Gagarin: First in Space

Yuri Gagarin and the historic, first manned mission into outer space are celebrated in this glossy tribute to an unassuming hero. The focus of Pavel Parkhomenko's film is the events of 12 April 1961 but it also yo-yos back and forth to other episodes in Gagarin's life: his impoverished childhood under Nazi occupation, his relationship with wife Valentina, training as a pilot and the preparations to become one of Russia's first cosmonauts. Yaroslav Zhalnin plays Gagarin as an easy-going everyman, but one whose ambition to be chosen for the Vostok mission to orbit the Earth not only pits him against fellow hopeful Gherman Titov (Vadim Michman) but also causes consternation in his own family. Some of the dialogue may be stilted and the flashbacks a little jumbled, but the flying sequences are well executed and the period detail neatly captures the early days of the Russian space programme in all their primitive, low-tech glory. It may lack the scale and ambition of The Right Stuff, which catalogued American attempts to win the space race, but this feature offers a revealing flip side to those events, telling the story from the other side of the Iron Curtain.