After hearing cosmonaut Andrei (Boris Borisenko) sing love song about space flight to fellow cosmonaut Tanya (Larisa Gordeichik), aliens from the planet Centuria decide to send a delegation to Earth. Their starship crash-lands on Mars but at the last minute releases an emergency beacon that informs Earth of the disaster. After some discussion of the possible alien motives for coming to Earth, a rescue ship (the 'Ocean') is dispatched, crewed by Tanya, Paul (A. Genesin) and Vasily (Peeter Kard). The Earth ship is damaged by a solar storm and lands on Mars but cannot takeoff. The crew locate the downed alien starship and a single dead crewmember but surmise that the rest of the crew had escaped in an emergency pod and are stranded somewhere on Mars. A second ship (the 'Meteor'), crewed by Ivan Batalov (Otar Koberidze) and Andrei is despatched from Earth. The Meteor can get to Mars quickly but doesn't carry enough fuel to land, so the ship touches down on Phobos and launches surveillance satellites to search for the aliens. Ivan discovers that the alien escape pod is not on Mars but rather on Phobos and rescues a female alien, the only survivor. The Meteor's escape craft, which Ivan and Andrei had planned on taking to Mars to link up with the Ocean's crew, can only hold two people, so Andrei volunteers to stay behind: a death sentence as the Meteor lacks the fuel to take off. Despite landing in a massive Martian dust-storm, Ivan and the unconscious alien make it to the Ocean to await rescue from Earth. The final scenes are images of the alien woman being triumphantly broadcast to Earth, followed by a cryptic sequence with Andrei and Tanya on Earth and a TASS broadcast stating that the Ocean is on its way to Mars, suggesting that the Martian adventure and death of Andrei may have all been in Tanya's imagination. The film is visually imaginative, especially the opening images on the alien planet, which resemble the covers of 1960's science fiction paperbacks, and the scenes on Mars and Phobos are excellent. The 'science' in the film is an odd mix of hard and fanciful: the aliens on Centuria hear recent music from Earth but later a reference is made to a five minute time delay in radio signals from Mars to Earth, gravity on the Ocean seems to come and go, and that old sci-fi trope of meals in a pill is trotted out (one pill equals one lamb-chop). For a cold-war era film, 'Mechte navstrechu' is not overly political but the rescue ship is manned exclusively by Russians with space helmets are emblazoned 'CCCP, (despite the emphasis is placed that the emergency message was sent to Earth as a whole), and "Professor Laungton", who is suspicious the alien's motives, may be a dig at 'paranoid Americans'. The film is an odd mix of hard science (with spectacular and expensive visuals), a mawkish love story, and incongruous banter and 'flirting' amongst the cosmonauts when they are undertaking a dangerous and incredibly important mission. The films seems disjointed, which may be due to poorly translated subtitles (a reporter asks why only two people are going to Mars in a ship that holds three (hinting that room is being left for the alien), yet when the Ocean departs, there are three crew members). Another possibility is that all (or some) or the events are in Tanya's imagination. This would obviate the need for logic and continuity, but reduce an otherwise excellent space opera to a juvenile 'it was just a dream' romantic fantasy. If the special effects look familiar, it may because Roger Corman and his crew of recyclers at AIP used them to backdrop a ridiculous story about a green space-vampire-queen with a striking bouffant in 'Queen of Blood' (1966).
