Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969)

Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969)

Directed by: Robert Parrish

Starring: Roy Thinnes, Ian Hendry, Patrick Wymark

This movie explores the concept of Nemesis, another planet in our same orbit that’s always on the other side of the sun from us. Obviously now that we’ve been into space we know that there isn’t such a thing, but it was a theory that popped up occasionally throughout human history up until then. I find it a very interesting idea for a story, personally.

Two astronauts go on a trip to a newly discovered planet on the other side of the sun from the Earth, and crash land on it. One dies in the crash, and the other finds himself back on Earth… or is it? Everything is reversed, literally. Words are written backwards, people’s organs are switched around, and generally it’s a mirror world. The remaining astronaut has to escape and find his way back to his world, even though nobody believes his crazy story, instead thinking that they came back to Earth somehow.

There’s a made-for-TV movie with the exact same plot as this that MST3K did for an episode, so it felt like I had already more or less seen this movie before. It’s not great, it’s just an exploration of this interesting idea. They don’t have a very strong plot to make the characters all that compelling, which is a problem with a lot of hard sci-fi movies. It gets too wrapped up in the cool concepts and forgets that you still need a human story the viewer can relate to. Ah well, such is the way of things.