Earth II

Everyone is talking about how EARTH II was ahead of its time with special effects, scientific imaginings, and the like. I was, however, a little more down to earth. The people who worked up this film did not have their feet on the ground.

Here's the premise: An international project sends up a huge space station and populates it with about a hundred people from various nations. The USSR is represented but not China - because the Chinese had a bad attitude about it. Instantly the US President (Lew Ayres) tells the inmates of this space station that they are now a new and independent nation, he (evidently without the advice and consent of Congress) is recognizing it as a new nation and he's going to have the UN make it a member state. This is absurd on a number of levels include any business about the exchange of ambassadors.

Additionally, the technology pretty much does their thinking for them. In a ship-wide video discussion of a crucial problem of international relations, the ship's computers analyze each person's argument and put subtitles on the screen with disparaging labels about their contribution -- e.g. "Appeal to authority".

Apart from this, the interesting stuff (the special effects) is about a Chinese nuclear satellite that is being used to the homelands of the inmates of this space station.

So, comic book logic, impressive special effects.