That was an excellent one.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

It's just over an hour long, watchable and kinda fun. Is it good? Yes and No, it depends on how much you like Buck Rogers and silly "B" Sci-Fi flicks. It's a classic example of older, fun "B" Sci-Fi that fans of the genre might enjoy. It is not what you call a good movie just silly fun.This was originally a 1939 Buck Rogers Serial. In 1953, it was re-edited and put together to create this short feature film. I have not seen the original serial, so I'm unsure just how much was cut out for this movie but I'm sure it was all the unnecessary extra stuff.Buck Rogers fans the film should delight, Sci-Fi fans might enjoy it while others might want to pass on this one.3.5/10

OK, this one often is listed as being from 1953, but this is not exactly correct- it is an edited version of the 1939 serial.Keeping this in mind, it still seems a bit dated by 1939 standards (the costumes, and the (in)famous electric razor sounds emanating from the rocket-ships). On the plus side, we see that the original 1939 audience got exposed to television, lasers,interplanetary spaceflight, and robots. Re-releasing this in edited form in 1953 could have been part of forming the space pioneer mind-set among American youth that eventually propelled the US to the Moon in 1969, so we can thank Buck Rogers for some of the inspiration. The pace is good, the action keeps coming, but the plot and directorial execution is very simple. This was made primarily for children and early teens, so things never get too complex here. Not really the best of the Buck Rogers material that's out there. This is mainly for die-hard fans of the principal character and fans of Buster Crabbe.

Someone at Universal Studios got the bright idea to edit out all the cliffhanger chapter endings and re-release an old Buck Rogers serial as a feature film in 1953. The advances in science have rendered it laughable in those Cold War years, now the film is high camp.The original serial had the notion that a 20th century dirigible pilot and junior sidekick Buster Crabbe and Jackie Moran crash near the North Pole and their bodies are cryogenically frozen and thawed out by those who found them 500 years later which is about the same time that the Starship Enterprise was doing its thing. But this is not a Star Trek world that they've come back to. Although in the original Star Trek series in one of the comic episodes a humanoid people did take on the gangster culture from 20th century earth.In this film because we did not deal with the Al Capones and Lucky Lucianos back in the day as we should have, they're on top now and the boss of all bosses is a guy named Killer Kane played by Anthony Warde. Fortunately Crabbe and Moran fall into the hands of the Resistance who have holed up in a Hidden City. There are some other humans on Saturn and most of the film is devoted to making an alliance with them.Science Fiction as a film form does have a half life. Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov can write about the wonders of the future, but you can read it and use your imagination and a hundred, a thousand years from now it will adjust depending on how far humans advance. But once it's on film it stays. The Buck Rogers films are pretty laughable and campy for today, but I wonder what Gene Roddenberry's vision will look like a hundred years from now, just how much will he have gotten right?Tacked on is a prologue and epilogue of narration where a Cold War era message is hammered home. That too is a relic of the times.

This is one of four feature version attempts made from the serial 'Buck Rogers' (1939). This one, released in 1953, in addition to condensing the story down to a trim 69 minutes, has an added prologue and epilogue filmed that year. The prologue narrator suggests that as the submarine, airplane and atomic bomb were written about years before they actually became a reality, so too will the existence of flying saucers be proved in the near future. What a non sequiter! He makes reference to the science-fiction writer (it was Cleve Cartmill) who was investigated by the FBI which thought that he had used classified information to write about the A-bomb years before it was created.Supposedly, this is the prologue to the story of Killer Kane and his quest to rule the Earth. Cut to the condensed archival footage of the 'Buck Rogers' serial, with Buster Crabbe, Jackie Moran, Constance Moore, Anthony Warde and C. Montague Shaw. Not much derives from the original story or comic strip-- Buck (Buster Crabbe) and Buddy (Jackie Moran) go into suspended animation and wake up 500 years in the future, where they meet Lt. Wilma Deering (Constance Moore). That's it. Very quickly they take sides with Dr. Huer (C. Montague Shaw) and 'The Hidden City' in its war against the tyrant Killer Kane (Anthony Warde). For some reason, in order to win the war they need to form an alliance with the government of Saturn, so our trio of heroes wind up going there three times. The alliance is made; they storm Kane's city, and he is turned into a mindless robot. The continuity is pretty good in condensing the story, but as a result, in several scenes we see things going on in the background that are never explained since so much from too many chapters has been skipped.Travel to the far future was a common trope in science fiction from H. G. Wells on, and the emphasis was usually on the contrast or differences between our time and that of the future. Here, in Buck's new 25th Century, we get anti gravity belts (from the original story), terrestrial spaceships that double as interstellar ones, a high speed tunnel car, a mind control device, and a funny triangular space gun. The best part for me was the great art deco sets of Killer Kane's city.Killer Kane just doesn't make it as an evil tyrant, since about all he does is stand around berating his council members for their incompetence, except when he tries to put the Robot Battalion coffee pot on Buck Rogers (deleted from the feature versions). I had this same reaction when I watched the entire serial. Anthony Warde didn't have a menacing enough tone of voice, but had more of a high pitched yell. He was better in other serials where he was not the lead villain. The 1953 epilogue narrator warns us of the rise of any future Killer Kane (an obvious reference to Joseph Stalin of Russia), and facing the camera says, "God bless America!"We get a lot of music from Max Steiner's great score for 'The Bride of Frankenstein' (1935), Buster Crabbe's winning personality and cheerful take charge attitude, and the great deco and recycled 'Flash Gordon' sets. It's too bad that neither this nor the original serial is very good. Unfortunately this squeezed down version moves so quickly and does so little that I can only give it a 3.