Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes

In the far flung future of the twenty first century, space-faring has lost its appeal. With everyone on Earth living comfortably and content, mapping the cosmos has fallen to the armies of criminals being tugged about in space freighters so massive that their interiors can believably take on the demeanour of sunken, Soviet infrastructure. Director Piotr Szulkin's Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes follows one such expedition, undertaken by Daniel Olbrychski's Scope, a prisoner with very little interest in committing crimes who, when pushed to detail his preferred mania, describes himself only as recalcitrant. Packed into a malfunctioning spacecraft and fired off into the void, this political dissident lands, seemingly by design, on a dark, snow-tracked planet called Australia 458. This Antipodean satellite, that Scope is instructed to claim for mankind, has not only already been visited by humanity but so long colonised that the people stranded there have fallen into the mouldering destitution of a dependent state. 

There are signs that money was spent here at one point: the hotel Scope stays in has high ceilings and a certain amount of ornamentation but such ostentation has long been defeated by sodden cigarettes and taps that dribble sewage. As well as coalescing around a wintery, one-horse town, Australia 458's inhabitants have become obsessed with rotting digits as a delicacy and televised, ceremonial execution. Scope is intended to figure into the latter, one-third of a trio of ritual sacrifices with obvious, Christian overtones. Scope is selected to pay the part of one of the thieves crucified at Christ's side; encouraged to indulge in any and every crime; and issued with a teenage sex worker to help him on his way. Rather than lower himself (like the impenitent thief racing around 458 fucking and shooting everybody he sets eyes on), Scope prefers to bend the rules in an attempt to work a variety of gimcrack miracles. It's not that Scope is particularly Godly then - he spends the majority of the film chasing after Katarzyna Figura's pointedly underage escort - but Glory to the Heroes does make a point about societies that are too busy re-enacting the pageantry of a barbaric past to notice when a potential candidate has wandered into their midst.