Get your communist ass to Mars. It’s unusual for a movie to have inspired creations as diverse as Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Roland Emmerich's Independence Day , but a movie celebrating its 100th birthday today can claim just such an accomplishment. Loosely based on a 1923 novel by Alexei Tolstoy, Yakov Protazanov's 1924 silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars is, in fact, secretly one of the most influential sci-fi movies of all time.
Set in 1921, the film follows a group of people in post-civil war Soviet Russia as they reckon with their place in a rebuilding society. The movie begins with people worldwide attempting to understand a mysterious radio message, and the scene immediately makes Queen of Mars’ influence obvious. Seventy years later, its visuals were echoed by Emmerich as countries around the globe received transmissions from Independence Day’s invaders, then later used Morse code to coordinate a united counter-offensive.
And much like Jeff Goldblum's Independence Day character, recently-divorced satellite engineer David Levinson, the main protagonist of Aelita , Los (Nikolai Tseretelli), is an engineer having issues with his Natasha (Valentina Kuindzhi). But while David is able to hack the transmission and save the day, Los merely daydreams of becoming a hero. Obsessed with going to Mars, the mysterious transmission leads him to flights of fancy as he imagines they have a celestial source.
It’s in these Martian sequences that Aelita’s impact on sci-fi film c.