The influences are obvious in Signale: Ein Weltraumabenteuer (Signals: A Space Adventure), a big-budget sci-fi actioner that’s higher on chat than actual action but was popular in the Eastern Bloc when it came out in 1970. A co-production between the German Democratic Republic and Poland, it takes its cues from Star Trek and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with its informal multi-racial crews, silent spaceships gliding through the solar system and its fascination with weightlessness.
As the film opens the spaceship Ikaros is being bombarded by meteorites. Devastation. Everyone on board dead, or that’s the official line at any rate. One man isn’t so sure. Veikko, captain of the spaceship Laika, decides to head out into deep space on a rescue mission, without telling his crew what he’s up to.
Who names a ship Ikaros (ie Icarus, the figure from Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun and died)? Or Laika for that matter. She was the first animal into space, in Sputnik 2 in 1957, and also perished (shortly after lift-off). The names are either some sort of elaborate joke or are there to instil foreboding.
The plot, such as it is, is bare bones. Eventually there will be a signal – as the title suggests – and it will appear that Veikko’s faith is justified. He is the very Captain Kirk repository of optimism and humanity in this film, though William Shatner never had to contend with the sort of plot digressions that Piotr Pawlowski has to put up with here.
In fact more attention is focused on Konrad (Alfred Müller), a folksy mix of Star Trek’s Scotty and Bones – worldly, genial, technically adept, older than the rest of the crew and less good looking. Talking of which, Pawel (Evgeniy Zharikov) and Terry (Gojko Mitić), two handsome cosmonauts, to provide some eye candy and do some of the other dramatic work.
Money has been spent, starting with the decision to shoot on 70mm, which captures the lavish sets with pin-sharp clarity. Technically they are superb. That obsession with the technical is, sadly, reflected in the plot, which labours over procedural space stuff to little dramatic advantage. The training of rookie astronaut Juana (Irena Karel) in spacewalking and piloting a spaceship, for example, is long-winded and nowhere near as fascinating as it’s meant to be.
The film also feels like a tickbox exercise in getting all the sort of stuff audiences might expect onto the screen – robots come on stage right and then leave stage right, having done nothing at all. Computers speak. Spaceships wheel in space. People experience zero gravity and float about doing not very much at all. We’re on the bridge. We’re in a corridor. We’re going weightless again. And so on.
Occasionally there is a bizarre cutaway to the ship’s crew having some R&R time back on Earth, and suddenly we’re in the middle of what looks like a beach-party movie, the women in bikinis and the men doing handstands to capture their attention. Very colourful, super groovy.
Karl-Ernst Sasse’s synthy soundtrack is rather lovely and the cinematography by Otto Hanisch is very swishy. Technically, it can’t be faulted and at that level there is a lot to like.
It does look very spiffy, especially on Blu-ray in the 6K (whoof!) restoration by the DEFA Foundation, which can be found on a two-disc box (along with In the Dust of the Stars, also directed by Gottfried Kolditz) by Deaf Crocodile in the USA and a four-disc set called Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction from DEFA (from the same restoration) from Eureka in the UK. It contains Signals, In the Dust of the Stars, The Silent Star and Eolomea. A great place to start if you want to know more about sci-fi from the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Signals: A Space Adventure – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
