Kronos, O Monstro do Espaço

As must always be kept in mind while viewing classic SF cinema, one cannot and should not extricate a film from its historical context. Kronos is no exception. This is 1950's SF movie making at its marginal budgetary best.

Certainly the storyline taxes credibility, involving alien possession of humans, but the ETs at least have a practical purpose for invading than just doing it out of spite. Plus, the dirty work isn't accomplished with sundry flying saucers and blaster rays, but by a huge robot.

The acting is an uneven mixture of serious and melodramatic that oddly adds to the dark overtones of the fims early scenes. The dialogue, littered with quasi-scientific jargon, flows at near poetic tempo.

Ultimately, it is the clever resourcefulness of our nuclear-scientist heroes that wins the day. Now that has to be worth watching!

This movie reflects the cold war tensions of the fifties and captures the history of that time period on film. The movie is interesting for its presentation of modern age technology of its' time and the wonders that technology would bring. Movie goers who have been spoon-fed on modern digital animations and graphics will have no appreciation for the effort that went into this movie. This is obviously no academy award winner; however, one must view this film in its' proper context. A thoroughly enjoyable movie. 8 out of 10.

Yep, it's black & white and low budget but the film has great ideas and is executed incredibly well for the small amount of money they had to work with. The score by Bert Shefter and Paul Sawtell is probably the best the duo ever wrote. In fact, the title theme was so good it was re-worked for IT, THE TERROR FROM OUTER SPACE. Some people have said they think that cartoon animation was used for walking shots of KRONOS. I think it is stop-motion model animation, especially since Gene Warren is one of those credited for special effects and stop-motion was his specialty. Regardless of how it was achieved, KRONOS is about as much fun as they get. The special effects, while dated-looking now were as good as anything else you would see at the time it was released. I love this film which fortunately, has been preserved on an excellent widescreen DVD. The film has an enduring quality about it and never ceases to entertain me no matter how many times I see it. If you just like to have a plain old good time watching a movie, then I highly recommend KRONOS.

"Kronos" is about a robot emissary (which Earth scientists name Kronos), sent by aliens to Earth. It lands on the coast of Mexico and goes on a rampage. The aliens have exhausted energy supplies on their own planet (which it is correctly noted may well happen here before too long), and so they sent Kronos to Earth to suck up energy from our remaining energy resources. Unknowingly, Earth counterattacks with weapons like an H-bomb, but Kronos greedily absorbs all that energy and just gets stronger and hungrier for more.

At this point, you just have to put aside the immediate obvious objection that there is far more energy in any star in the galaxy than in all the power plants on Earth, and the aliens should have just harvested energy from them.

If you can forget all that, what is left is an enjoyable typical 1950's B-movie, with what I consider to be some decent special effects for the time (except for the obvious cartoon animations of Kronos' march). Jeff Morrow, one of the better B-movie actors, delivers a decent performance as a scientist. Despite its low budget, the movie tries hard to be an early techno-thriller, replete with what was state-of-the-art technology for its time--B-47 jet bombers, missiles with nuclear warheads, computers, etc. And that also makes it a cut above the usual sci-fi B-movie of the 1950's.

Recient edit: I notice that a lot of the sci-fi movies are being remade. This movie could be remade and with CGI and all the special effects available now, could become a major money maker for the studio that can take on this project. So many remakes have been made that are based on boring original movies and some have been a success, most have not. If any producer that reads this would just watch this movie, he / she would see the potential of this story and as long as the story is followed with the critical elements intact, this could be a success for everyone. ----------------------------------------------------------------- I downloaded this movie last week because I remembered it from when I was a kid and a friend just happened to mention that he had a copy, so I grabbed it. I really didn't either understand or care about the story as much as I enjoyed the 'neat stuff' when I was 7, but after watching it again, I was impressed with the story. A species in outer space has used up all it's energy resources and sends out these machines to roam the galaxy looking for planets with energy producing potential. The machines have the ability to absorb any and all power and convert it into matter, thus growing in size with each meal. The science here was right on, The opposite on E=mc2, or as mentioned in the movie, 'the other half of the equation'. Because of these little bits of physics, I now wonder if the movie was made for kids or adults, Stuff like that was way over our heads back then. If the Machine is successful in locating a suitable planet, it calls for more machines to finish the job. Of course the special effects are primitive, but they make the point. The stream of energy as it flows past the 3 scientists while they are standing on top of the giant, was right on the money. The way the robot closed itself up to absorb the blast of the A-bomb from the jet it magnetically pulled into itself, even the design of the machine, was very original and very cool. All, in all, This is a classic 50's sci-fi movie that should be seen at least once. Of course, at the end there is a moral message and it is: "They ran out of energy because they wasted all the resources and if we don't watch out, we could end up the same way". We never know just where it came from and there are no aliens, just the machine. How was the machine going to get home? Somebody needs to remake this movie, it would be a great movie with all the modern effects in our bag of tricks.