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An overwhelming, frequently disorienting film, party by design, partly by circumstance... The finished product is, by the filmmaker's admission, disjointed and incomplete, yet what's there is so astonishing and downright scary that one can easily accept the film on its own terms. Indeed the shambolic structure adds to GLOBE's effectiveness as a fever dream, as one's mind constantly races to assemble to disparate pieces.

The film is alive with the wild energy of its director determined to create a work that is both totally unique and absolutely, solely his vision. Within this extremely intense, sometimes baffling but always fascinating fable, Żuławski explores the struggle between an inherent, unique identity, and the self as defined by the outside world and others.

The team responsible for the new digital restoration conceived of it as the third moment in the completion of On the Silver Globe, returning the film's colour scheme to the original intentions of the filmmakers. The success of this venture is open to examination, but in any case, the radiantly delirious quality of the film remains thankfully unimpinged by the digital makeover.

Even out of time, even incomplete, even now that its director is gone for good, "On The Silver Globe" endures and its beautiful power will never dim. Should anyone ever want to understand how this mess we call modern life came to be, one could do worse than to watch this movie. More simply, as my fellow RogerEbert.com writer Glenn Kenny said to me when the credits started to roll at the press screening, "It's everything, isn't it?" And then some.

The film is loaded with grandiose questions, specifically revolving around notions of: what does it mean to enforce an organized religion? an organized society? Most akin to Aleksei German's last film, Hard to Be a God, On the Silver Globe boldly attacks totalitarianism and radical institution as pure apocalypse. Perhaps, in the context of the venomous state of current events, both here and abroad, it is the perfect time to reevaluate this masterwork of impending unpredictable doom.

Space travel and pagan rituals converge with the ruins of modern warfare and the dawn of civilization in Andrzej Zulawski's ecstatic, image-drunk science-fiction fantasy, which he filmed in the mid-nineteen-seventies and completed in 1987. It's among the most visually extravagant films ever made.

Jean-Luc Godard subtitled his 1967 feature Weekend "a film lost in the cosmos." But if there's any film that truly deserves that title, it's On the Silver Globe, a philosophical epic of science fiction cinema by Polish director Andrzej Zuławski. On the Silver Globe is the prime film maudit in the oeuvre of a director who pretty much specialized in films maudits... As it stands, it's an extraordinary film.

...None of those films quite hit that atmosphere of political violence inherent in On the Silver Globe. It's a film that wears all of its history and imperfections at the end of its raggedy sleeve. Like Żuławski himself, it's brutally honest about the state of human affairs.

The film remains a singular cinematic experience, challenged only a quarter-century later by Aleksei German's posthumous Hard to Be a God (2013): it's a monumental adventure of astronauts marooned on the barren moon (key location: Gobi Desert), but really an immersion in the coming and going of an entire civilization in all its aspects. It is essentially indescribable, but as a heady tour de force it may be the ecstatic epitome of Zulawskian mise en scène.

However maimed, the movie is all the more fascinating for its incompleteness... On the Silver Globe presents itself both as a narrative and an essay upon its own making. Plot gaps are filled with non-narrative footage that varies from static nature shots to frenzied zipping through the streets of contemporary Warsaw and Kraków—all overlaid with Żuławski's own voice, dryly synopsizing unfilmed sections of the script. The effect is nothing less than haunting.

It's all but unwatchable, far as I'm concerned—bad actors wandering barren landscapes in ridiculous costumes, gesticulating wildly for no reason. It's as if the shittiest Planet of the Apes sequel from the '70s fucked the Zion sequences from The Matrix Retarded and gave birth to some mutant population of nonsense-spouting quasi-primitive cretins.

Mr. Zulawski's masterpiece... As always, Mr. Zulawski is an inspired orchestrator of tumult; the rabid crowd scenes in this primordial pageant might have been played by the Living Theater at its acid-ripped height. "On the Silver Globe" is outsider art on a huge scale.