Waste of time

Good concept, poorly executed.

Crappy film

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

(Flash Review)This was just shy of 3 hours and felt longer. Uff-dah for a silent film. The duration could have easily been hacked in half and been just as effective. The first overly long and forgettable portion is about a scientific professor who has a goal to prove there is a wealth of gold in the moon's rocks and surface ground. His hypothesis is greeted by skeptical laughter by his peers. Fast forward to the actual voyage to the moon. It was rather amusing and had improved creativity and cinematography than the first long portion. There are portrayals of the takeoff, approach, landing and comical moon adventures. And either Fritz believed there was oxygen on the moon or used that as a way to get the helmets off the actors to show their expressions. Will they find gold? Will they be able to get home to prove the professors hypothesis? Overall, the film dragged on and on and it was not a space adventure version of Fritz's masterwork Metropolis that I had hoped it might be.

This was Fritz Lang's last silent film. It is a science fiction adventure in which a scientist, Professor Georg Manfeldt, had theorized that there were large supplies of gold on the moon. He was ridiculed by his peers and disgraced because of this. However, a wealthy industrialist believes Manfeldt's theory and has been building a rocket to travel to the moon. when a group of wealthy men who control the world's gold supply feel threatened by the possibility the theory may be correct, they threaten to destroy the rocket unless one of their agents, Turner, is allowed to go on the expedition too. Apparently Lang's film got so much right about space travel that the Germans seized the models used in the film as state secrets when they started their own rocket-building program. This film runs 169 minutes and is quite slow in places. It has some very interesting and thrilling scenes, but it is probably one of the weaker of Lang's films that I have seen.

AKA "Woman in the Moon" This is a fun film about a journey to the dark side of the moon to see whether there is gold in them thar hills. It's one of those movies where you talk to the screen throughout, laughing about some of the ideas about space exploration. I was particularly taken with two of the astronauts' matching sweaters. At the same time, the conception of the rocket and rocket launch were eerily prescient. The film also contains a nifty subplot about how international bankers will stop at nothing to gain control of the moon's gold. The chief thug employed by cartel is portrayed by Fritz Rasp who played the pharmacist's assistant in "Diary of a Lost Girl". He is rapidly becoming one of my very favorite screen badies.Unfortunately, this movie runs almost 3 hours. Trimming an hour could only have improved it. I found myself editing in my head as the movie played on and on.

It's about 40 years since the last manned flight left the moon, and 40 years before that "Woman in the Moon" hit the silver screen. So we can admire the prescience of Willy and Werner in their multi-stage rocket and their depiction of zero gravity. But I struggled with the most non-ergometric controls ever engineered, the atmosphere of the moon, the presence of bubbling springs of water, and a divining rod(!?) used to find gold. The film also gets into trouble with its many and varied subplots—the two-men-in-love-with-the-same-woman subplot, the speculators-cornering-the-gold-market subplot, the evil-spy-network subplot, the cute-kid-stowaway subplot… It makes for a long film (my DVD comes in at 149 minutes) and a not very interesting one. The expressionist acting style wears after a while, and the slow-moving plot doesn't help matters. I loved the rocket launch (done by Oskar Fischenger, whose short animation films you should check out), and am able to put up with a fair amount of hokum in the name of entertainment. But this isn't one of Lang's best efforts.