I just bought the DVD of this film, since this was the first George Pal sci-fi film in cinemascope, and I thought it would look pretty good in the letterbox format. The quality was slightly better than the television versions I'd seen in the past, but not incredibly so. The DVD was pretty cheap, so I'm not that disappointed. This film has always interested me because I've always been able to pinpoint when a film was made just by its look, and this one stumped me as a kid. When I first saw this in the seventies on TV I thought, "gee, this is either a very good scifi film from the fifties , or a cheap, bad scifi film from the sixties"....since the effects were elaborate, but hokey, and virtually all the actors were from, or in the case of this film, about to be, familiar TV faces,,,,,with some actors terribly miscast, such as Phil Foster (Laverne DeFazios dad)as a master electrician, and Mickey O'shawnessey as the general's lapdog.....of course, once I realized this was made in 1955, and was a George Pal production, I knew the science would be relatively accurate for the era , and was. In fact its straight out of Von Braun's blueprints, which were eventually altered quite a bit when we actually went to the moon.
What really hurts the film for me, is the silly script which propels the "plot" such as it is. I mean, can you actually believe that the commander of the space station would assemble an enormous spacecraft and only question its design and "whats it for" after it is finished. Then , be told by the designer that it was made to travel to Mars and not the moon, as everyone had expected......and you leave, tomorrow!.....right, just like that, just hop in and go.... Then, as in George Pal's Destination Moon, you constantly have the dumb astronaut (in this case,Foster) asking stupid questions, so that the "audience" can get some accurate scientific explanation for why they can or cannot do something in space. For example , Foster is afraid to go outside the ship (going 20,000 mph)because he thinks he'll fall off and be left behind, but is assured that hes going as fast as the ship and there's no wind friction to blow him off. I mean, would you let someone that clueless go outside the ship to make repairs? Then there's the scene where the Foster is informed they wont be able to take off for a year, the next time the earth aligns with mars......gee, I kinda would like to know those little things before I volunteered for that mission......I kinda understand that its hard to relate all the scientific facts to the audience without sounding academic, but springing it on them in dialogue where the characters should reasonably already know the score.......reminds me of something Kubrick said when he was making 2001: a Space Odyssey....he never wanted to have a scientist in his space movie have to explain scientific principles to the audience....like Mr . Wizard,,,"well, Jimmy , it works like this",,,,,I paraphrase, of course....
