Invention for Destruction (the Czech's Guide to American Movies) (Patreon)

At various points in Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction, the future history of special-effects filmmaking flashes through in a blaze of visionary glory. An underwater encounter with a shark presages Jaws. A volcano lair appears nine years before You Only Live Twice. Terry Gilliam’s entire aesthetic has a blueprint in Invention for Destruction. That the Czech film industry’s most successful and enduring work would send shockwaves across global cinema should reassure everyone invested in this weird little subculture.

Karel Zeman is not one of the finest storytellers in world cinema, but he’s one of the most visually distinctive filmmakers to ever live. No other movie looks like Invention for Destruction, which is a ravishing bricolage of Victorian line engravings, forced perspective, matte tapestries, and stop-motion. The only recent movie to even slightly resemble its curated hyper-unreality is Barbie, but even Greta Gerwig doesn’t hew to artifice to quite the degree Zeman does.

Invention for Destruction loosely interprets the works of Jules Verne, with a surreal sort of anachronistic faithfulness. Doing this in 1950s Czechoslovakia is a strange choice. Verne was a Parisian fabulist who exuberantly chronicled science in the age of Darwin. Invention for Destruction materialized in 1958, three years after the Soviet Union dropped its first hydrogen bomb. To revive Verne with such scrupulous fidelity is, to say the least, wildly retro.

And yet the results simply do not resemble anything in the cinematic past. Invention for Destruction recreates the line engravings of Verne illustrators Édouard Riou and Léon Benett in lavish detail. And it looks incredibly weird — even George Méliès, Zeman’s closest antecedent, couldn’t have envisioned Invention for Destruction’s melding of his painted glass techniques with contemporary montage editing. You have ships and primeval aircrafts that are flagrantly wooden cutouts against fake waves. Stop motion mice scuttle across inserted paintings made with hard rubber rollers. The actors are performing in a determinedly anachronistic, anti-realist style. Even among Czech movies, this thing is an anomaly.

Karel Zeman is credited as both set designer and director. His pioneering of Mystimation is something Terry Gilliam has spent his career replicating. The storytelling is the visual style itself — and unlike Journey to the Beginning of Time, which is fairly pedestrian outside of its dinosaurs, Invention for Destruction is so defined by its visual style that it simply cannot become boring.

The result is frankly better than any Ray Harryhausen movie. Zeman plays with notions of nuclear war, the horror of technocracy, and — I shit you not — venture capitalist explorers raiding the deep sea to steal treasures from shipwrecks, decades before the Titanic was found. It’s remarkably prescient in a way many special effects movies of its era aren’t. Invention for Destruction suffers from front-loading its most exhilarating spectacles, meaning that the minimalist plot takes over a bit in the back half, but one can only fault it so much. This is a treat to watch, and if it’s not quite one of the best Czech movies, that only speaks to how good Daisies and The Cremator are.