Destination Moon

Irving Pichel – 1950 – USA

The granddaddy of mature latter-day science-fiction movies that kicked off the genre for the 1950s by making a quantum leap from the sillier, kid-oriented serials (like Flash Gordon) that comprised sci-fi up to that point, at least on film.  Based on a novel by one of the pioneers of the genre, Robert A. Heinlein, the film is also producer George Pal’s ambitious foray into live-action features.  Both Pal and Heinlein’s goals were to bring an adult seriousness to sci-fi not only by grounding it in genuine scientific theory but by infusing it with timely political relevance, both elements that characterized the best science-fiction from that point forward.  (Hot on Destination Moon’s heels were The Thing from Another World, The Day the Earth Stood Still, both 1951, Invaders from Mars and Pal’s own War of the Worlds, both 1953, among many others.)  A team of four men build and man a rocket with the intention of being the first human beings to get to the moon and return.  Set in an already heady Cold War environment in which both the US and the Soviet Union find it imperative to conquer space before the other, Heinlein’s ambivalence towards politics and bureaucracy is admirably preserved; it is telling that the team has to gain funding from wealthy independent backers rather than from the government, which lacks either the means or competence to manage such a project.  The special effects are highly primitive, of course, and the performances are so laughably earnest, but the film is a fascinating and influential depiction of a time when no one in the world had yet left the Earth’s atmosphere, though the feeling of imminent accomplishment was palpable.  In concludes with the famously portentious caption: “This is The End of the Beginning.”