Aelita, the Queen of Mars is a Socialist science fiction spectacle and in 1924 was the first big-budget movie from Soviet Russia. A year and a half in the making, it was intended as ideologically correct mass entertainment which could compete both in Russia and abroad with the Hollywood films that dominated Soviet and world screens while also earning plaudits for artistic innovation such as had greeted The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and other German expressionist films.

Los, an engineer living in Moscow who dreams of Aelita, the Queen of Mars, builds a spaceship to take him to her. They fall in love, but Los soon finds himself embroiled in a proletarian uprising to establish a Martian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.