Don’t underestimate the significance of Czech science-fiction — the word “robot” is a Czech invention, coined by author Karel Čapek for his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). Four years later, Čapek published the novel Krakatit, a prescient cautionary tale about a scientist who creates a seismic explosive and realizes just how hellish its impact on mankind will be. A film adaptation was produced over 20 years later, when Czech director Otakar Vávra used the precarity of post-war Europe to influence his paranoid, hallucinogenic style — making Krakatit a genre hybrid that speaks to the subversive and disquieting arrival of the atomic age.
In his essay about Czechoslovak sci-fi, Martin Šrajer puts Krakatit in conversation with “the trend of post-war skeptically-oriented” films in the genre, including The Day the Earth Stood Still, Godzilla, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But the noirish nuclear pessimism also makes Krakatit a precursor to Kiss Me Deadly, an American noir film from 1955 that later influenced David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Now available on 4K Blu-ray through Deaf Crocodile Films, Krakatit can be your sci-fi discovery of the year.
