Hour of the Scorpio

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Movie
Original title Hour of the Scorpio
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1968
Rod
Director Horst Zaeske
script Siegfried Peters
Horst Zaeske
production German TV broadcaster DFF, Electronic Cam / DEFA studio production group for feature films
music Karl-Heinz Schröder
camera Siegfried Peters
Tilmann Dähn
Hans-Joachim Hortscht
Alfred Krehl
cut Renate Mueller
occupation

Hours of Scorpio is a science fiction - television film in three parts of the German Television DFF and was in the DEFA produced -Studio for movies. The literary model was the novel Die Invisbaren by Günther Krupkat , who also wrote the scenario for the film adaptation. The film aired on December 20, 21 and 23, 1968.

Further technical data

  • Scenario: Günther Krupkat
  • Dramaturge: Walter Baumert
  • Production design: Günter Broberg

First broadcasts: December 20, 21 and 23, 1968, length 5220 m

action

Speaker's voice from off in front of a rotating earth:

The 21st century has dawned. A new millennium. Eight billion people inhabit the earth. It offers plenty of space and food for everyone. Science and technology conquered ice deserts, turned seas of sand into gardens, opened up the wealth of the oceans and the depths of the globe.

Always new, unimagined perspectives open up to the peacefully searching spirit far beyond the earthly realm. The differences in the level of development of the peoples are disappearing more and more. Because a socialist world determines what happens.

However, there are still dangers on the path of humanity to a happy future. This is the story of a possibility.

Glint, the president of an overseas democratic state, is killed with a radiation pistol. The former CEO Barry Vanderbrook lives in the state not named. He leads an organization that combats socialism in order to restore capitalist conditions like before the October Revolution in 1917.

The murder of Glint and worldwide mysterious incidents caught the attention of the international security organization IKOM, whose headquarters are in Warsaw . The perpetrators are always invisible. But when an invisible man in the city of Polaria in Antarctica intrudes into the research laboratory there, where research is being carried out on the Gravitron , he makes a mistake while stealing documents. The invisible man accidentally steps into a spilled liquid, proving its existence to the laboratory staff. The Gravitron is said to be able to cancel out gravity and generate enormous amounts of energy.

Thereupon Michail Kostja, a kind of department head of the IKOM, instructs his colleague Pit Wendel to investigate the case, since there are apparently espionage and sabotage. While Dr. Kris Merten, who discovered the footprints, is very helpful, her colleague Frank Groneberg is extremely uncooperative during Wendel's investigations. Kris and Frank have already discovered footprints of humanoids on Mars that could not be assigned. They also saw a huge shadow that could not be assigned to any object.

Pit Wendel sets a trap for the invisible in Polaria. For a short time, human outlines become clear, but Groneberg prevents the intruder from being captured, who injures two security guards with a radiation pistol while escaping.

Through Vanderbrook's secretary, "Ronny" Harding, who is actually an officer of the IKOM, Kostja and Wendel learn that Vanderbrook has a secret laboratory in which Professor Orell is also working on a Gravitron . Orell's daughter Elena helps Harding with the investigation on moral grounds. During the search of the secret laboratory they are arrested by Lennart, a close confidante of Vanderbrook, but they manage to escape with Vanderbrook's underwater yacht Cadena .

Kostja and Wendel also learn that the Cadena , coming from Oslo , called at Lofoten and took a shipwrecked man on board, which, however, is kept top secret by Vanderbrook.

For security reasons, Kostja orders the relocation of the experiments on the Gravitron to the MIRNA space station, where Kris and Frank are protected by Pit Wendel. The space station is approached surprisingly by the alleged space service watch ship C 23 , which has apparently suffered damage. However, the C 23 is actually the spaceship Regulus Vanderbrooks and manned by his assistants. The space pirates attack the headquarters of the space station and want to take over the Gravitron .

But Wendel manages to hold off the pirates until three space services spaceships appear. For a short time a duel situation arises in which the "delta thrower" of the Regulus and the Gravitron of the space station face each other, but at the last moment the Regulus flees to escape the ships of the space service.

As it turns out, Groneberg worked for Vanderbrook, but at the last moment decided to prevent the theft of the “Gravitron” . Back on earth, the mainframe computer ELVIRA has now combined all the components of the mysterious events on behalf of Kostja. It turns out that the invisibility of Vanderbrook's men was created by the Invisator . This device was on board an alien spaceship that originated in the constellation Scorpio .

The spaceship is occupied by an alien race with "semi-organic automata" that resemble robots . In order to be able to undertake undisturbed explorations on Mars and Earth and in order not to frighten people with their appearance, the machines used the Invisator . When approaching earth, one of the machines crashed near Lofoten and was recovered by the Cadena , so that the invisor fell into the hands of Vanderbrook. The spaceship then left earth again, apparently towards the zodiac sign Scorpio.

Kris Merten is shocked by the fact that the aliens have overcome the time wall between Scorpio and the solar system , but Kostja is optimistic:

No path is so far that we will not go it one day.

The film fades out with the extraterrestrial spaceship that continues to fly, which was simulated by ELVIRA.

Production background, dramaturgy, trick technology

Aesthetically and acoustically, the film is clearly based on the West German television series Raumpatrouille , which was broadcast two years earlier and repeated in 1968. This becomes particularly clear in a dance sequence in which the couples move to electronic music and which are reminiscent of the dances in the Starlight Café . The IKOM shows parallels to the Galactic Security Service GSD of the space patrol .

Although the film was produced in the DEFA studio for feature films, which had excellent possibilities for animation , this was not used. The film is a purely chamber play of a few exterior shots, such as a mockup of the Cadena in a "harbor" and short shots of Kris and Frank on Mars . The briefly assembled images of the MIRNA space station apparently come from an older feature film of Soviet origin, possibly The Path to the Stars .

The dramaturgy is borrowed from contemporary crime films; The hour of the scorpion is actually a "Uto-Krimi" in which even the sequences on Mars and in the space station only serve to solve the mysterious incidents. The film only indirectly conveys a utopia, but primarily reflects the Cold War of the production time, which at the time of filming experienced a new high point with the Prague Spring .

The hour of the scorpion remained one of the few science fiction productions of the DFF. To what extent this is related to the reception of the audience or to the establishment of the artistic working group defa futurum in 1970, which practically had a monopoly on utopian films in the GDR, has not yet been clarified.

criticism

According to the film bibliographic yearbook , there were no contemporary film reviews . The lexicon of science fiction films judged a good 30 years later:

Since the first SF multi-part of GDR television is knitted according to the motto "Socialism will win" ... one can unfortunately only appreciate this relatively homely, three-part series, which primarily relies on elements of the crime film, as a story from an alternative universe - from such a universe in which socialism has won after all.

Hahn / Jansen, Lexikon des Science Fiction Films , Vol. 2, p. 864.

Further utopian productions of the DFF

literature

Web links