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ACTOR
Roy ThinnesIan HendryPatrick WymarkLynn Loring
DIRECTOR
Robert Parrish
SYNOPSICS
Doppelgänger (1969) is a English movie. Robert Parrish has directed this movie. Roy Thinnes,Ian Hendry,Patrick Wymark,Lynn Loring are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1969. Doppelgänger (1969) is considered one of the best Drama,Sci-Fi movie in India and around the world.
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Doppelgänger (1969) Reviews
A wonderfull flashback!
I'll admit that like many others here this is a movie I've seen many times as a kid in the 70's. :) The concept and story are just wonderfull. My favorite type of sci-fi, the kind that makes you think and doesn't completely bombard you with special effects. Speaking of special effects, without spilling any beans I can say if you like The Thunderbirds, you'll love the SFX in this movie. Gets a 8 on 10 for me.
Tour the solar system on $5 a day
Spoiler Alert!! 100 years from now scientists discover a new planet in the solar system hidden on the far side of the Sun. It shares earth's orbit and revolves at exactly the same speed so that it has remained undiscovered until now. A consortium of nations collaborate to send two men to the new planet. Security leaks frustrate their desire for secrecy. The two men crash on the surface of the planet and are surprised to wake up back on earth. They are accused of turning back halfway in their journey since a roundtrip flight would have taken twice as long as their trip. One of the men dies of his injuries and the other becomes disoriented by his surroundings -- everything is reversed: cars pass on the wrong side of the road, words and letters are flipped. His interrogators are convinced when he can quickly recite lengthy passages of text read in a mirror. When an autopsy on the dead astronaut reveals that his organs are in reversed position, the conclusion is bizarre -- the men did indeed complete the journey but landed on a parallel/mirror-imaged earth. All matter is duplicated, and each person has a doppelganger partner on the far side of the sun. They attempt to return him. With disastrous results. While it doesn't rank in the top tier of sci-fi classics, Doppelganger is still worth looking for. This film (aka, Journey to the Far Side of the Sun) is an oddity, beginning as pure SCIENCE-fiction then suddenly turning surreal -- almost fantasy. Slow by today's standards, it's intriguing if you put yourself in the mindset of its era, the space-race 60's. (Suiting up and preparing for blast-off was more carefully depicted compared to how someone would film it today) I'm particularly impressed by the art/costuming/production design; it doesn't suffer from a cliched "vision" of what the future would look like. It's a low-budget poor-relation to GATTACA in this regard. The movie indulges in some delightful "gee-whiz" gadgetry -- [A spy uses a miniature camera in his prosthetic eye to record holographic images. A trans-Atlantic flight ends with the craft disassembling itself on the runway so that the passenger section is carted separately for disembarking. Wrist-bands monitor everyone's vital stats and reminds them to take their meds.] This was the sort of attention to detail that embellished "2001: a Space Odyssey", but on a much cheaper budget. Often the miniatures don't look realistic -- but they were always very well crafted and painstakingly rendered. This included a large number of rocketry, vehicles and many outdoor sets (buildings, launch pads, roads). I admired them even in their artificiality; it lent a surreal tone to the project. Roy Thinnes does a serviceable job in the lead (not his usual blandness) and it's fun to find another performance by Ian Hendry (whose brief career included the first season of TV's "The Avengers", and the sadistic guard Sgt Williams in THE HILL) Patrick Wymark is good as the pushy authoritarian who heads up the project. After the fateful conclusion -- where all evidence is destroyed that might prove the existence of the Doppelganger world -- he is left as a broken mumbling invalid. The film ends as he rolls his wheelchair excitedly into his mirrored reflection.
Love it or hate it
Most people who enjoy this film enough to sit through it multiple times probably first saw it, as I did, during their childhood back in the late 60's - early 70's. It was one of the first science fiction movies I saw as a child and it made enough of an impression on me for me to remember it decades later. It was more thought-provoking than your average 1960's "space opera" and the special effects were among the best of its time (second, at the time, perhaps only to '2001' which came out about a year earlier). And although the people behind it were definitely influenced by Kubrick's earlier masterpiece, it contains enough original thought to be fascinating in its own right. Most adults who didn't see this movie when it first came out will probably be too critical to be able to enjoy it if they were to watch it now. As for today's younger audiences, they would probably tend to measure it by the standards of today's movies with their much more advanced special effects and simply dismiss the film as too archaic for their tastes. Unfortunately, this movie is probably destined to languish in ever-increasing obscurity as its original audience gets older and eventually fades away...
Not the film it should have been
Fans of Gerry Anderson's productions will recognise several actors and vehicles from UFO (which was made after Doppelgänger) - as well as sound effects from various Anderson series. Barry Gray's excellent music (mostly unique to this film) adds to the feeling of familiarity. For these reasons alone, I think any Gerry Anderson fan would find Doppelgänger worth getting. Judged simply as a film, it has to be said that Doppelgänger is flawed. It is known that there were major problems during production, and I suspect this is why there is a time-consuming plot thread that ends abruptly and appears to have no relevance to the rest of the story. Presumably time/budget constraints prevented the relevance from emerging! Distractingly, the special effects range from outstandingly good - better than any 1960s film that I know of - to disappointingly bad. Nevertheless, even with these flaws, Doppelgänger's main story is well told and keeps the viewer (or, at least, this viewer) engaged throughout. The ending is perhaps not what one might expect from Anderson, yet at the same time it is typical of Anderson, and it is certainly appropriate. To find out what I mean you'll have to watch it for yourself. :)
Flawed but fascinating. Possibly the most underrated SF movie of the 1960s.
'Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun' is quite possibly the most underrated SF movie of the 1960s. It certainly has some flaws - especially the lack of character development, and a few ponderous sequences seemingly modeled on '2001: A Space Odyssey', released the previous year - but if you overlook them you'll find a quietly intelligent and fascinating movie that deserves to be rediscovered. The brains behind this movie were Gerry and Sylvia Anderson best remembered for their wildly entertaining marionette TV shows such as 'The Thunderbirds'. This movie was their first foray into live action SF and in some ways was the precursor to their 1970s cult series 'UFO'. Ed Bishop, George Sewell and some of the other supporting cast members went on from this movie to that TV show. The real stars however are Roy Thinnes, best known at the time for 'The Invaders', and Brit character actors Ian Hendry and Patrick Wymark. Hendry was the star of the little seen first series of 'The Avengers', and also appeared in Polanski's disturbing 'Repulsion' (alongside Wymark), and the camp classic 'Theatre Of Blood' with horror legend Vincent Price. Wymark appeared in another Price movie 'The Conqueror Worm', and starred in 'Blood On Satan's Claw'. Thinnes, Hendry and Wymark are all very good in this movie, albeit a little too cold and remote for my liking, but that is obviously the script's failing not the performers. I haven't mentioned much about the plot of the movie wary of spoiling it for those who have never seen it. Suffice to say it involves the discovery of a hereto unknown planet in our solar system. The less you know about it after that the more you will enjoy it. Overall, despite the script problems and one or two other minor criticisms I highly recommend this movie to all SF fans who prefer ideas over action.