I'm a real sucker for vintage sci-fi films. I love old films generally, but I particularly like old sci-fi partly because of the marvellous irony you sometimes get with hindsight of the combination of the attempt to makes things futuristic with the giveaway dated period details arising from the inability of any age to really imagine its way out of contemporary technology, or indeed contemporary moral and social assumptions.
Sometimes I like to catch up with old films that I vaguely recall seeing on telly when I was young. One such is the 1969 film "Doppelganger", aka "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun", which I watched on DVD last night:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064519/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl
It's a strangely half-baked and unsatisfactory film in some ways. The unique and bizarre premise of the film (that a twin planet of Earth exists in the same orbit but always invisible behind the sun, where everything is the same as here, right down to individual people and their life trajectories, but mirror-image right to left) emerges only about two thirds of the way through, with almost no time to develop a plot around that, never mind to explore the bizarre philosophical conundrums around free will etc. which such a hypothesis inevitably generates. Always good to see Herbert Lom though (in a minor role this time).
Edit: also, of course, an astro-physically absurdly incoherent premise. At one point a character refers to "a complete duplication of matter", at which point you think, well, yes, sort of, but "complete" only in relation to planet earth, not any other part of the solar system, eh, else we'd have noticed it before?
Sometimes I like to catch up with old films that I vaguely recall seeing on telly when I was young. One such is the 1969 film "Doppelganger", aka "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun", which I watched on DVD last night:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064519/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl
It's a strangely half-baked and unsatisfactory film in some ways. The unique and bizarre premise of the film (that a twin planet of Earth exists in the same orbit but always invisible behind the sun, where everything is the same as here, right down to individual people and their life trajectories, but mirror-image right to left) emerges only about two thirds of the way through, with almost no time to develop a plot around that, never mind to explore the bizarre philosophical conundrums around free will etc. which such a hypothesis inevitably generates. Always good to see Herbert Lom though (in a minor role this time).
Edit: also, of course, an astro-physically absurdly incoherent premise. At one point a character refers to "a complete duplication of matter", at which point you think, well, yes, sort of, but "complete" only in relation to planet earth, not any other part of the solar system, eh, else we'd have noticed it before?
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