It's 1959. The film opens with a man in a space suit, Guy, (Kingsley) wearing a helmet with no face plate. He's alone in a tiny dark flight deck, strapped into his chair, and he's talking or shouting into a radio that keeps befouling his contact with his friend Larry back at the space station in Britain. There's something wrong with the ship. He's not sure what but the power keeps cutting in and out, like his radio, and his fuel is low and his oxygen down to 6 percent.
That's it. That's the whole movie -- one man in a space ship. The others are all voices, except for the twist ending that takes place within the surly bonds of earth. What a Twilight Zone episode this would have been.
Someone mentioned a stiff upper lip, but it must have belonged to someone else, or perhaps Guy left it back in England, because most of the time he's hysterical, sweating and stuttering with fear. "Larry! LARRY! Come IN, Larry!" Larry's friendly, reassuring voice fades into silence. Later, a Russian calls him and demands to know what Guy Taylor is doing in Russian air space. The Russians order him to exit Soviet air space at one, or else. "Get some sleep," says the Russian. Another long period of radio silence, during which Guy talks to himself, dreams about his loving wife Lotte, whose static-ridden voice appears for a few seconds on the radio, and he bangs senselessly on the instrument panel, which emits a series of irritated sparks.
Finally, the Americans call him. Like the Russians, the CIA knows all about his background. The CIA agent on the radio isn't particularly concerned about Guy's lack of oxygen. The CIA wants to know why he was talking to the Russians before. The agent shouts at Guy: "Don't you know we are all at WAR with the Russians?" When Guy demurs, the agent asks bluntly, "Are you a Commie?" At length they turn Guy over to an expert at Houston who curtly gives Guy explicit directions that will bring him down in the Atlantic Ocean, a spot where the US had already has a ship that will pick him up.
Then there is that shocking and improbable ending, which I don't think I'll go into.
There are no special effects to speak of. Few wondrous photos of the blue marble. And we get a glimpse of some unidentified white metal of his ship, Hermes, from the outside, but only a glimpse, and only an unidentified part, shifting and creaking ominously. We never see another face. There's just Guy, sweating, snapping at recalcitrant radio spooks, and thinking about home and Lotte.
It drags quite a bit at the beginning, before the Russians come on the air. There's at least half an hour of Guy chatting with Larry or despooling with worry or changing one magical module in the flight panel for another. But it's tense. I was about to switch channels when I convinced myself that there MUST be more to it than Guy suffering one annoyance after another. And of course there was. But -- an hour and a half? It would have made a fine episode on Twilight Zone.
