Good concept, poorly executed.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

I have seen many bad films but it is hard to remember any which equaled this one. The film has very little if anything going for it. Like other parts of the film the beginning of the film wasn't needed. There is little continuity to the scenes. It will be a real struggle for even the most die-hard film lover to get through this monstrosity. It lasts two and a half hours long and is horribly written. The film tries to be poetic but the script is stilted and the story line becomes constantly disjointed. (The fact there is one-fourth of the film which was never shot doesn't help matters.) In place of lost scenes viewers will see modern shots of life on Earth as the director narrates what the missing scenes would have looked like. The acting is overdone and is laughable if it weren't for the fact they are trying to be serious. I get the idea that the actors were allowed to ad-lib their lines which go on for an inordinate amount of time. I'll do my own ad-libbing right now which will give you an idea of what is in store:A rainbow is like a light never reaching its essence. It is the light of life that glows that way. Life is that way everyday in the morning. I like the morning it gives me a feeling of freshness. Feeling fresh I can see the light.Yes it is that bad. As previously stated the film has several scenes which should have been cut or not used as they add nothing to the storyline. The lighting is very dark and shot with a blue filter to the point that fire looks green. The soundtrack (or lack thereof) will also make you question the director's ability to bring a coherent story to the screen. The only joy I experienced while watching came after the two hour mark when I knew it was almost over.

I suspect this may be a kind of fake. It's all that remains of a film whose production was stopped in the middle: a science fiction film that, to judge from this paste-up, might have been something like Stalker done in the style of Weekend. Unfortunately, the sequences that were never shot included virtually all of the science fiction and most of the action, so that two-thirds of what's left concentrates on three people trekking through barren landscapes and going crazy into the camera, as in Blair Witch Project. I found it difficult to track the progress of their degeneration, which all seemed very much the same. Based on this, I'm not surprised the Polish film bureaucrats canceled the production, only that it took them as long as it did. Now the extant footage has been edited into what the DVD case calls a reconstruction. But is it really? Or is it a new construction using the old materials? What made me begin to suspect this was that throughout the film, while the director summarizes the unshot sequences in voice-over, the screen shows what seem to be outtakes, but the last of them closes on a shot of the director, taken contemporaneously. So were the other interpolated sequences shot then or forty years ago? And if forty years ago, were they to have gone in where we see them or elsewhere, and as we see them or in some other form? Or were they just scrap? Much of the rest consists of long tracking shots of scenery, which also look like outtakes. And the film is edited in a style now fashionable--with series of multiple cuts on the same angle, a few seconds apart--which I don't remember being the fashion forty years ago. This made me wonder whether the director had cut the film as he would today, rather than as he would have back when. I also wonder whether he had done so partly to disguise the incompleteness of the available material. And where did the music come from? If the film was never finished, it can never have been scored; and to me the music sounds new, too. So all in all I don't know how to judge the "reconstruction" on the basis of what it was to have been because I don't know how much I'm seeing of that. If the gaps could have been bridged with staged readings of the missing portions of the script, maybe read by the surviving actors, the film might come together into something; as it is, it seems to be little more than what another, better known film was deliberately intended as and named for: ashes of time.

first off, the copy of the film that i was able to track down, was in polish with a very difficult to follow English voice-over narration/dubbing that spoke everyone's lines. Yet, despite the tedious dubbing issue and the frustrating image quality on the bootleg i tracked down, the wonderfully unsettling lunacy of the whole affair was able to shine through and really hit home for me.One earlier reviewer, in an attempt to discredit the film, described the actors' performances as similar to the ramblings of mental patients. I thought about it a bit, and concluded that, yes, all of the performances did have an element of hysteria and frenzy that someone might attribute to psychotics, but for me, thats part of what made the picture so extraordinarily unsettling (in the best way). The point-of-view style of camera-work and delivery that carried the first half of the film was really unnerving. The entire thing had a dizzying sense of madness that threatened to crumble at almost any moment, but managed to hold together long enough (around 3 hours) to hit you with the savage power of its staggering ending.It had more going for it than simply being "crazy" though, as i felt it also offered a fascinating look at the cyclical nature of human civilization, and perhaps more so, the ultimate hopelessness of it. It is a terrifyingly bleak film.if you can track down a copy of it, and feel as though you can handle the often tedious viewing experience, its definitely worth it. There's nothing else out there quite like it.

This film is as far from Hollywood style as Poland is.There are some impressive ideas in the movie (like some surreal scenery) but unfortunately everything else is a total scrap.Film was shot on East-German ORWO film of deplorable quality giving it a look worse than amateur 16mm shots. Sentences are completely absurd - you are lucky if you do not understand polish ! Acting reminds mad mumbling of psychiatric clinic patients....I was a small kid when I fist learned about this production - it was in 1978, they were taking some shoots in Cracow where I lived. I was a fan of SF, watching then Space 1999, Star Wars and Japanese films about Godzilla. So obviously I was very excited about this SF production taking place in my city. Then there were no knows about the movie. Ten years later it was show on Polish TV - I was angry, because it disappointed me totally.It is "unwatchable" !