Ascension is a very peculiar, occasionally fascinating, but ultimately not very illuminating, 49-minute montage of archival footage from the Soviet Space Program. The documentary is inexplicably mixed with footage from China during Mao’s reign and various television/film sequences from around the era, compiled in such a fashion to reduce it to a VHS-quality print.

At times the footage shows unexpected insights, as we watch, for example, dogs and chimpanzees get strapped into the vomit comet and spin around in circles, hooked up to an EEG while scientists also monitor the vitals of the animals. Of course, it should not be a huge surprise that such tests took place; after all, we’ve seen the same ones carried out on humans in Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff, yet the footage of Laika and some chimpanzees undergoing these very same tests still comes as a bit of a shock, but an interesting, if not somewhat torturous (the poor animals!) sight to behold. There is one shocking scene in which a rocket is launched just metres away from a group of people, which, unsurprisingly to us, now, did not end well.

Unfortunately, no narration or subtitles have been added to the archival footage to inform us of what we are watching. Even for those that are reasonably well informed – for whom Yuri Gagharin or Laika are household names – we still don’t necessarily know what it is exactly that we are looking at. While this allows us to experience the archival footage as just a keepsake of the past, our ignorance about what we’re watching prevents Ascension from being a wholly informative record of past events  – the images themselves are interesting but without additional factual information, the experience is disappointing.

Whenever footage of talks or short-lived narration occurs, the translation in the subtitles is abominable. The scenes from China at around the same time, of workers toiling in the fields and miners in mines seem completely out of place – what does this have to do with the Soviet space age? Why intersperse Soviet space age training with footage from China? The only connection, and a lame one at that, is made at the end when we see China’s recent space program come to fruition.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.