Though the main focus of the story are the daily lives of a small group of people during the post-civil war Soviet Russia, the film's enduring importance comes from its early sci-fi elements.

It primarily tells of an engineer Mstislav Sergeyevich Los (Russian: Лось) traveling to Mars in a rocket ship, where he leads a popular uprising against the ruling group of Elders, with the support of Queen Aelita who has fallen in love with him after watching him through a telescope.

They live in a society where aristocrats rule over slaves who are confined underground and put into cold storage when not required.

Los's wife Natasha (Valentina Kuindzhi) is pestered by Erlikh (Pavel Pol), a bourgeois playboy before the revolution who is now a dishonest minor official.

Los continues to daydream: he imagines that Aelita has access to a telescope by which she can see people on Earth and has become attracted to him.

Disguising himself as Spiridonov with a wig, false beard and glasses, he goes into hiding and makes a plan to escape to Mars in a rocketship he has been constructing.

[3] One of the earliest full-length films about space travel, the most notable segment remains its remarkable constructivist Martian sets by Isaac Rabinovich and Victor Simov and costumes designed by Aleksandra Ekster.

[4] Their influence can be seen in a number of later films, including the Flash Gordon serials and probably Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Woman in the Moon and the more recent Liquid Sky.

[5] J. Hoberman of The Village Voice wrote that the 1960 American film Beyond the Time Barrier "suggests an impoverished remake" of Aelita.

[7] Frederik Pohl noted that the sole Soviet space film worthy of Aelita appeared half a century later: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.