Operation Ganymed seems to be sort of a cheap ripoff of Planet of the Apes. The premise and approach are basically the same. What it's missing is the adventure. And the excitement. Not to mention Charlton Heston and Roddy MacDowell. I'm sorry, but when you have Dieter Laser and Jürgen Prochnow doing a half-remake of Planet of the Apes it's ok to leave the apes out as long as you replace them with something else - and I'd have recommended dancing Godzillas for this, or maybe they could have imported the monster from DNA or the Chinese cat weasels from WING COMMANDER. There should have been SOMETHING in this movie.
I do have a synopsis of this story now, but here's what it's like watching the thing without a synopsis. And probably with, for that matter:
A bunch of guys are in a spaceship forever. Eventually you figure out they must be having a problem, even though it's hard to tell because nobody in the movie gets very excited about it. Finally they land in the ocean next to someplace that's hot, and is nothing but rocks. They walk over the rocks. An hour into the movie they find an abandoned village where Jürgen says dirty words in Russian and they figure out from a newspaper and a map that they're somewhere around Mexico or California. Dieter Laser has been hiding some canisters that contain water samples from whatever planet they just returned from, and everybody else is very upset about that, but we don't know why because after Dieter's secret is out nobody drinks his stash of water.
Then they walk through the desert some more, find an airplane, and one of the guys kills Jürgen by breaking his neck with a ladder. (For those of you keeping track, death by ladder is definitely a new one.) The guy who kills him gets killed with signal flares. Then one of the other crewmen cannibalizes one of the dead bodies but we don't know which. I doubt it was Jürgen, though. It would have made more sense to eat the other guy since he was already partly cooked from the signal flares.
The cannibal dies. Another guy dies. Then the only one left is Dieter, who has the last of many annoying flashbacks/fantasies/hallucinations before finding a village with people in it. The end.
Well... it turns out that the point to all this is philosophy, not adventure. These guys are late getting back from an interplanetary expedition and have come home to the results of a nuclear war on Earth. Dieter's water samples contain life, and the samples were very precious to him but I'm sure not as precious as the life on Earth that's been destroyed in his absence, yadda yadda yadda. I dunno... I think if you want to make a point like that you should do it in an essay with a 9-word title, not in a purported science fiction movie. Not when the movie doesn't offer anything else, like, you know, maybe some fun, or a sandworm like they had in DUNE. Planet of the Apes made pretty much the same point about the fragility of civilization, but you get cool monkey suits and a few chase scenes with that one. Just watching 5 guys stagger around for an hour and a half with their lips peeling off doesn't quite cut it in the entertainment department.
I was rather pleased to discover that Dieter Laser can act, though. I'd only seen him in The Man Inside, so I didn't know.
Jürgen says dirty words in Russian!
Yeah, well, as much Russian as I DON'T remember any more (which would pretty much be all of it), I still know 'govno' when I hear it.
Funny, you weren't too pleased with Ganymed! OK, it is not a great film, but nice enough. Jürgen's part was a good one , which fit him well: the rather quiet cosmonaut Ossorkin, who only says something, when he has thought about beforehand. Doesn't he curse nicely in Russian? Besides that, the other actors do well too and the story is straightforward and well told.
No, I wouldn't call Operation Ganymed a BAD movie; I just look for a little more stimulation from something that has a sci-fi premise to it. Okay, a LOT more. I did like all the actors in it and enjoyed Jürgen's performance. He's always very good in those understated roles.