1969: A Space Oddity

Doppelgänger vs 2001: fair comparison?

On the evening of Saturday 14 February 1976, I sat down to watch a film whose existence I’d been unaware of until a few days earlier. Gerry Anderson’s Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (aka Doppelgänger) had gone unremarked in the only overview of his career I’d seen to date (ITV’s Clapperboard special of 1975), and I’d never seen it mentioned in print.

Until this point, I’d imagined that the Andersons’ involvement in ‘proper’ films, using actors instead of puppets, had begun with UFO. Now, I knew differently. Doppelgänger had received its ITV premiere in the Granada region, two years earlier, but tonight’s screening marked its first appearance on ATV in the Midlands. This was a broadcast not to be missed. Indeed, on spotting the listing in that week's TV Times, I could barely believe it: a previously unknown piece of science fiction by Gerry Anderson and it was going to be on television in a matter of days. It was the kind of thing I often dreamed about...

My diary entry for the day confirms that I was already aware of the film’s alternate identity, a nugget of information I probably gleaned from the TV Times’ film review column. Billed as ‘Film Spectacular’, and shown with its American title, the broadcast went out at 7.45pm, sandwiched between comedy impressions show Who Do You Do and The Best of Upstairs Downstairs in a 105-minute slot that allowed for 15 minutes’ worth of advert breaks.

Watching for the first time, the parallels with UFO were immediately apparent – indeed, the film came across as a kind of 90-minute pilot for the series, albeit with a completely different concept. I recognised cars and cast members from the later series, and the film’s asethetics were pretty well identical. In my diary that night, I pronounced it ‘v. good’, but ended my entry with the query: ‘Is there a second earth – did it really happen?’ Watching the film again today, I find that is still the only satisfactory explanation – Jason Webb is nothing but a senile old man in a nursing home, who has imagined the whole thing. After all, the Andersons were somewhat notorious for their milking of the ‘everything’s been destroyed but phew, it was only a dream’ trope, having been there previously in Fireball XL5 and Captain Scarlet. Doppelgänger was, in effect, A Day in the Life of a Space General, done with live actors.

Back in 1976, I was more than happy to have discovered this previously unimagined addition to the Anderson canon, but today I can’t help looking at the movie with a more critical eye. This is a film that desperately wants to be 2001. In special effects terms, it’s up there with Kubrick's masterpiece, but in every other department it falls woefully short.

I thought it might be interesting to examine the ways in which Doppelgänger/ Journey to the Far Side of the Sun fails to measure up to 2001 and the reasons behind them:

a) It’s too wordy. I haven’t done a word count, but at a guess, I’d say there’s probably as much dialogue in the first twenty minutes of Doppelgänger as we get in the whole of 2001. Kubrick’s statement is essentially visual, with dialogue kept to a minimum. Long stretches of his film are wordless – the first and last half hours in particular. By comparison, the Andersons’ characters never shut up, yet the bulk of the dialogue is either technical or expository. None of it is good dialogue, or interesting or revealing. Some of it is fit only for puppets.

b) It tries to be too many things. The Andersons must have been cock-a-hoop that they were finally getting to do their sci-fi schtick with real people at long last, but in their excitement, they tried to do far too much. They were big fans of ATV's boardroom drama series The Power Game: so hey, let’s do it in the 21st century – we’ll even get Patrick Wymark so we can write the character we already know from television. The notion of doing The Power Game in the arena of space exploration wasn’t at all bad, but it was enough for a film in itself: one can easily imagine it – Jason Webb fighting to get his Sunprobe project accepted only to have it blow up in his face – no need whatsoever for the ludicrous ‘twin earth’ conceit.

But this was only one aspect of the movie: the Andersons also wanted some Bond-style espionage with gadgets, so we got a pointless preamble involving Herbert Lom with a camera in his eye that serves the plot only in so far as it provides a motivation for NASA to finance Webb’s space project. 

And we’re still not done: free from the constraints of working with fibreglass characters who couldn’t emote on screen, the Andersons added some, ahem, ‘human’ drama about an astronaut whose wife believes he’s sterile. Again, this is a topic for a film on its own terms, rather than the rushed subplot we’re served up in Doppelgänger. It goes nowhere – Colonel Ross discovers a packet of contraceptive pills and we’re done. This does, however, beg the question of why his wife would be taking them then complaining to him that they can’t conceive? The Andersons really did not understand human relationships and motivations at all.

All of this wastes a huge amount of time that might have been better spent on working up a more interesting character-based drama. The original script was written by Tony Williamson, a journeyman well known to fans of the ITC filmed adventure series, but no great shakes as a character writer. When his first attempt failed to pass muster, the Andersons took on the scripting job themselves, bringing in Donald James – a writer of similar background to Williamson – to help them flesh out the characters. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that he failed.

By comparison, Kubrick’s film isn’t concerned with characters at all, except in the case of HAL. He doesn’t delve into their backgrounds beyond a telephone call from Heywood Floyd to his daughter, and a happy birthday message from Astronaut Poole’s parents. His characters are vehicles to serve his ideas – there is no subplot in 2001. There’s a secondary plot (HAL’s breakdown) but it functions as one of Kubrik’s ‘non-submersible sequences’ – dramatic episodes within the main body of the film that serve as complete dramas within themselves while also serving as plot drivers. 

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare the two movies, but critics did so back in 1969 and it was inevitable: 2001 was still fresh in the mind when Doppelgänger received its theatrical release. But while Kubrick had spent years planning and filming his epic in meticulous detail, the Andersons were done in a couple of months. There is literally no comparison between the two, but the Andersons didn’t help their case with their shameless plagiarising of themes from 2001, which brings us to our next point:

c) It’s imitative. The Andersons would have been well advised to leave 2001 well alone: but not content with doing a boardroom drama in space, a ‘human drama’ and a straightforward space movie, they had to try and add a bit of Kubrick’s mystique. This, in practice, meant three sequences that were shamelessly inspired by 2001: a couple of psychedelic interludes, and a coda that depicts the leading actor as an elderly man.

The psychedelic sequences are probably the worst offenders: while Kubrick’s bizarre visuals are there to show his astronaunt travelling through an uncanny space phenomenon, the astronauts in Doppelgänger merely doze off for a few weeks. The resulting sequence is justified only in that it allowed Barry Gray to compose one of his finest music cues. But like so much else in the movie, it just bogs down the action.

At the end of 2001, in an inscrutable silent sequence, we see an aged Astronaut Bowman living in an elegant period bedroom. At the end of Doppelgänger, an elderly Jason Webb resides in a nursing home whose interior decorator was probably the same one emplpyed by the monolith intelligence of 2001. It’s so pat, it’s laughable, but as I mentioned earlier, it provides the only reasonable explanation for all the implausible things that have been happening for the previous ninety minutes. If 2001 was the Beatles, then Doppelgänger was the Rutles...

d) Pacing. No one could claim that 2001 is a ‘pacey’ movie – its tone is sedate, langourous, even, but all the time there’s a palpable sense of development, of a story and an idea that is going somewhere. Doppelgänger, on the other hand, dwells far too long on the business of launching the Sunprobe rocket, a sequence which seems to be there only to let the audience know how much the Andersons knew about real life space missions. They’d already committed the same error with Thunderbirds Are Go!, although in the earlier movie, the protracted launch sequence served as a bed for the opening credits. Doppelgänger could easily have spent more time on characterisation and story if there had been less emphasis on the hardware. Admittedly, it’s good hardware, and the effects are some of Derek Meddings’ best efforts – it’s just not enough to save the rest of the film.

e) It does nothing with its own idea. One of the severest criticisms of Doppelgänger is that it fails to explore its own central conceit. The idea of a duplicate Earth where everyone and everything exists in a mirror twin of our own world is frankly about the worst thing Gerry Anderson ever came up with, but having decided to run with it, he should really have thought harder, and done a better job of selling it to the audience. Nothing in science can explain it away, which leaves us in the realm of the mystical – but the film doesn’t go there either, until the risible coda where again the Andersons try to make off with some of Kubrick’s enigma. They simply can’t pull off the heist.

Having said all this, Doppelgänger is still a watchable piece of escapist nonsense, distinguished by fantastic space hardware and elevated above its B-movie status by some decent actors doing their best with a lousy script. As long as you can accept it as such, and expect nothing more from it than a long, off-topic episode of UFO, you’ll be fine.

The big, big problem with the movie is that it couldn’t help trying to be 2001. The closest the Andersons would get to Kubrick’s vision of the future came a few years later with Space:1999 (which managed to sneakily borrow Clavius base from 2001 to do duty as Moonbase Alpha – not to mention the Discovery probe as an alien spaceship). But while Space:1999 managed to pull off some of the asethetics of 2001, it missed its aim whenever the writers tried for enigmatic obscurity, which they did on far too many occasions.

Revisiting 2001 for the purpose of this piece, it occurred to me that it’s probably unfair to judge any other piece of film making against it. Kubrick’s masterpiece is much more than just a science fiction film – it’s an artistic statement, unparalleled in the annals of movie making. It set the bar impossibly high for everyone who followed, and no one has bettered it yet. They probably never will. It was the Andersons’ bad luck to be some of the first off the block with another sci-fi epic when the world was still coming to terms with the phenomenon that was 2001.

It may seem unfair to even draw comparisons between the work of an auteur like Kubrick and a television director such as Gerry Anderson, whose only directing experience prior to Doppelgänger was with marionettes (we'll draw a veil over the lamentable Crossroads to Crime [1960]). The comparison would be irrelevant if the Andersons hadn't tried to co-opt so many of Kubrick's ideas into their own work. They were always on safer ground when aiming for originality, and both UFO and Space:1999 would make considerable advances on Doppelgänger. If this goes to prove anything, it is simply the old maxim: know your strengths. Sadly, Gerry Anderson never did, and never truly appreciated the unique asethetic of his own work. It's easy to say he should have stuck with puppets. But it's also true.