MOSCOW, Jul. 8, 1979 (AP) -- The Soviet newspaper Izvestia says foes of the SALT II arms limitation treaty are taking their fight to American moviegoers through thinly veiled anti-Soviet innuendo in the science-fiction spectacular Battlestar Galactica.
The government newspaper charged over the weekend that the outer-space epic -- as well as other U.S. films and TV shows -- was rife with hidden ideological messages amounting to "propaganda of mass anti-Soviet psychosis."
"Their spirit is the spirit of the Cold War," wrote Melor Sturua, a veteran U.S.-based correspondent for Izvestia who often reports on American lifestyles and popular culture.
Sturua said Hollywood movie companies were enmeshed in a tight web of interests with big Wall Street banks and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
His vitriolic 2,400-word dispatch reflected the increasingly strident tone the government-controlled Soviet press has been taking in recent weeks toward American opponents of the SALT pact, signed last month in Vienna.
Debate on the strategic arms limitation accord is set to begin this week in the Senate, where the treaty must win a two-thirds majority for ratification.
Sturua said that after a local movie review had piqued his curiosity about Battlestar Galactica, he went to see it.
While the film's cosmic struggle unfolds "everything around you rattles and shakes," Sturua told Soviet readers.
He said the matinee audience, mostly children, "withstood it very well. I noticed only a couple of cases of hysteria, which ended in tears and removal of the children from the hall."
The movie's plot pits a united space civilization of humans against a society of robot beings called the Cylon.
"The galactical negotiations between the people and the Cylon really resembled the U.S.-Soviet SALT talks -- not in their actual form, but in the perverted interpretation of the enemies of the treaty from the family of Washington hawks," Sturua wrote.
"The crafty Cylons, similar to the 'crafty Soviets,' propose to the president of the galactical union something like space detente," he wrote.
The galactical union's armed forces commander tries to warn that the Cylon "don't want peace but only a pause to prepare a knockout blow that they'll deliver as a first strike."
Nonetheless, "the president categorically refused to believe his commander and in spite of his warnings signs a pact with the Cylons," who subsequently launch a devastating surprise attack on the United States of Galactica.
Sturua conceded it was "just plain naive" to search for any direct parallels with reality.
But, "far more important," the Soviet correspondent wrote, "is the spirit, the inspiration of films of the 'Battlestar Galactica' type. Their inspiration is the pumping-up of military anti-Soviet hysteria, which in this case is disguised in the modern costume of socio-scientific fantasy."
"The fact that modern American cinematography prefers Cold War is not just a coincidence -- and the film 'Battlestar Galactica' isn't the only example of (Hollywood's connection with Wall Street and the military-industrial complex)," he wrote.
― roc u like a § (ex machina), Wednesday, 10 January 2007 19:11 (eighteen years ago)