Despite fears that he will die trying, Professor Pavel Ivanovich Sedikh (Sergei Komarov) insists on making his planned trip to the moon. He enlists a number of uniformed children (whom he refers to as "Young Astronauts"*; the film was promoted by the 'All-Union Leninist Young Communist League') to distract Professor Karin (Vasili Kovrigin), director of the 'The Moscow Institute for Interplanetary Travel', boards the 'rocket-plane' with his assistant Marina (Mariona Ksenia Moskalenko), and youthful stowaway Andryusha (Vassili Gaponenko), and the three of them take off for the Moon. The film is very imaginative and realistic (for the times). In preparation the extreme acceleration of take-off, the crew are immersed in tanks of water, and they experience zero-gravity when the engines are shut-off and reduced lunar gravity when they land (allowing them to make prodigious leaps when not wearing their heavy metal moon-boots). The special effects are outstanding, especially the long tracking shots of the two rockets in their massive hangers. The great streamlined and finned spaceships are visions straight from the covers of vintage 'Amazing Stories' magazines and the intricately detailed miniatures are amazing: the gantries are endless complexes of iron beams, tiny vehicles move back forth in the shadows of the colossal rockets, and there is even the occasional movement of the miniscule workers. The scenes on the moon blend realism and surrealism with the tiny stop-motion explorers leaping across the lunar surface and the shot of Earth rising above the lunar crater prefigures one of the most famous images from the 'real' space-age. Not surprisingly, there is some geopolitical subtext to the film. The two rockets are named for prominent Soviet leaders Josef Stalin and Klim Voroshilov and the letters "CCCP" shine from the lunar surface as the astronauts signal their success to Earthbound observers (they also plant a flag but (realistically) it does not unfurl). In contrast to the often doctrinaire and joyless Soviet-era cinema, 'Cosmic Voyage' is a fun film with a number of whimsical scenes as the astronauts cavort in the weightless spaceship or occasionally summersault through the air as the jump around on the moon (apparently, such frivolousness got the film supressed by dour Soviet censors for a couple of decades). The film makes an excellent companion piece to Lang's 'Woman on the Moon' (1929), another outstanding pre-WWII silent 'hard' science fiction movie. Well worth watching for any science fiction or early cinema fan and the various commentaries/reviews that can be found on-line are quite interesting. *According to the translation in the version I watched on YouTube