I finally managed a track down a copy of this film after looking for it forever. And not only did it live up to expectations, it surpassed them in every way possible! I had no idea what to expect from a Polish sci-fi film from the 70ies and the first thing I noticed were the lavish costumes, extremely impressive sets and great make-up. If someone would attempt to pull off something similar in the US today it would cost insane amounts of money. This is a film by Adrzej Zulawski so it figures that there is a lot of philosophical dialog and religious metaphors aplenty. In a way I was reminded of the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky and maybe if he had made his adaptation of DUNE, as he planned for many years, it would have turned out to be something like THE SILVER GLOBE. The copy of the film I watched was taped from the German TV station 3 Sat who actually paid for subtitling the film in German! The rather poor picture quality only stressed the otherworldly beauty of the images. Often the film felt like a transmission from another time or maybe even another planet. It is a truly unique gem, even in it's unfinished form, and a film that is overdue for rediscovery.

Maybe if mankind was given a completely new slate on a different planet, starting civilization over again, it would still end up in the darkness of ignorance, superstition, and warfare. Maybe man lives in an absurd condition, forever groping, and the oppressively dark visuals in the film and the delirious raving of its characters mirror that. I don't know. I just could never connect with this, though I really wanted to like it, and appreciate the struggle director Andrzej Zulawski had in making it (the ending scene of him in a window reflection is truly heartfelt). On the other hand, the way the voiceover bits over periods of lost footage was done, showing things like regular people taking an escalator, was pretty amateurish, and the only real points he scored with me were for some of the visuals in the final half hour.

The plot to this film is far too obscure, without a lot of connective tissue in between characters chaotically raving on in religious mania. Seriously, the script is 98% sheer gibberish. There's lots of shrieking, lots of madness, and lots of emotional excess - and no rationality or introspection of any kind to balance it out even a bit. The commentary seems to be in the raving itself, as opposed to what anyone is actually saying, and it's a pretty dark, nihilistic view. Just following the characters or what rituals they're going on about is tough, and the film has an incredible denseness to it that made it very hard to endure for 157 minutes. When it ended, I was relieved that what amounted to a torture session was over.

The film looks really intriguing so I was excited to watch it. It definitely wasn't the experience I was hoping for.

I have to admit I basically understood nothing of what was going on. The plot is already complex, and when you add in the attempt to reconstruct the missing scenes using voiceover, it becomes pretty much impossible to follow the story.

As it stands this seems to be more of a curiosity than an actual film.