The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The Moon, being Earth’s nearest planetary neighbour, has featured prominently in various SF stories.
Up until the real thing in 1969, there was a reasonable body of films predicting the Moon Landing, ranging from the silly whimsies of Georges Melies’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) to various adaptations of H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon (1901) where it is inhabited by aliens to more seriously scientifically grounded works like Destination Moon (1950).
Since 1969, The Moon has largely been relegated to being the location for a moonbase or bases, occasionally a few moon cities. It is a stopping-off point for voyages on further out into the Solar System, although only a few works take place on The Moon. In some cases, it can be a staging point for alien visitors.
There are very occasional depictions of The Moon within fantasy such as Baron Munchausen’s journeys there and the Japanese tales of the Moon princess Kaguyahime.
Often misidentified as the first science-fiction film, Georges Melies’s short is a classic whimsy involving comedic exploits on the Lunar surface. Hardly serious as SF but an undeniably iconic work made with enormous sophistication for the day
Early silent film in which a motorcar travels so fast that it heads into orbit. One of the films from Walter R. Booth, a British imitator of Georges Melies, The effects are less sophisticated than Melies developed around this point but the film has its charms
A silent film from Fritz Lang where he sets out to depict a realistic attempt (at least in terms of what was known in the era) to build and launch a rocket to The Moon. Lang directs with an epic grandeur that still takes back today.
An early Soviet-made film that does an extraordinary job in depicting the launch of a rocket to The Moon. Fascinating to see in terms of its incredible ambition and the things it gets right
Fascinating, epically sized versions of the adventures of Baron Münchausen produced by the Nazis
The film that started the great 1950s age of science fiction. A bold exciting work from George Pal and Robert Heinlein that says the Moon is our to conquer and lays out a credible road map about how to do so
The second of the Rocket Man serials in which Commando Cody faces invaders from the Moon. This comes with the creative impoverishment of serials where the alien invaders are no more than regular gangsters.
Low-budget film set aboard a space station clearly springboarding from the success of Destination Moon and featuring a Robert Heinlein script
Classic bad movie in which astronauts land on The Moon and encounter an all-female society. Some really datedly war of the sexes politics play out amid the laughably impoverished sets and effects
A remake of the classic bad movie Cat-Women of the Moon where explorers to the Moon encounter an all-women society
Godzilla director Ishiro Honda makes a colourfully entertaining space opera about Earth’s battle to fight off an alien invasion force on The Moon
A version of the Baron’s tall tales from the great, underrated Karel Zeman. Zeman’s dizzying blend of live-action, animation and cutouts and deadpan absurdism is perfect, resulting in the best Baron Munchausen film to date
Quirky and charming sequel to The Mouse That Roared in which the world’s smallest country decides to launch a mission to the Moon and accidentally end up winning the Space Race
One of the numerous Italian peplum films of the 1960s featuring assorted body builders as Hercules. This pits Hercules against invaders from the Moon
The adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel about a Victorian journey to the Moon and encounter with its denizens. The film comes with Ray Harryhausen effects but is considerably weakened by a buffoonish tone
Comedy in which Jerry Lewis and Connie Stevens are forced to marry to go to The Moon. The sexual politics play out pretty embarrassingly today
A wannabe entry in the Japanese monster movie, this has the distinction of featuring possibly the most ridiculous monster to ever turn up in one of these films
Film adapted from the popular German-language Perry Rhodan space operas that is cheap and quickly heads into bad movie stakes
An early Robert Altman film about the planning and launch of a Moon Landing starring then unknown James Caan and Robert Duvall. The most realistic depiction of a space launch up to that point.
The greatest science-fiction film ever made? Stanley Kubrick goes against all convention – the film is slow, has no clear story and reaches an enigmatic ending and yet it is a work of brilliance, both visually and in terms of effects technology, groundbreaking in a number of ways,
Muchly ridiculed Hammer film that was billed as a ‘Space Western’. Once one gets past that it is actually a far more interesting film than it suggests
A two-part episode of the Gerry Anderson tv series Space: 1999 that was repackaged as a feature film during the late 1970s SF boom
Shoddy low-budget Canadian-made attempt to jump aboard the Star Wars fad, this promotes itself as a bogus sequel to the H.G. Wells classic
Pilot for a forgotten short-lived tv series starring Andy Griffith as a junk dealer who decides to mount his own expedition to The Moon. Snappily written and pulls its premise off with a reasonable degree of plausibility
Shot back-to-back with the first Christopher Reeve film, this then became a mess behind the scenes. The end result emerges fairly well with the show dominated by the magnificent Phantom Zones villains and giving depth to the Superman-Lois relationship
Airplane was a parody of the disaster movie that proved a hit. This was a sequel that expands the action aboard the space shuttle and contains many SF in-jokes but to generally lesser effect
Incredibly bad Hercules film from Cannon Films made in Italy by Luigi Cozzi. This was the immediate aftermath of Star Wars so we get a bizarre attempt to rework Greek mythology as science-fiction
This is a derivative and dull copy of E.T. about two alien kids who run away from their family on The Moon and end up on a ranch in rural Wyoming
An anthology of comedy skits from several different directors including Joe Dante and John Landis. The result is fairly scattershot with moments of occasional humour falling between laughs that do not come off
Murder mystery set on a moonbase. Aside from assuming the Soviet Union would exist in the future and the datedness of its technology, this creates a surprisingly credible lunar environment set amid East-West tensions. Brigitte Nielsen even gives something approaching a performance
Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of the adventures of the world’s greatest liar was another problem ridden Gilliam production that emerges as an absurd, colourful spectacle filled with a dizzying greatness of imagination
Conceptually ridiculous film where a spaceship crew in lunar orbit come across a space shuttle that disappeared through the Bermuda Triangle and contains a parasitic organism that is The Devil
Cheap Cyberpunk action film that borrows the basics of Cyborg with Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson as android bounty hunter engaged in stopping corporate skulduggery
Low-budget Mad Max copycat action film with Michael Paré from the lunar colony who comes to Earth to take on the marauders of the post-apocalyptic wasteland
Very cheap-looking attempt to essentially relocate a gold prospectors adventure into outer space
Film from Enki Bilal, a celebrated comic-book creator in France, about the noirish goings-on and in-politics on a lunar colony
The second of the Austin Powers films is less sharp in its parody of the James Bond film and more focused on a series of broad scatological gags. Mike Myers owns the show in a trio of entertainingly gregarious performances
Clint Eastwood directs a film about a quartet of aging NASA astronauts reunited for one mission back into space after forty years.
Huge flop comedy for Eddie Murphy in which he plays a nightclub owner on The Moon. There is an almost good SF film hiding inside and depiction of a surprisingly detailed Lunar culture but the unnfunny comedy elements kill it
Remake of the classic H.G. Wells novel that comes with the novelty of being directed by Wells’s great-grandson. More disappointingly it prefers to merely remake the 1960 film rather than return to the book
A Russian mockumentary that purports to tell the story of a Soviet expedition to The Moon in 1938. This conducts an exceptional mimicry of the style of the Soviet propaganda film
The original version of Superman II became mired in problems over the firing of director Richard Donner. After the rediscovery of the original footage, Donner was able to go offer up a restored version. Seeing the storylines the way they were meant to be and Marlon Brando’s original scenes as Jor-el make for a work that is superior in every way
SF film with Sam Rockwell as a lone man stationed on The Moon discovering the truth of his existence, this gained much word of mouth when it came out
Found Footage film that has fun uniting UFOs and wacky conspiracy theories into a grand unified thesis. The swim of ideas is head-spinning but the film commits the mistake of delivering them to us quasi-documentary style rather than dramatically
Very nicely produced BBC retelling of the H.G. Wells novel that conducts an extremely faithful adaptation of the story and captures a perfect period sense of wonder
An animated effort about a mad scientist and three orphans that one entered with zero expectation only for it to unexpectedly emerge as a side-splitting and completely charming pleasure
Melies Cinemagician is a special screening of a selection of films from Georges Melies presented by Vancouver’s Vancity Theater to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. The show was a live performance involving a score composed especially for the event, displays of conjuring tricks and a magic lantern show. The same year also saw […]
Clever and well made Found Footage film about a NASA crew encountering something alien on The Moon’s surface. Falls somewhere between Alien, Apollo 13 and Paranormal Activity
The third of Michael Bay’s Transformers films. While the human scenes opt for a ghastly miscalculated sense of humour, the effects houses are at the peak of their game, even if Bay allows them to drag the mass destruction out to a numbing excess
Beautifully made children’s film that is a refreshing change from most of the formulaic product released in the US mainstream. Comes with a sweet simplicity and an enormous freshness, while the animation is rendered with a considerable beauty that makes it just as much a film for adults
Finnish fan filmmaker Timo Vuorensola of Star Wreck fame returns with this conceptually wild film about invasion by Nazi flying saucers from the Moon. Stunning quality effects on a minuscule budget that rival the work of professional houses, although Vuorensola lets the comedy elements become broad caricature
One hardly greets the attempt to generate another entry out of this franchise with any enthusiasm. This mostly consists of tired and familiar gags, where maybe the most generous compliment you can pay is that it is better than Men in Black II was
This adapts What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way?, the highly acclaimed graphic novel that was written as a response to 9/11. Unfortunately, I am not sure condensing the story into a 76 animated film fully does justice to the complex debate of the original
Roger Christian was art director on Alien but will always be remembered as director of the notorious Battlefield Earth. Here he is stuck making a cheap, tatty and frequently incomprehensible copy of Alien about alien impregnation
Studio Ghibli adaptation of a classic Japanese folktale from Hayao Hiyazaki’s mentor Isao Takahata. This is a slower, very different film than Hayao Miyazaki’s, the animation designed like a traditional Japanese woodprint. Never quite soars like Miyazaki’s films do but not without its charms
This takes the old conspiracy theory about the Moon Landing being faked by tv and is a Found Footage film being shot by two filmmakers who have been tasked with fabricating the Moon Landing. Including a cameo from Stanley Kubrick, the results are hilarious
Comedy about a cop from the future who joins the present-day force where he is partnered with a cop thawed out from the 1960s. This is a premise that should have been funny but emerges as something like Sledge Hammer cast with the characters from Dumb and Dumber
Roland Emmerich returns with more of the same – epic-sized mass destruction, simplistic emotional cues – but tries to make it bigger. When your bread and butter is blowing the Earth up every time, the problem is how to top it and here everything is so big and with so much happening that it cannot be taken in thus slips into tedium
Beautiful stop-motion animated feature from Laika. Unlike the simple-minded comic supporting relief of most other animation, Laika take a big bite and tell an epic adventure. The only failing is that the stop-motion has become so flawless that audiences cannot tell the difference between regular animation
In the same vein as Gravity and The Martian, this depicts spaceflight with scrupulous scientific regard. Essentially Apocalypse Now in space with Brad Pitt on a mission to Neptune to find his father who has gone rogue
Timo Vuorensola’s follow-up to Iron Sky. It is hard to believe that a film with a demented premise that combines Nazis on the Moon with alien lizard people living in the hollow core of the Earth could do any wrong but this does emerge as a disappointment
The Asylum’s mockbuster version of Moonfall. This plays a ridiculous premise with an often ingenious and highly entertaining absurdity and actually proves a far more entertaining than its bigger budgeted model
South Korean tv mini-series about the investigation of a moonbase with illicit experiments and something possibly alien unleashed
Another gonzo killer shark film from The Asylum, makers of Sharknado films, featuring Soviet sharks on the Moon
Richard Linklater makes a charming animated film about a kid selected for a secret Moon Landing. Most of all a film with a lovely nostalgia for growing up in the era of the Moon mission
Roland Emmerich returns to mass destruction with a film about The Moon on a collision course with Earth, which heads in some conceptually challenging directions
Comedy from China about a man abandoned on the Moon, the last person left alive in the aftermath of the destruction of the Earth
The Asylum offer up a mockbuster copy of Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall that is far more entertaining than the original
Solid South Korean attempt to copy Gravity and The Martian with the attempts to rescue an astronaut who becomes stranded on The Moon
A surprisingly better than expected film from the Disney Channel, a Coming of Age story set on The Moon about a group of kids who break out to go on a jaunt across the lunar surface
Prequel to the Chinese spectacular about the construction of an engineering project to move the Earth, this comes with some epic-sized effects sequences
A low-budget film with some very accomplished effects that takes place in a devastated future as a Martian colonist returns to find what has happened to Earth