The Road to the Stars-revisiting the original Space Odyssey

Before the flight of Sputnik, one astonishing film depicted the future of space exploration as never seen before, the docu-drama Road to the Stars.

Road to the Stars was one of the most amazing special effects accomplishments in film history. Pavel Klushantsev began working on the colour film in Leningrad in 1954. His aim was to explain and realistically portray the coming age of space exploration. With technical advise from Tikhonravov (who was secretly developing the Soviet Union's first manned spacecraft at the time), Klushantsev showed tremendous ingenuity in explaining and portraying man's conquest of space. The film was nearing completion when Sputnik 1 was launched. Klushantsev hurriedly filmed a sequence illustrating this feat, and the film was released internationally a month later.

The film begins in Kaluga, following the life of Tsiolkovskiy, as he finds the basic technical solutions to spaceflight. Each discovery is explained in layman's terms. The early experiments of GIRD are restaged.

The final section of the film portrays the launching of the first Soviet man into space, the first space station, and the first landing on the moon. In creating this footage Klushantsev created marvellous special effects, using techniques copied by Stanley Kubrick ten years later for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Indeed, some sequences in 2001 seems a shot-for-shot duplication of Road to the Stars
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Road to the Stars could indeed be considered the grandaddy of all the great space movies. It's easy to compare it's depictions with those from Destination Moon, Conquest of Space, and 2001 a Space Odyssey.




While many clips of this film are available on Youtube, For the first time a high-quality version of the film has been released with English subtitles and a new soundtrack. Here's a sample-