Destination Moon (1950) - film review

A team of scientists persuade a consortium of wealthy businessmen to back their project to send a manned rocket to the moon.  On the day of the launch, one of the four astronauts is taken ill and has to be replaced, by engineer Joe Sweeney.  The rocket takes off as planned and accomplishes a successful landing on the lunar surface.  But when the time comes for the crew to make the return trip they receive a message from the scientists on Earth.  They will not be able to take off unless they can drastically reduce the payload of the rocket...

Although now somewhat dated by its effects and clunky exposition, Destination Moon is a seminal science-fiction movie that not only created an appetite for sci-fi in mainstream cinema but set the standard against which subsequent films of the genre would be measured.
br> Cinema’s association with science-fiction is almost as old as the medium itself - George Méliès set the ball rolling with Le Voyage dans la lune (1902) -  but there had been few serious sci-fi films since.  For most people, sci-fi meant the fantastic adventures of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers in the 1930s serials.  The only realistic sci-fi movies of any note prior to 1950 were Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond (1929) and William Cameron Menzies’s Things to Come (1936).  

Destination Moon was conceived as an attempt to portray a lunar expedition as accurately as possible, whilst still being an exciting feature film.  It was also intended to have educational value, hence the cartoon insert in which Woody Woodpecker helps to explain the theory of rocket science – high school stuff by today’s standards but highly informative for a 1950s audience. 

The film was produced by George Pal, who subsequently produced the sci-fi classics When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953) and The Time Machine (1960).   The legendary sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein was hired to work on the screen adaptation of his own novel.  The film won an Oscar for its ground breaking special effects and earned another Oscar nominated for its impressive set design.

What is perhaps most interesting about this film today is what it has to say about the period in which it was made.  Cold War paranoia had begun to assert itself and fear of Russian Communists had reached almost ludicrous proportions.  When anything goes awry in the story, the first thing that occurs to the characters is that their work is being sabotaged – presumably by the Russians.  The government is too preoccupied with Cold War politics to get interested in a lunar mission, so it is left to private industry to pick up the tab, in the expectation of collecting a windfall when the United States administration realises the military value of space travel.  It may not be an entirely accurate prediction of what actually took place over the following two decades, but the film gets the broad principles right.  The actual lunar mission had less to do with man’s desire to push back the boundaries of science and far more to do with showing the other side who was boss – not that this prevents it from being the greatest achievement in the history of mankind.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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