Well Deserved Praise

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

If you're expecting an action-packed movie of aliens vs. humans like the Alien franchise or the Predator franchise then forget about watching this. This is a family-friendly movie to watch with the family during a lazy afternoon. It was relatively loyal to the novel written by H. G. Wells. It discusses the dangers of imperialism and greed of the era and the pursuit of knowledge at any cost.You have to give credit to Mark Gatiss who despite being in an obviously low-budget movie is able to entertain the viewer. I'm not too familiar with Rory Kinnear's work except that he played a great villain in iBoy and I like his work on the Bond franchise, but he played a great role in this movie too.I have seen Sci-fi movies that have made me nauseous to watch them. However, this movie I believe paid a genuine homage to the 1950-60's science fiction movies. The one thing that I didn't like was the alien's appearance, which was a bit weak and could have used a bit more work.

The First Men in the Moon is a low budget BBC4 adaptation of the HG Wells book. The film stars Mark Gatiss as Cavor and Rory Kinnear as Bedford. Gatiss also adapted the screenplay.The setting is July 1969 on the eve of the first lunar landing as a 90 year old Julius Bedford tells a young lad the story of how two men made the first journey to the Moon back in 1909. He recounts that when he was a young man, he met Professor Cavor who had invented 'Cavorite', a substance that blocked the force of gravity and they worked together to build a ship that would fly them to the moon and encounter the Selenites.The film is an affectionate tribute to the HG Wells book but the pacing is uneven, the drama is low key and the special effects display its low budget origins. Gatiss and Kinnear do their best to elevate the production values but Gatiss screenplay is uneven and the direction does not help too much to make it more memorable.

I had already read the original book by H.G. Wells, so when I found this movie for sale at a local store I bought it.One thing I particularly liked about the movie is the fact it's faithful to the original story, only leaving out a few details (for example, in the book Cavor and Bedford get lost and start hallucinating after eating some of the plants on the moon before being captured) and not adding too much new material (just enough to explain why the moon has no atmosphere anymore). That seems to be a rarity for adaptations of H.G. Wells-stories, because the most well known adaptations of his books are either modernized versions of the story (War of the Worlds) or add a lot of new plot elements (The Time Machine).The special effects are decent enough. It is a television movie after all, so you can expect it won't have the same production values as a Hollywood blockbuster. One thing the movie could have done without however is the short dream sequence Bedford has when he just escaped from the moon, which is filmed in the style of the old silent movie "A Trip to the Moon".Overall, this is a movie that a fan of H.G. Wells' works should see at least once.

It's only been on for 15 minutes and I love it! Thankyou Mark Gatiss for finding this brilliant novel, and presumably the previous film version, and remaking it for today. Clever and funny and hopefully immensely sad ( haven't got to that bit yet.....)it tells of before we knew more than that the stars twinkled and other worlds existed, and chances were that aliens lived in darkest Africa. If you've ever loved Edwardian schoolboy stories, or looked for adventure in everyday happenings - or imagined yourself living in a time when there was no cynicism, Science was King, and literally ANYTHING was possible - then enjoy this. The acting is good too - it's like tome travel....