fifties

Nice Pinnoc update. Disney sanitized it, now Spielberg/Kubrick, with approval of Hebrew University (Einstein likeness use), thoroughly blasts all one-sided Love from Above. Cup your ears to catch all the religious references, especially WHY God made man originally. All love is merely programmed when not reciprocated? Father (ref Blade Runner), Son (same ref, or ET), and Holy Ghost (back to Close Encounters' little skinny fellas, with transparency and basketball potential). Catholic Church reduced to a narrow store front with one exiting patron smiled upon by the Devil. Romans drinking beer at the County Fair. Underwater stained-glass windows of the carpenter's son's life searching for The Blue Fairy (Madonna). Spielberg must have choked on the comment made about ET by a reviewer: "it's looking for the Blue Fairy." What guts! I raise my hand in salute (a la Charleton Heston in Soylent Green): "AI ARE ...PEOPLE!" Where ARE the theater picketers?!

The paranoid, sexist 1950's has rarely ever been so summarily(unintentionally?) satirized as in this early-TV-quality space-opera. Was THIS the SciFi movie in Midnight Cowboy? I wish I could ask Heinlein how long it took him to get his tongue out of his cheek. If you liked Rocky Jones Space Ranger for the cardboard sets and acetylene-torch rocket engines and hokey camp plots and dialogue, and the required cutie with sweater-popping Pleasantville-weight undergarments (Ah, DVD on Pause), then this jaw-dropping side-to-side-head-shaker is for you. Both Rocketship X-M and Destination Moon assumed that an "unassailable base on the Moon" was vital to US survival. No mention of the Tax Payers here! Well, RXM had it politically and environmentally right, Destination Moon made it seem silly and one-way, but this thin movie includes a church-approved ending (that Forbidden Planet left off) which takes the cake. All 3 movies are so moral that you may wonder how year 2000 movies will look to people (if any) in about 50 years. Will we look this crazy?

Okay, the special effects now look incorrect, and the science now looks erroneous, and the men are pigs, but the big point of the movie is still valid. The hogwash talk of needing an "unassailable base" on the Moon is also found in Destination Moon (a more-expensive comedy with a cartoon and sidekick), and Lippert's other (silly) Project Moonbase. But this movie has more to say. I was startled as a kid seeing this when it came out, and still love the love story (Lloyd B asked the director to excise it, for Heaven's sake), and especially the red-filtered (sepia tone on DVD) sequence of the sandstone-hills marchers. The DVD is so clear that you can see a Pleasantville city in the matte-painting distance?! Anyhow, I bought a Geiger Counter and went into Big Science because of this movie. Destination Moon, on the other hand, kept me from joining the Military! (See October Sky for the other side of the story.)