Otkrytyy kosmos

A partly dramatised documentary this film is made of four 55-minute episodes. It does have an educational value as it gives some good background info on many things: people, spacecraft, technology, science.

What makes this movie stand out is it goes all they way back to the pioneers of space flight: Tsyolkovsky and then Hermann Oberth (although it fails to mention Goddard). Also, it covers pretty much every flight from the first R-7 test flight to the launch of Sputnik, through to the flights of Gagarin, Titov, and all other subsequent early soviet space flights. It depicts in quite interesting details the flight of Voskhod 2 and Leonov's historic spacewalk. It is also quite well balanced in telling presenting facts about the space race than most of Russian documentaries on the subject.

The film uses some archive footage, but mostly lots of low quality computer graphics. Particularly horrible was Leonov's almost cartoon-like first spacewalk and that of Apollo 11 moonwalk. There is an iconic archive footage of Leonov's spacewalk and Neil's footage on the Moon and they never show those.

In many ways it copies a typical American Discovery channel style of documentary with drawn schematics, on-screen biographies and ridiculously sensationalist voice, which gives an impression it is aimed at retarded audience. To add to that, the narrator's voice in this one was hoarse and terrible.

In general, it is much better made and more accurate in terms of facts a documentary about the Russian, mostly manned, space exploration history than, for instance, the Russian series "Our Space" (2011), which came out at the same time. This one is a good refresher of those historic events, especially of the early space flight. Worth a look.