Column Science Fiction Film Club Aelita: An Ambitious Dream of Bringing the Revolution to Mars A wild, messy blend of politics, artistry, and propaganda By Kali Wallace | Published on November 19, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Aelita (1924). Directed by Yakov Protazanov. Written by Fedor Ozep and Aleksei Fajko, based on the novel of the same name by Aleksey Tolstoy. Starring Nikolai Tseretelli, Yuliya Solntseva, and Valentina Kuindzhi. About halfway through watching this movie, I began to text a friend with increasingly bewildered updates about what was happening on screen. My friend did not ask for these updates and probably wasn’t interested, although they were very tolerant of my play-by-play. I just really needed somebody to understand how often I was staring at the screen and thinking, “What the fuck? No, really. What?” I don’t think I mean that in a bad way. I’m pretty sure I don’t. I think I enjoyed watching Aelita, at least as much as anybody can enjoy watching a two-hour Soviet silent movie from 1924 in which a man wants to build a spaceship from Mars and… You know what, we’ll get to the plot in a moment. I definitely enjoyed the exquisitely artistic costume and set design of the Martian scenes, and I never lost interest in what would happen next, even though I was missing a lot of context for the domestic and political convolutions of the Earth-bound scenes. Aelita is loosely based on a novel, but only some of the movie’s story comes from the source material. The short novel Aelita, or The Decline of Mars was published in 1923 by Russian author Aleksey (or Alexei) Tolstoy. (He was in fact related to Leo Tolstoy, but distantly and a bit scandalously: Aleksey’s mother was married to a count in the Tolstoy family, but she ran off with another man, who raised Aleksey as his own son until mother and son sued to have the count legitimize him when he was in his teens.) The novel is about an engineer who travels to Mars with a soldier companion, where they discover that the planet is inhabited by descendants from Atlantis who live in a rigidly stratified society, with the ruling class enjoying the surface and the worker class toiling underground. If that sounds familiar, well, you’re not wrong, and we’ll get to the link between Aelita and Metropolis (1927) below. In the novel, the engineer and soldier encourage a workers’ revolution on Mars, but the revolution is defeated and they flee back to Earth. The film keeps the plot of the novel more or less intact, but it wraps the story up in a whole lot more, adding subplots about domestic infidelity, bureaucratic corruption, criminal investigation, cross-dressing to sneak about a spaceship, and murder. Well, sort of murder, but not really. It’s complicated. To understand how all of that fits together, we have to look at the context in which the film was made. So let’s travel back to Russia in 1923. It was a tumultuous time, to say the least. Six years earlier, the people of Russia overthrew their monarchy in two successive revolutions in 1917; the first led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, while the second was when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government that had been formed following the abdication. This, in turn, led to years of civil war; then severe drought struck in 1921, leading to widespread famine and the deaths of millions due to starvation and disease. The Russian Civil War ended in 1922 with the formation of the one-party Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with Lenin as its first head of government. Historians still debate exactly how many people died during the war, but many estimate it was around ten million. When it was over, the newly formed Soviet Union was in economic shambles, with intense food rationing, a widespread black market, ubiquitous bureaucratic corruption, and waves of outward emigration as people left the country. Aelita begins in Moscow in 1921, but most of the story takes place several months later, in the immediate aftermath of the civil war. That’s the context that surrounds the whole story, even when it isn’t apparent onscreen to our modern, non-Soviet eyes. It would have been implicitly understood to audiences watching in theaters in 1924. Another important thing to note is that in 1924, film production happened under the watchful eye of the new Soviet government’s People’s Commissariat for Education. Many cinemas and production studios were still technically independent businesses, but they were in the process of being nationalized and censored. In January of 1922, Lenin issued two “Directives on the Film Business,” in which he states that every film-showing program should include both an entertainment film (“of course, without obscenity and counter-revolution”) and a propaganda film demonstrating how bad life is in other countries (“…such as: Britain’s colonial policy in India, the work of the League of Nations, the starving Berliners, etc., etc.”). The studio that produced Aelita was the Russian-German company Mezhrabprom-Rus, which is an abbreviation of the full Russian name that means International Workers Relief Studio. The name gives a pretty good indication of what the studio was trying to do: encourage communist workers’ revolutions worldwide through the power of cinema. As I mentioned back when I wrote about Metropolis, this was also a period of intense artistic experimentation in film, especially in Germany. The artform was still fairly young—it had been not quite thirty years since the first public film screening, and not quite twenty since the production of the first feature-length film—and filmmakers were exploring ways the medium could be used to tell bigger, flashier, and more appealing stories. That’s what the folks at Mezhrabprom-Rus set out to do with Aelita. Their goal from the start was to make a big impression, to create the kind of movie that could compete with films from around the world, because the Russia-based film industry didn’t have a movie like that yet. With a pile of money injected from the German part of the company, Mezhrabprom-Rus called on Yakov Protazanov, one of the founding fathers of Russian cinema, to direct Aelita. Protazanov was a wildly prolific and admired filmmaker, but he’d actually left Russian during the civil war and spent a few years making movies in France and Germany instead. The offer from Mezhrabprom-Rus is what brought him back, and Aelita was his first film after his return. So we have a novella about a failed workers’ revolution on Mars, in the hands of a director who had established his reputation making realist dramas based on the works of Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy, in a political environment where movies were pressured by governmental edict to be explicitly in favor of communist revolution while also making a great deal of capitalist money, and to somehow do so without criticizing the hardship of the post-war years nor alienating the audiences who were living that hardship every day. It is, in retrospect, not really surprising that Aelita turned out to be a bit of an ideological and philosophical muddle. It is a bit surprising that the movie makes any sense at all—so far as it does, which is a matter of debate. The film opens in 1921, when all around the world radio stations receive a mysterious message. When somebody jokes that the message might come from Mars, an engineer named Los (Nikolai Tseretelli) becomes obsessed with this possibility. He decides he has to build a ship and go to Mars and find out. Another bit of historical context, because we love historical context: In 1921, only about fifteen years had passed since the first long-distance audio radio transmissions. But filmmakers hadn’t waited that long to start imagining radio transmissions from Mars. The 1913 British film A Message From Mars has Martians pulling the old A Christmas Carol trick on a rich man to convince him to mend his miserly ways. That film was based on a 1903 short film of the same name from New Zealand, which in turn was based on a 1899 play by Richard Ganthony, but in the original play the Martian visits in his dreams. One thing about humans is that we’re always going to be imagining visitors from other realms showing up to tell rich men not to be such assholes. Back in Moscow, nobody can decipher the mysterious message, but life goes on. Los and his wife, Natasha (Valentina Kuindzhi), become neighbors with the obnoxious Erlich (Pavel Pol), a former businessman who mourns the pre-revolution days when he was wealthy and pampered and could order servants around at will. Erlich works alongside Natasha at what the subtitles call a “checkpoint,” which seems to be a sort of clearinghouse for things like medical care, housing, and food rations in the aftermath of the war. The choice of this setting is not subtle, for it allows the movie to highlight the difference between diligent, incorruptible Natasha and deceitful, corrupt Erlich, who steals food rations and tries to seduce married women and spends all his free time scheming and partying. The investigator looking into the corruption (played by Igor Ilyinsky) suspects Erlich’s friend Spiridonov of the crime. Spiridonov is played by Nikolai Tseretelli in glasses and a fake beard, for reasons that eventually become apparent but are honestly a bit silly. While all of this is going on, we also get a glimpse into what’s happening on Mars. Aelita (Yuliya Solntseva) is the queen of Mars, but she doesn’t seem to have any real power; that is all in the hands of Tuskub (Konstantin Eggert), who rules over a rigidly divided Martian society where the wealthy live on the surface and the workers live underground and are sometimes frozen and put into cold storage. One of Tuskub’s men, Gol (Yuri Zavadsky), has built a powerful telescope through which he can see life on other planets. Tuskub doesn’t want his people to know about this, but with the help of her servant, Ikhoshka (Aleksandra Peregonets), who is wearing the coolest pants of all time, Aelita persuades Gol to let her have a peek. She becomes enamored of watching life on Earth, particularly when she watches Los kiss Natasha. Martians, it seems, do not know what kissing is. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Los observes Erlich hitting on his wife, but instead of asking Natasha what’s going on he decides to have a breakdown about it. After he is sent away for several months to rebuild the nation—literally, he’s working on constructing a power plant—he returns and is convinced that Natasha and Elrich are having an affair. Los draws a gun and shoots Natasha, which comes out of nowhere and is the point at which I began sending my friend bewildered “wtf?” messages. Now it’s time to imagine me taking a big, fortifying breath before I run through the rest of this plot… okay, here we go. Natasha dies, and Los attends her funeral disguised as Spiridonov, not because he wants to mourn the wife he just murdered, but because he wants a chance to retrieve the plans for his Martian spaceship from where Spiridonov has hidden them in the fireplace. Los’ plan to evade capture is to go to Mars—which he does, with a Red Army soldier named Gusev (Nikolay Batalov) along for the ride. Gusev is, he says, so very bored now that all the fighting is done, but his wife doesn’t want him to go to Mars, so he has to disguise himself in women’s clothes to get to the ship. They are well on their way before either of them realizes the investigator who is looking into Elrich’s corruption and Natasha’s murder has stowed aboard, although he doesn’t seem to know where they are going. They arrive on Mars, where the investigator tries to have the Martian guards arrest Los (who he thinks is Spiridonov), and Los begins romancing Aelita, and Aelita has her maid kill Gol. When the maid is taken to the underground prison camp, Gusev goes with her and gives a rousing speech inciting the workers to rebellion. It works, and the workers rise up and overthrow Tuskub, but Aelita turns around, takes control of the army, and has them drive the revolutionaries back underground. Gusev isn’t surprised—he knew a queen would not lead a revolution—but Los is horrified. He’s also confused, because now Aelita looks like Natasha. Los pushes her off the stairs and to her death. Then he wakes up. More accurately, he snaps out of his delusion. He’s back on Earth. He’s never been to Mars, because there was never a message from Mars. The mysterious radio signal was a garbled advertisement from a tire company. But he did, apparently, think the message was from Mars, and he did try to build a spaceship. It’s not immediately clear to me where reality ended and the delusion began. I don’t think he actually shot at Natasha, but it’s possible he did. Either way, the movie thinks the fact that he didn’t harm her—he only daydreamed about it—is reason enough for them to be romantically reconciled at the end. Elrich is arrested for theft, and everybody else can get back to the very important business of nation-building. I feel like looking for a coherent message in Aelita is an exercise in frustration, even though it’s the type of movie that feels like it wants to say a lot of things: Pay attention to the work that needs doing in your own nation rather than daydreaming about escape to other lands—never mind that Los is very much working as an engineer and seems to doing his job just fine, even while he’s daydreaming about Mars. Spread the message of the workers’ revolution to the downtrodden everywhere—never mind that Gusev’s Martian revolution fails. A rigidly stratified society like the one on Mars needs to keep its people from seeing and hearing about other societies in order for the ruling class to maintain power—but that doesn’t end up mattering in the end. It’s all quite a mess, which makes sense considering it consists of a short sci fi novella padded out with the elements that the filmmakers thought would make for mainstream dramatic cinematic success. Alas, Aelita would not end up being that first global success for Soviet cinema. In spite of having a large budget, a lengthy production process, and an extensive advertising campaign, it never gained the attention of international film fans, largely because the Soviet government denied a petition to export it. The honor of drawing serious international attention to Soviet cinema belongs to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), which became successful in other countries before it was even distributed in the Soviet Union. However, Aelita did eventually earn a place in sci fi movie history for an entirely different reason: the scenes on Mars look so unbelievably cool. They look so cool, and the credit for that belongs to three people: set designers Viktor Simov and Isak Rabinovich, and costume designer Alexandra Exter. All three of them created a vision of Mars strongly tied to both the German expressionists that we met when we watched Metropolis and to the constructivist art movement that was spearheaded by Russian artists Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko during WWI. Constructivism incorporated abstract, geometrical, simplified, and highly symbolic imagery to convey the notion of an austere, industrialized society that has done away with the ornamentation and excesses of classical Western European art and architecture. That all sounds very high-minded, but I promise you have seen Soviet constructivist art before. Quite a lot of Soviet state imagery is constructivist in style, and a lot of what we think of today as early twentieth-century avant-garde or abstract art is working in the same vein. See, for example, Rodchenko’s poster advertisement for a Soviet state airline or Varvara Stepanova’s poster for promoting literacy or Gustav Klutsis’ Oppressed Peoples of the Whole World. Turning a political movement in art and architecture into an otherworldly film setting meant building a set made of an abundance of geometric shapes and sharp lines. What we see of Mars is all sweeping staircases, blade-like pillars, and arched walkways. The doors fold and unfold like fans. There is no softness in the design. The Martians do not have cushions, not even on their thrones. The overall effect is cold, unwelcoming, full of hard surfaces and harsh shadows, and absolutely fascinating. Alexandra Exter’s costumes only emphasize the glorious strangeness of the setting. Exter takes the very same rigid, geometrical forms of the setting and translates them into clothing. Aelita’s headdress radiates rigid spokes and her dress is made up of a series of circles and spirals; her maid’s amazing pants compress like parts of a machine every time the young woman bends her legs; the Martian soldiers wear armor that make them look like the mechanized versions of Roman centurions. Exter was a renowned artist whose striking work remains valuable and admired today. She left the Soviet Union to live in Paris and pal about with Pablo Picasso and Getrude Stein shortly after finishing work on Aelita. A century later, her costume designs are still the most memorable and recognizable thing about the film, and it’s very easy to see why. Now, a lot of people see similarities between Aelita and Metropolis, particularly in some elements of costume design. Some articles claim that Aelita was a direct inspiration, while others are a bit more cautious in making the connection, but it’s all speculation. It’s possible that Fritz Lang saw Aelita when it was distributed in Germany, and there was a period when Lang and Protazanov were probably moving in the same filmmaking circles, but there is no direct evidence that Lang was aware of Aelita. What we do know is that Aelita did not influence other Soviet filmmakers, at least not obviously or immediately, because it was too far removed from the grounded social realism favored in the young Soviet Union. It did fairly well with audiences at first, but it faded pretty quickly, and Protazanov went back to making realist comedies and dramas. He died in 1945 with nearly 80 films to his name. Aelita sank into the background of cinema history, largely inaccessible for many decades, but never fully vanishing from memory. A 1929 review in The New York Times says of Aelita, “This film is far more interesting to read about than to gaze upon.” Even though I find the Martian scenes very interesting to gaze upon, I can’t really argue with that review. Aelita is a curious part of cinema history. The film doesn’t quite work as a whole, but the insight it provides into the context in which it was made and the bursts of artistry that went into it make it worth watching. What do you think about Aelita and this glimpse of early Soviet sci fi cinema? Who among you is going to cosplay Aelita and her servant? Next week we’re off for Thanksgiving, but the week after that we’ll be back with Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M. Watch it on Amazon or Indieflix. It’s also not hard to find if you poke around the internet in all the usual places.[end-mark] The post <i>Aelita</i>: An Ambitious Dream of Bringing the Revolution to Mars appeared first on Reactor.