Wonderful character development!

Strong and Moving!

A Disappointing Continuation

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This is a very good looking science fiction film about an expedition to Mars.It has great cinema, with an attractive, although fake look, about it. The boredom of Reality is sacrificed for the spectacle of Fantasy, which makes this very easy viewing, particularly during the scene when they're watching dancing girls on a screen.The story is easy to follow, and the characters easy to like. Five men set off for Mars, along with a stowaway, which is probably the hardest part to accept, even for the juvenile viewer.The visuals are very easy to watch. They look like classic age India Ink comic book representations, but the characters are very good. One is a comic relief man, whose presence already makes this a very good film. The action and drama is well balanced, and there is never a lull. In this day of video, you'll likely keep rewinding to the dancing girls, who are more than scenic.It becomes a story of moderation and mediation. The final peril sees four men left, hoping to leave Mars. The two that have died at this point represent opposite extremes, the most honorable, and the least honorable, the most likable and the least likable, the best and the worst.Adventure films tend to either make survivors out of "extreme" personalities, or "moderate" ones. Here, as in most films, we see the trend towards the "moderate" character.This is probably Eric Fleming's "stick out" film, easily his best. Ross Martin (who most people still know as Artemis Gordon) does his best to steal the show, but all of the actors are exceptional at this. It is a delight to watch.

The film opens with a rotating space station that has two huge light-bulbs attached in its middle. Next to it is a spaceship that seems to carry four giant ping-pong balls.The B-movie retards refer to themselves as "soldiers". Funny how deluded I was in believing they sent mostly astronauts into space..."You are my son," says the chief to his son. Not only does this inform the viewer, but also his son; apparently the chief wasn't sure the kid knew. (These two boneheads have a totally formal rapport, even when talking in private.) We are introduced to the merry and incredibly moronic crew: a goofy Japanese, the "comic-relief" New Yorker with many unfunny one-liners (a virtually xeroxed character from the unfunny buffoon in "Destination Moon"), and their bulldog-like Irish moron sergeant (Shaugnessy) whose I.Q. is even lower than Sean Penn's.The crew's uniforms look like those of school janitors.An incredibly simplistic - not to mention stupid - letter is handed to the chief simply stating in two short sentences that the Moon mission is canceled and that the new destination is Mars. Just like that. So what is the guy in the suit&tie acting as? A postman? The suit&tie guy dresses like a NY mobster and strikes one of his many poses by leaning on several Mars pictures. His face has more paint-brush strokes than all the Van Gogh paintings combined. He looks more surreal than Michael Jackson sexually pleasing a chimp.Some truly encouraging words from the space captain for his crew: "Every volunteer for this mission is an idiot." One of my favourite lines.The Japanese is eager to prove to his captain that he is an "idiot": he decides to go. He then actually has to explain to his own captain why the mission is necessary! The explanation starts with a rather baffling cultural history of Japan in a nutshell... Hello!!...The chief thanks the volunteers for their courage and support, having branded them as idiots just minutes earlier. The two astronauts who didn't volunteer start literally jumping with joy that they avoided the mission! I guess these lazy, cowardly slobs would have preferred to have become unemployed couch potatoes.What is the point of the blue guys going to the cafeteria if they only get pills? "We're not on Earth, we're in space." Another immortal cinematic moment.The mad captain-turned-general has fallen in love with the Bible. He hates the mission and jabbers about God...Half-way towards Mars, the chief's son is suddenly and inexplicably happy that they're going, leaving Earth and his family behind - even though he bitched at the beginning about how he never sees either! A perfectly round, pizza-shaped asteroid heads toward the ship. Unfortunately, it misses.This movie's Mars - it's not red. I think even B-movie 50s writers should have done a minimum amount of "research".The chief is in a daze. At old age he discovers he doesn't want progress and exploration of space: he discovers he's chosen the wrong job and keeps quoting the Bible every 5 minutes to the increasingly annoyed crew.No matter what the chief does, there is no chance of the crew to mutiny against his. Shaughnessy even sides with him. The kind of loyal bulldog everyone would want to have."Look, it's red!" Another asinine highlight.At this point we have to wonder: what's the chief got against Mars being explored, and nothing against the Moon? Christmas on Mars. It's snowing. Are they or are they not going to build the first man-made snowman on Mars? The tension rises.

There is a space wheel in orbit around the earth, not unlike Kubrick's that came fourteen years later. Half a dozen of the crew are being trained for an exploratory trip to the moon. They take off as scheduled, but at the last minute their orders are changed. They will land on the planet Mars to find out if it is fit to add to earth's diminishing supply of basic materials. En route, the general in charge goes berserk and is accidentally killed while trying to destroy the ship. Another of the crew is hit by a tiny meteor fragment and is lost in space. The landing on Mars is successful and, in fact, it looks as if the planet can support crops for transport to earth. The final take off is perilous but the crew survive and their solidarity and confidence are enhanced.The effects aren't bad for the period. Oh, they look clumsy by today's standards, but not by the standards of, say, Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s and 1940s. Seen from space, the earth has at least a few scattered clouds and doesn't look like an illustration from a fourth-grade geography textbook. And there is a nod to weightlessness, with the crew having to wear the usual "magnetized boots." The paintings of the Martian surface must have looked realistic at the time, and the soil is as red as in upland Georgia.That's about it for the good part. The bad parts fall into two classes. (1) Scientific implausibilities too outstanding to go unnoticed, and (2) an unfocused script involving stereotyped characters.I'll skip most of the questions about the technical aspects of the film except to wonder here how it is possible to grow a terrestrial flower in soil that has never known life and is bereft of nitrogenous waste. True enough that "only God can make a tree," as one of the comments. (Except in California, where anybody can make them.) One more lapse can't go uncommented upon. A Japanese crew member (actually Number One son from the Charlie Chan movies, born to a Chinese family in Sacramento) explains earnestly why he wants to make the trip. Japan had just fought a bad war, but they were forced into it because they had no natural resources. (More or less true. They still don't, except for labor and ingenuity.) Well, in the absence of resources, the houses were made of paper and people ate with chopsticks because there was no metal for forks. And this idealistic Japanese doesn't want to see the rest of the world reduced to the condition the prewar Japanese occupied -- "Too many people and not enough food." So he years to address the supply side of the equation without even mentioning the demand side. Too many people and not enough food? Then fewer people = enough food. His perspective is strictly utilitarian and he leaves out any mention of population control. The mission is short-sighted and ultimately self-destructive. We've been there before. We're there now, and it's not working too well. One of the more majestic sights in the United States is the Giant Meteor Crater in Arizona. The first thing entrepreneurs did after it existence became public was to establish a mining camp at the bottom of this huge hole and dig for whatever might be left of the meteorite in order to retrieve the metal and melt it down into dollars. The remnants of the camp are still there, an irritating speck under the eyelid of the scenery.The crew themselves. Right out of a World War II movie. One a Japanese, another an Austrian, two stern officers (father and son), an Irishman with a sweet temper, and the unavoidable Brooklyn wisecracker. Things cannot hold. The center falls apart. Why does the skipper start spouting gibberish from the Bible? Or -- okay, let him quote verse -- but why does he try to destroy the ship? What's the point of having the son kill the father and take over command in order to save the space ship? Or should we call it "the mother ship" and start ruminating about Sophocles? I mean, it's possible to be driven TOO far in trying to fit this meandering script into a coherent whole. Phil Foster, who plays the wise guy from Brooklyn, turns in a weak performance. When he speaks it's as if his speech organs were made of blubber. He and the other stereotypes are sometimes painful to watch and listen to.I don't mean to bomb the movie. I only wish that as much talent and skill had gone into the script as had obviously gone into the special effects. As it is, the former undermines the latter.

Although it has George Pal written all over it; it is not his best project, but a pretty darn good Sci-Fi flick for its time. A team of American astronauts assemble a space station called "The Wheel" to enable a spaceship to be built. Gen. Samuel Merritt(Walter Brooke)and his crew that includes his son Captain Barney Merritt(Eric Fleming) believe their mission is to eventually land on the Moon. Change of orders; new destination...Mars. Special effects are redeemable with the most striking color and depiction of the 'angry red planet'. Religion and human emotions are the subplots, because in the mid 50s we want to see space travel. Most of the cast will be remembered for later work: William Hopper, Benson Fong, Ross Martin, Mickey Shaughnessy and Phil Foster.