . . . to save a dream from becoming a nuclear nightmare

Plot:

Story of the daily operations of a space station called Earth II.

Plot Keywords:

Space Station | Zero Gravity | Pacifism | Spacewalk | Nuclear Weapon

Cast

Gary Lockwood	...	David Seville
Anthony Franciosa	...	Frank Karger
Scott Hylands	...	Jim Capa
Hari Rhodes	...	Dr. Loren Huxley
Lew Ayres	...	President Charles Carter Durant
Mariette Hartley	...	Lisa Karger
Gary Merrill	...	Walter Dietrich
Inga Swenson	...	Ilyana Kovalefskii
Brian Dewey	...	Matt Karger
Edward Bell	...	Anton Kovalefskii
Diana Webster	...	Hannah Young
Bart Burns	...	Steiner
John Carter	...	Hazlitt
Herbert Nelson	...	Chairman
Serge Tschernisch	...	Russian

Runtime:

100 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Metrocolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

UK:U (original rating) | UK:U (video rating) (1987) | USA:G

Company:

Wabe

It seemed good at the time.

A couple of years before Gene Roddenberry was trying to start new series with his movies "Genesis II" and "Planet Earth" (or is that "movie"?), this superior film with the oddly similar name paved the way. Alas, the road came to a dead-end, as all movies of this kind in the early '70s failed to understand that good story is better than bad sfx. This one is about a space station that has a unique social structure intended to eliminate conflict. The concept was handled in a simplistic way, but it nevertheless had a kind of wistful hopefulness about it that seemed not entirely incredible in 1971.

Like Roddenberry's films, this one fits into a short-lived era of TV sf that seemed suspended between Chesley Bonestell's airbrushed vision of the near future of space colonization, and Ralph McQuarrie's grittier, plumber's-nightmare versions that would soon follow. A bit of "2001" can be seen here and there as well (for example, when the characters walk "up" a wall).

If you liked the kind of austere models and similarly inornate acting (scripts, too) of early '70s sf, you'll like this one. The dilemma faced by the characters is familiar, as is its solution (but please overlook the glaring error involving the sun, the Earth, and the station's rotation). Still, there's a lost sense of "coming real soon now" in modern sf that this film might bring back to your memory. In 1971, it seemed we were _all_ going to fly in space and get to walk up walls. You know what happened next, but you didn't see it coming when this movie was new, so you believed it more then than you would today. See it again, if you get the chance, and ask yourself how we lost interest in going into orbit ourselves.