1979: STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE

What’s it about?

After being retired from command for several years, Admiral Kirk returns to take control of the bridge of the Enterprise, displacing young Captain Decker. The occasion of Kirk’s return is the appearance of a powerful alien ship heading straight for Earth and destroying everything in its path. But dealing with the threat means getting the old team back together -- especially Dr McCoy and Spock, both of whom have deactivated from Starfleet in the years since Kirk’s last tour.

Once the gang is all in place, the Enterprise approaches the alien ship and narrowly survives the first encounter by correctly identifying and replying to a hail. They then proceed inside the enormous cloud of accreted gas and laser-light shows that engulfs the alien ship, and slowly approach the center. When one of the Enterprise’s crewmen is kidnapped by the alien and then returned as an exact mechanical duplicate, they begin to learn some of the intentions of the alien. But even though the robot mouthpiece allows communication, the safety of Earth is not assured.

Is it any good?

I will admit that for many years I subscribed to the popular evens/odds theory of STAR TREK movies. Even-numbered movies were supposed to be good, while odd-numbered movies were supposed to be bad. As the first in the series, STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE was an odd-numbered movie, so the conventional wisdom held that it wasn’t all that good.

It’s been a long time since I really believed in that old theory though. The first crack was a sneaking suspicion that STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK might actually be better than STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME. Later, I found myself very much enjoying the ninth installment, STAR TREK: INSURRECTION, while being pretty disappointed with the tenth, STAR TREK: NEMESIS. It’s obviously a lot to ask that a silly rule apply across a movie series with eleven installments and counting -- but I still hear references to it to this day among fans of the movies.

In any event, I haven’t seen STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE since the days when I really did believe in that evens/odds theory. I’m sure the slowness of the movie helped vindicate it for me at the time. The plot doesn’t really get going until about an hour into the movie, and even then there are still a lot of deliberately paced interludes of impressive (but very lengthy) effects shots. It’s a slow movie -- there’s no doubt about it -- and the STAR TREK of this movie isn’t quite the same as either the original series that came before, or the other movies and television shows that came after.

Watching this movie again, I was struck by the number of things that were changed or improved or updated from the show. There was a new Enterprise, new uniforms, new music, new Klingons, new special effects for transporters and photon torpedoes, and a new Earth-centric approach to storylines. At the beginning of the movie, there’s even a new haircut for Spock. A lot of the slow pace of the early parts of the movie can probably be attributed to the need to introduce all this new stuff. It had been a decade since the original series went off the air, so I suppose the producers felt that the fans deserved a good long look at the Enterprise in spacedock. And then another. And another. And one last one just to make sure.

The tone of the movie is fairly serious as well. It has neither the cheesy unintentional camp of the original series, or the playful intentional camp of the later movies. Kirk is a pretty interesting character -- it’s clear that he’s muscled his way into the command of the Enterprise, and Captain Decker is none too pleased to find himself demoted. Even though the crew feel more comfortable with Kirk at the helm, it’s easy to agree with Decker’s assessment that Kirk is simply using the crisis as an excuse to get back in the captain’s chair of his old starship -- and it does seem quite likely that it won’t be so easy to get him back out again.

The story (once it kicks into gear) is pretty exciting too. The alien comes from a machine planet and is looking for its “creator” on Earth. It initially wants to establish contact with the Enterprise itself, believing the human crew is an infestation of destructive parasites. When it eventually kills a prominent crew member and replaces her with an android copy to serve as a communication interface with the humans, it’s a genuinely shocking moment. The android -- being an exact mechanical copy of the dead crew member -- retains memories of those onboard the Enterprise, which makes for some interesting relations and tensions.

The special effects are very good as well. Extremely good, in fact, considering that the movie was released in 1979. They aren't especially ground-breaking or even original in any way, but they are all very good. If FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) felt like movies ahead of their times, then STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE feels just about exactly right for its times. Science-fiction cinema at the end of the 1970s included such flicks as LOGAN’S RUN (1976), STAR WARS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), SUPERMAN and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (1978), and ALIEN and THE BLACK HOLE (1979). Outer space adventures and sci-fi spectacles were becoming fairly common, and STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE fits right in with all those other movies.

I ended up really enjoying this movie -- much more than I thought I would. The slow pace actually adds to the epic feel of it all. Any movie that’s almost two and a half hours long is something that is endured as much as it is enjoyed, so it can't help but feel important. It’s possibly not even going too far to say that STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE captures some of the grandeur of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic. (Well, maybe that is going too far. But it’s close anyway!) I think that grandeur is important here, since otherwise it might start to feel too much like an extended episode of the old series. After all, unlike the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA movie, this isn’t an origin story. Instead, it’s more of a late elegy for an old television show long past its heyday, and it could have very easily come off as irrelevant or unnecessary -- just another reunion show that’s good for a bit of amusement and not much else.

But everything in STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE works against that feeling. Everything is upgraded from the original series. The Klingons are barely even in the movie at all, for instance, but their make-up and spaceships are vastly improved from their 1960s incarnations. The seeds of the Klingon language were planted here as well, but they wouldn’t be fully developed until later movies. But attention has been paid to every detail and nothing is thoughtlessly retained the way it was simply because the fans would recognize it that way.

I like this intermediary iteration of STAR TREK a lot. It has epic scope and sweep and a high level of detail and polish, but it’s not saddled by decades of mythology. In fact, there’s a sense of exciting new possibilities watching this movie. There are tantalizing glimpses at Vulcan lore and Klingon culture, but nothing that locks down a single future direction for the series. It’s more like STAR TREK has been taken down from the art gallery where it hung for fifteen years, cleaned, restored, and fitted in a new frame -- and now we can see much more clearly some of the previously obscured details and corners. The movie doesn’t reinvent STAR TREK, but it clarifies and focuses it.

Before I go, I should certainly say a word about Robert Wise, the director. He got his start with Val Lewton’s horror unit at RKO in the 1940s, directing CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE and THE BODYSNATCHER -- two of the better movies in the bunch. He later went on to direct musical classics like WEST SIDE STORY and THE SOUND OF MUSIC, but he returned periodically to weirder fare. In addition to STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, he also directed THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951) and THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1971). Three sci-fi movies out of an entire career doesn’t make Robert Wise a “sci-fi director” (whatever that might mean), but it certainly seems he’s sympathetic to the genre.

1973: FANTASTIC PLANET

What’s it about?

On an alien planet, a race of blue-skinned, semi-reptilian giants called “Traags” treat tiny humans (or “Oms”) as both pets and pests. One young Traag girl in particular finds a wild Om baby whose mother has just been killed. The Traag girl takes the Om home as a pet, and he grows up as a tortured plaything. However, he is also able to listen in on the automatic lessons intended for the Traag girl, and so becomes a highly educated Om.

Eventually, the Om boy escapes and falls in with a colony of wild Oms living in a park. Their life is rough but tenable -- at least until the Traags recommence their regular program to cull the wild Om pests. While fighting back, the Oms kill one of the Traags, which only makes things worse. Led by the educated boy, the only hope for Om survival is to steal Traag rocket technology so they can escape the planet once and for all.




Is it any good?

Oddly, some of the most difficult movies to write about are the ones that are the most unique. FANTASTIC PLANET is the earliest animated sci-fi feature film that I’m aware of, but I have to assume that by 1973 that there were plenty of Saturday morning sci-fi cartoon shows. And, if nothing else, there were certainly Marvin the Martian and Duck Dodgers shorts. But as far as feature films go -- and feature films presumably for adults -- there seem to be hardly any before FANTASTIC PLANET.

It also doesn’t help that the animation of FANTASTIC PLANET doesn’t look much like any other cartoons I’m familiar with. The prevailing style for at least the past seventy years has been dominated by the bright colors and clear lines of the Disney or Warner Bros. cartoons. There are exceptions, of course -- such as Terry Gilliam’s animation work for the various Monty Python projects around this same time. FANTASTIC PLANET, with its stiff compositions and pencil shading, is another.

The pace and structure of the movie doesn’t quite follow the sci-fi norm either. The movie is constructed out of many vignettes of varying importance -- many of them simply document the changing seasons (though they are very weird seasons) or other natural phenomenon on the alien planet. FANTASTIC PLANET has at times almost a neorealist feel to it -- as though it’s meandering through unremarkable incidents in unremarkable lives. This is a pretty unusual way to approach science fiction, though not necessarily totally unique. In retrospect, THE SEED OF MAN (1969) seemed to be doing a similar thing at times -- if I’d realized it at the time, I might have enjoyed that one more.




But FANTASTIC PLANET is not actually a neorealist movie. I’m not even sure that the philosophical underpinnings of neorealism can survive their application to animation or science fiction (let alone both together), and I can’t imagine that anybody involved with the movie was even trying to really do that. The episodic vignettes soon coalesce into a true story -- though only a small handful of characters are ever really developed.

Ultimately, FANTASTIC PLANET is more concerned with its dreamy, savage atmosphere than it is with anything else. The world it paints is one that is full of casual brutality and sudden danger -- at least for the diminutive Oms, both “wild” and “tame”. This is also one of those sci-fi stories which seems to have some kind of obvious message, but which also eludes any attempt at real allegory once you start trying to pin it down. Putting humans near the bottom of the food chain certainly inverts our usual expectations of how things should work, but the film doesn’t seem to be trying to say anything particular about that.

But whether this movie is good or not seems completely beside the point. It is totally distinctive, and is certainly worth seeing simply to have the experience. I can’t even say that it’s especially crazy shocking or anything like that. But I can say that the first and (until now) last time I saw any part of FANTASTIC PLANET was on a fuzzy independent UHF channel about fifteen years ago, and I remembered far more scenes and moments than I expected when I watched it again for this project. It may not have blown my teenaged mind, but it definitely burrowed deep inside and stuck there.




What else happened this year?

-- An unpopular low-level party official and Ivan the Terrible trade places in IVAN VASILIEVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE, a Soviet time-travel farce.
-- THE HOLY MOUNTAIN is really more grotesque magical realism, but it has some hilarious satirical sci-fi bits in the middle.
-- George Romero takes a break from zombies to direct THE CRAZIES, in which a contaminant causes otherwise ordinary people to go crazy and start attacking their friends, family, and neighbors.
-- In IDAHO TRANSFER, a group of college kids accidentally discover time travel and then decide to colonize the not-so-distant future after they realize an ecological disaster is going to ravage the planet. Peter Fonda directs.
-- Michael Crichton directed WESTWORLD, in which Yul Brynner’s merciless cowboy robot goes berserk in a Wild West theme park and starts hunting the guests.
-- Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson star in the dystopian detective thriller SOYLENT GREEN. Even though everybody knows the twist already, it’s still an amazing flick.
-- SLEEPER is the only Woody Allen sci-fi movie that I’m aware of. Allen plays a twentieth century man unfrozen in the future who then disguises himself as a robot to get along, but he seems more interested in making it a silent movie-inspired farce than anything else.
-- BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES wraps up the series with a story about the early days of ape and human coexistence after the nuclear war that ravages Earth.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1973...

SOYLENT GREEN is far and away my favorite from this year, but FANTASTIC PLANET is well worth seeing as well.

1964: ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS

What’s it about?

An errant meteor forces a spaceship orbiting Mars into evasive maneuvers that bring it dangerously close to the red planet’s surface. Unable to pull out of the descent, the crew eject in two separate escape pods, but only one astronaut and one monkey survive the landing. On the surface, the astronaut faces a quick succession of life-or-death challenges: staying warm during the cold Martian nights, replenishing his fast-dwindling air supply, and discovering a source of water and food.

Assisted by a healthy dose of dumb luck, the astronaut manages to solve most of the problems of basic survival. But he soon realizes that his biggest challenge will be reconciling himself to the possibility that he will be stranded forever alone on a dead planet with no companion except the monkey. Just as he is starting to crack under the strain of isolation, he discovers evidence that he may not so entirely alone as he imagined. The sudden arrival of a runaway alien slave provides the astronaut with the companionship he seeks -- but differences in cultures and the return of the alien captors create unexpected problems.




Is it any good?

A movie about an astronaut struggling to survive on the real Mars would be short, grim, and all too predictable. But luckily for ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS, there were very few hard facts known about conditions on the surface of Mars back in 1964. So even though the astronaut and his monkey have things pretty rough, they at least have a fighting chance to survive. Nights are cold, but not instantly deadly. Air is thin, but can be breathed for fifteen minutes at a time. Water and edible plant life are scarce, but not entirely absent.

But even though the first half of the movie is devoted to the question of basic survival, this is not really a movie about a man overcoming a hostile environment on his ingenuity alone. The astronaut does use his brain to solve a few problems, but the deciding factor is really that the bare necessities of life are all available right at hand. Most convenient of all, an apparently very common yellow rock not only burns like coal (providing heat for those freezing nights) but releases life-saving oxygen in the process. Meanwhile, water and food are not necessarily easy to find, but a smarter man would have figured out the key to locating them after just a couple days on the surface.




But for better or for worse, there’s more to the movie than a simple survival story. In the second half, the astronaut discovers that alien visitors use disposable slave labor to extract minerals from Mars. One such slave escapes, joins up with the astronaut, and becomes a sort of “man Friday” for the space age. It’s a little hard to figure out exactly what the movie is trying to say about the Friday character. He looks, dresses, and talks like an American Indian (though his hairstyle is ancient Egyptian) and has practically no alien characteristics despite hailing from a different star system. It briefly seems as though the escaped slave is not going to be satisfied meekly playing the Friday role -- he remains perfectly mute and aloof for days, then refuses to respond to the astronaut’s attempts to teach him English or to give him a new name. But before long he’s caved on all fronts and is speaking broken English and responding to the name Friday.

The survival bits at the beginning of ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS are pretty good, and even the arrival of the modern Friday turns out to be more interesting than expected. But the end of the movie takes a sharp turn towards the silly and the predictable when the aliens come looking for the fugitive slave. (Why? The slaves are disposable anyway -- why care if one survives instead of dying with the rest?) The alien spaceships do a lot of really boring blasting of the Martian surface, and the two friends do some slightly less boring fleeing to the north pole. But up to the last twenty minutes or so, the movie is really pretty interesting. And it’s worth noting that Adam West and his amazing voice have an all-too-brief role early in the picture as well.




What else happened this year?

-- THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON is one of the better movies to feature Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion special effects. Besides awesome alien monsters, it also delivers much of the same humor and excitement that the H.G. Wells novel does.
-- No one really ever needs to see SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS, but a snowy December evening could be worse spent. It obviously requires a high tolerance (and preferably affection) for low budget film making, but it has enough weirdness to please. The only missed opportunity is a climactic robot/polar bear fight that is teased but never materializes.
-- HERCULES AGAINST THE MOONMEN delivers both the ancient Greek strongman and several different monstrous bad guys (some, as promised, from the moon). It’s diverting enough as long as you ignore the usual shortcomings.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1964...

This was a weak year for sci-fi flicks -- thus the pathetic list above -- but THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON is really pretty great.

1960: THE SILENT STAR

What’s it about?

A newly discovered alien artifact linked to the Tunguska meteorite explosion of 1908 appears to be a recording in an unknown language from an exploded spaceship. Although enough of the recording is deciphered to determine that the spaceship originated in Venus, most of the message remains a mystery -- and Venus itself stays strangely silent despite repeated attempts at contacting the inhabitants by radio. A multinational expedition is quickly mounted, incorporating crew members from all the great countries of the Earth: the Soviet Union, East Germany, the United States, Japan, China, India, Poland, and of course the nation of Africa.

While en route to Venus, the scientists continue trying to decipher the remainder of the alien message while dodging the usual perils of space travel (i.e., incredibly boring meteor storms). It’s only once the rocket has moved beyond radio range with Earth that they realize the message was not intended for humans at all -- instead, it’s a report on the feasibility of an invasion of Earth. Several decades have passed since the recording was made, so the crew decides to press on with their mission and make peace with Venus if a threat still exists. Attempts to contact the planet still yield no results and even in orbit the thick cloud cover makes it impossible to see the surface, so the crew decides to land and contact the inhabitants of Venus in person.




Is it any good?

THE SILENT STAR is very much like a socialist version of DESTINATION MOON (1950) or FLIGHT TO MARS (1951) -- much of the movie is taken up by the mounting of the interplanetary expedition and the resulting trip through space. The intervening ten years have made a bit of a difference, however. Although the rocket is still an impractically cavernous movie rocket, the details of the space voyage ring a little truer. The astronauts wear uniforms and spacesuits not too different from those that real cosmonauts wore, they eat liquified food, they rely largely on computers for navigation and control, and so on. On the other hand, those extra ten years also serve to emphasize just how creaky some of the plot contrivances of the space flight are. There is the usual meteor storm and the usual space walk to repair the damage, but THE SILENT STAR really seems to just be going through the paces as none of it is especially exciting or suspenseful or even important to the plot.

The sets, costumes, props, and sci-fi designs are all very nifty. Venus especially has a compellingly weird look, like a landscape illustration out of a Dr Seuss book. And the interior of the rocket itself probably has more in common with later spaceships like STAR TREK’s Enterprise than with the clunky submarine-inspired rockets of earlier sci-fi flicks. The music used over the opening credits was also very promising and raised my hopes for some weird sound design. It reminded me a little bit of the otherworldly score for PLANET OF THE APES, but unfortunately I can’t really say I noticed any music at all after the movie started. The action sequences also leave a lot to be desired. As soon as something ostensibly exciting starts happening, the special effects sputter out -- this is most obvious during the meteor storm when the cosmonauts are thrown about in high speed, so the sequence feels just a few bars of “Yakety Sax” away from a Benny Hill chase scene.




Another downfall of THE SILENT STAR is the dialogue. The movie starts with a long section of expository narration -- and, in fact, the exposition and explanation continues via news reports and character monologues for almost the first half hour. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima by the U.S. is also referenced repeatedly and figures in the back stories of two characters. (One is an American scientist who regrets he helped build the bomb. The other is a Japanese woman whose mother was killed in the attack on Hiroshima.) It does seem a little unsporting for the movie to pay lip service to multinational cooperation, but then also to continuously remind viewers that the U.S. is full of decadent war mongers. But then it’s a Soviet bloc production, so I’d probably be more disappointed if it didn’t have at least some party-approved propaganda. As far as the whole movie goes, I guess my final judgment is that there are a lot of “things to look at” in THE SILENT STAR (e.g., a super-computer, a chess-playing robot, some neat Venutian technology, a cool rocket), but not a whole lot else that is too interesting. The characters, the themes, the dialogue, and the action are all pretty simplistic. I’m not sorry I saw it, but it’s really more historically and culturally curious than enjoyable.

There is also an English-dubbed version of this movie which was released internationally in the sixties that goes by the name THE FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS. I watched about half an hour of that version as well, and though it’s essentially the same story, a lot of footage was cut from the beginning of the film. (Some characters also got new western-friendly nationalities -- for instance, the Polish robotics expert is French instead.) This not only removes most of the criticism of America, but also tightens up the pacing in that section. In the German-language version, much of the first half hour is facile politicking, and it’s really no loss to see it excised. But the English-language version also cuts much of the cosmonaut back stories as well. While most of that is no great loss either, there are some neat scenes that get lost (like one where two of the crew members take time to sit down in a field and appreciate the solidity of the Earth before blast off), as well as some really great mountain scenery that any cough drop commercial would kill for.




What else happened this year?

-- Roger Corman produced and directed the comedy/horror/sci-fi movie THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (emphasis on comedy) about a man-eating, talking potted plant named Audrey Jr. Though filmed in only two days on a minuscule budget, it eventually inspired a stage musical which had its own movie adaptation starring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin in 1986.
-- Taking place in an alternate timeline where Britain somehow leads the space race, THE MAN IN THE MOON follows the adventures of a normal guy who becomes the number one candidate for a trip to the moon thanks to his amazing ability to shrug off stress. Hijinks ensue, many of them involving astronaut training equipment of dubious utility.
-- The French sort-of-horror, sort-of-sci-fi flick EYES WITHOUT A FACE follows a monomaniacal doctor as he attempts to graft a new face on his disfigured daughter’s skull with the usual disastrous consequences.
-- Apparently alien telepathic children coexist uneasily with the rest of the inhabitants of a small English town in VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED. The movie is adapted from a John Wyndham novel called THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS.
-- Fritz Lang returned to one of his most diabolical characters in THE 1,000 EYES OF DR MABUSE. The ensuing Mabuse revival ran through the early sixties and made the telepathic hypnotist a villain on par with classic monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein. (But only in parts of Europe.)

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1960...

This is a tough one. I’d say that every movie in the list above (including THE SILENT STAR) is pretty good in its own way, but I don’t think that any of them are necessarily great. My advice would be to watch whichever one sounds most interesting to you, but if you just want an enjoyable sci-fi movie then I’d say go with either VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED or THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS.

BONUS BLOG -- 1958: I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE

What’s it about?

After leaving his bachelor party, a man has an encounter with a horrific alien on the road home. The alien imprisons him, assumes the man’s form, and is subsequently married to the man’s fiancee the next day. The new wife almost immediately notices the difference in her husband, but isn’t sure at first what to make of it. A year later, the situation comes to a crisis when the woman starts to worry both about her inability to get pregnant and her husband’s apparent penchant for killing animals. Following him one night, she discovers that he is reporting to an alien spaceship hidden on the outskirts of town.

The woman tries to convince others that her husband has been taken over by an alien being. At first afraid that others will think she’s crazy, she soon begins to realize the real danger is that others in town may also be aliens themselves -- including the police. Desperate to escape, she finds that all communication has been cut off with the outside world. After begging her doctor to investigate the site where the spaceship is hidden, she returns home and -- at her wits’ end -- confronts her husband with her suspicions.


Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller


Is it any good?

Somebody could probably take this premise and make a truly fantastic movie about the ways that people discover strange new truths about the people they marry. This is not that movie -- but it’s nevertheless a very interesting thriller with some neat sci-fi excitement and spookiness. But what really makes the movie interesting is how much of it is underplayed. There’s a generous helping of aliens and spaceships and ray guns, but there are also plenty of scenes where the husband merely appears to be irritable and secretive, and the wife uncertain and confused. Except for a brief moment when the husband vents his frustration with inhuman strength, it would be easy to believe that this was simply an ordinary young couple who were starting to feel the strain of married life.




Much like EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956), the alien invaders here have a sympathetic story to tell -- their women were all killed in a planetary cataclysm, and they need to find a way of mating with another planet’s women or else their race will die out. But also like that other movie, these alien bodysnatchers display moments of intense and off-handed cruelty -- as when the husband strangles the family dog, or when a cop casually executes a human who has learnt too much about his alien nature. The contrast makes for a great tension, especially since the actor who plays the husband is a pretty physically terrifying guy. He often looks on the verge of snapping, and it’s easy to understand why his wife is so afraid. The aliens also react differently to finding themselves in human bodies -- some are disgusted, others simply resigned, and others actually enjoy the experience. It probably wouldn’t take much to find some subtext about human reactions to marriage in all of that.

The final confrontation between alien and wife also reveals that the aliens are slowly becoming more human the longer they stay in their bodies. Unable to love or feel happiness at first, they begin to experience emotions by the end of the movie. So even as the humans begin to close in on the hidden spaceship, there are more and more reasons to be sympathetic towards the invaders. After all, the alien version of the husband is the one that we’ve known for almost the entire length of the movie. If the “real” husband is brought back, then he would be more of a stranger than the alien (at least to the audience). All in all, this is a pretty terrific movie and one that I would definitely recommend. The plot is obviously pretty similar to that of many other bodysnatcher movies, but the movie is just so compelling and intense that the familiar situation doesn’t seem trite or worn at all.

BONUS BLOG -- 1956: EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS

What’s it about?

A husband and wife working on a rocket project encounter a flying saucer while driving on a desert highway. Though they first assume it was merely an isolated fluke incident, they soon begin to realize that something is shooting down each of the satellites as quickly as they are put in orbit. Then, during their latest rocket launch, another flying saucer appears. Deciding to shoot first and ask questions later, security personnel at the launch site precipitate a conflict that leaves the facility in ruins with the husband and wife apparently the only survivors of the catastrophe.

In the aftermath of the destruction, an unlikely coincidence allows the survivors to decode a message from the outer space visitors demanding a meeting to discuss terms of peace. Although the government seems inclined to take the idea of flying saucers seriously, the bureaucracy moves too slowly to suit the two survivors. They contact the invaders on their own and are taken up in one of the flying saucers where they witness a display of destructive power. The visitors then issue an ultimatum -- the Earth must surrender within 56 days or else. (The “else” is not clearly explicated, but it seems to involve beams of energy that make things explode.) When the flying saucers return at the end of the period, they expect the Earth to give up without a fight. But the scientists have used the 56 day reprieve to build a new weapon which will level the playing field between man and invader.




Is it any good?

This is the second sci-fi collaboration between producer Charles Schneer and stop-motion special effects master Ray Harryhausen. The first was 1955's IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA, which is a pretty ho-hum giant monster movie about a radioactive octopus that gets a craving for the citizens of San Francisco. EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS is a big step up in terms of originality and excitement -- though it still doesn’t compare with the good times of the best Schneer/Harryhausen collaborations from the sixties.

One of the most admirable things about this movie is that it doesn’t avoid showing the spectacle of an all-out alien invasion -- something that’s more rare in sci-fi flicks than I would have suspected at the start of this project. With the obvious exception of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, most 1950s alien invasions involve aliens that either look almost exactly like humans or who assume human form to infiltrate and conquer from the inside. But here we get plenty of flying saucers, disintegrator rays, inhuman aliens, and a climactic full-scale attack on Washington, D.C. The best parts of the movie take place on the flying saucers, where the aliens and their human guests have a long conversation about the reasons for the invasion and the fate of the Earth. At times, the aliens are almost sympathetic -- but then they demonstrate a casual brutality that proves it’s really us or them.




The flying saucers are also some of the best looking ones I’ve ever seen. Ray Harryhausen’s living monsters have so much personality that I wasn’t really sure what he’d be able to do with a mechanical object that doesn’t have facial expressions or body language. But the effects of the saucers in flight are pretty great, even if the crumbling buildings look like they’re falling apart in slow motion. It’s disappointing that the aliens are people in suits (rather than Harryhausen effects), but they at least look fairly respectable. But as with so many sci-fi flicks from the time, the script is once again the weak point. It’s certainly not terrible and it stays pretty exciting almost entirely throughout, but there are some parts of it (such as the inexplicable 56-day window the invaders give Earth to prepare their defenses) that make no sense at all. The climactic battle is also a bit of a let-down, save for a few nice shots of flying saucers destroying famous Washington landmarks. To be honest, there is plenty you could laugh at here if that’s your kind of thing, but this one definitely delivers enough of the good stuff (like nifty special effects, weirdo alien technology, and overall excitement) to be better than your average 1950s B-movie.

1952: RED PLANET MARS

What’s it about?

A radio astronomer played by Peter Graves sends messages into space and receives responses that appear to be coming from Mars. Though they are at first unintelligible, he continues to work on a way of deciphering the messages from space despite periodic apocalyptic pronouncements from his wife (sample: "This will lead to our deaths!"). Meanwhile, a former Nazi scientist named Calder listens in on the American broadcasts and the Martian responses from a remote observatory in the Andes, and passes reports on the communications back to the Soviets.

When the messages are at last decoded and published, they cause pandemonium throughout the capitalist west. They indicate that the Martians are in possession of technology that would render the greater part of western industry obsolete. Afraid of causing further panic, the president is about to order the communications stopped when suddenly the messages change and begin to take on a decidedly religious tone instead. These messages in turn spark a popular uprising behind the Iron Curtain, and soon the Communist nations are in as much turmoil as the west. The whole situation is brought to a final crisis when Calder personally (and implausibly) confronts the American scientists in their own laboratory. Several twists later, the movie ends with a bang.

Is it any good?

It has a few things going for it. For one thing, it’s one of the few movies I can think of that deals primarily with radio messages from an alien civilization. (The only other that springs to mind is CONTACT from 1997 -- and even that one ultimately drops radio contact in favor of the personal kind.) As such, the first half hour is fairly interesting as the scientists try to find a way of making themselves understood. The movie doesn’t really do as much with this as it might and the solution they arrive at is simplistic enough that a middle schooler could (and, in the movie, in fact does) figure it out. But it’s at least sufficiently different to be interesting.

Things take a sharp turn for the worse in the middle section, where the world suddenly starts going crazy based on a handful of messages from Mars. The revelation that the Martians use cosmic rays for energy instead of fossil fuels, for example, somehow inexplicably leads to every coal mine on Earth spontaneously closing down -- despite there being no information yet on how Earth could harness the power of cosmic rays. Other equally inexplicable developments bring the entire western economy to its knees. It’s easy to believe that messages from an advanced alien race could incite panic and upheaval, but RED PLANET MARS is not the least bit convincing about it. When the messages switch from scientific to religious -- and create a panic in the Soviet sphere -- the same problem arises again. This part, in fact, is the very dullest stretch of the movie as it has nothing new over the western panic except a lot more preachy pontificating from a very Christian president.

By far, the best character in the movie is the Nazi scientist Calder. So even though his appearance at the American lab late in the movie is utterly preposterous, it’s nonetheless very welcome. The plot twists that arise out of this confrontation vary in their plausibility and effectiveness. I won’t reveal exactly what happens, but the messages are not exactly what they appear to be, and the revelations lead to a bit of a scuffle between the scientists. In any event, RED PLANET MARS is not what I would call a particularly good movie and it occasionally flirts with deadly dullness -- but it’s unusual and unconventional enough that I don’t want to give everything away in case anyone is actually interested.

What else happened this year?

-- The only other movie I’ve seen from 1952 that is remotely sci-fi is one called INVASION, U.S.A. It’s a WWIII flick about a Soviet invasion of the United States, and is a pretty heavy-handed propaganda piece about the need for ordinary citizens to contribute to anti-Soviet programs even in peacetime. It’s the earliest movie I know of that depicts an atomic war (through copious use of stock footage, natch), though it treats H-bombs simply as big bunches of dynamite and doesn’t address the effects of radiation or the possibility of nuclear winter.
-- Legendary B-movie RADAR MEN FROM THE MOON was also released this year, but I haven’t inflicted it on my attention span yet.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1952...

Go with RED PLANET MARS. But unless you have a high tolerance for both B-movie badness and high handed Christian preaching, you might as well steer clear. There’s a fairly unique story under all the distracting parts, but it’s more of a curiosity than essential viewing.