With sincerity and good intentions there was a smattering of Non-Alien-Flying Saucer-Soul Snatching Movies in the Fifties. This one is "Scientific" to a fault but somewhat succeeds at being an Adult friendly story, that Kids flocked to, about the yet to be, but soon to be, Adventure of Manned Space Travel.
It was all so new but we were approaching the time that all Sci-Fi Nerds just knew would happen and after we split the Atom, everything now seemed not only possible but probable. Hence we have this Movie and a very few others that tried its low-budget best to put up on the screen as Entertainment, this highly anticipated new era in Human endeavors and exploration.
The problem is that all this Science stuff is pretty boring when viewed as entertainment. Documentaries are informative and interesting but most are hardly effectively entertaining. They are what they are and this is what it is. A Movie marketed as entertainment that in the end is only slightly so. It is more interesting than entertaining and was more informative in 1954 than it was exciting.
It does manage, against all odds, to be engaging enough in a time-capsule kind of way and most likely created a buzz among Movie goers. It also, may have attracted the readers of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics Magazines. But the irony is that there are probably more accurate prognostications in this Movie than in those highly sophisticated, pretentious periodicals. They were almost always wrong.
It was all so new but we were approaching the time that all Sci-Fi Nerds just knew would happen and after we split the Atom, everything now seemed not only possible but probable. Hence we have this Movie and a very few others that tried its low-budget best to put up on the screen as Entertainment, this highly anticipated new era in Human endeavors and exploration.
The problem is that all this Science stuff is pretty boring when viewed as entertainment. Documentaries are informative and interesting but most are hardly effectively entertaining. They are what they are and this is what it is. A Movie marketed as entertainment that in the end is only slightly so. It is more interesting than entertaining and was more informative in 1954 than it was exciting.
It does manage, against all odds, to be engaging enough in a time-capsule kind of way and most likely created a buzz among Movie goers. It also, may have attracted the readers of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics Magazines. But the irony is that there are probably more accurate prognostications in this Movie than in those highly sophisticated, pretentious periodicals. They were almost always wrong.