Sadly Over-hyped

Fantastic!

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I am a fan of the early 1950s Sci-Fi Movies. This film was substantially better than I thought it would be.If it seems like you have seen this movie before - perhaps you already have. Many of the props were recycled from other Sci Fi Movies. The Ship interior is from "Rocketship XM", The Martian suits are from "Destination Moon".What impacted me most about this movie were the Martian Fashions. The women of Mars were wearing miniskirts in 1951!This is obviously an extremely low budget movie which was shot very quickly. It does however have a certain charm which you never find in the modern gazillion dollar Sci Fi movies.

For Flight To Mars, Monogram Pictures and its penny pinching head Sam Katzman must have really cracked open the cookie jar to spend money on this film. Color even, unheard of for Monogram film. It was probably their big budget item that year, comparatively speaking.Four scientists, Arthur Franz, Virginia Huston, John Litel, and Richard Gaines and a reporter Cameron Mitchell are the crew of the first manned flight to Mars. And the Martians are humanoid as we are and have a nice little underground civilization that unfortunately runs on a material called Corium. As essential to them as the buffalo was to the Plains Indians.But they're running out of Corium on Mars and the leader of the high council wants to use the earth astronauts rocket-ship to take armies back and conquer Earth. How they're going to do it with dwindling Corium and one rocket is something the script doesn't really go into.In the meantime Arthur Franz finds a little love on Mars in the person of shapely Martian Marguerite Chapman. Still the Earth visitors are caught in a power play between Martian leader Morris Ankrum and former leader Robert Barrat.Sad to say even with color Flight To Mars suffers from the same lack of production values that typify Monogram's products and the lack of a really coherent script. But the Martian girls are lovely to look at, it was like watching a Miss America pageant.

Early 1950s Sci-Fi directed by Lesley Selander. Special effects of course are very primitive, but pretty good in comparison to what else was out there then. Drive-in Movie double feature fare; still interesting enough to watch. Two leading men, Arthur Franz the brilliant young scientist Dr. Jim Barker and straight talking and earthy newspaper reporter Steve Abbot(Cameron Mitchell)are joined on a manned flight to Mars by Carol Stafford(Virgina Huston)another scientist and two other space experts(Richard Gaines and John Litel). Upon landing on the Red Planet, the space travelers encounter inhabitants that appear friendly and mentally advanced. In actuality, the Martians are led by Ikron(Morris Ankrum), who has the idea of conquering Earth to vitalize their civilization. There is a beautiful Martian(Maruerite Chapman)that Dr. Barker intends to take back on the return trip. She is the movie's redeemable element.

There's nothing particularly unique or interesting about this run of the mill low budget sci-fi flick. Regardless of its pedigreed origin (the film is loosely based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy), the plot and overall themes of this film are in no way remarkable or original, the science is weak at best, and unfortunately, the film fails to even involve compelling action sequences.The plot begins with a manned space flight to Mars, and though the main plot doesn't really get rolling until the ship lands, most of the most interesting scenes occur en route. Unfortunately, as soon as our interplanetary travelers touch-down, their previously interesting interpersonal relationships, speculations about cosmology and the meaning of life, and everything interesting about the film all give way to an only remotely coherent plot concerning Martian revolutionaries, environmental problems and not very convincing webs of deceit.There is nothing very remarkable about the production quality of the film either. It's passable. And most of the acting is, though slow, OK. Cameron Mitchell is actually pretty good and plays a likable character. I guess the best quality of this film, from my perspective, is its fashion sense. The martians have very nice outfits! If this film had a point, it might have been much more interesting. Oh well.