This Island Earth (joseph M. Newman, 1957)

There’s a companion movie to Forbidden Planet that I’ll make my next one, called This Island Earth. It came out a year earlier, and the adline was “two and a half years in the making.” That may well have been true from the time they decided to make it, but I think they were gilding the lily a little… It’s another movie that takes place on another planet, but they saved some money by having the first half of the movie take place on earth and then they go to the other planet, so they take all of their money and put it in one spot. It’s a very stylish movie in the sense that the matte paintings are really cool. It has a 1950s pulp magazine vibe, which is really appropriate since it was based on a pulp novel that appeared in Thrilling Stories or something like that in instalments. It’s not the most sophisticated science fiction movie I’ve ever seen, but it was really impressive to me at the age of 9. The special effects were amazing for the time, and it was a movie that, again, became a kind of a touchstone for people as they were growing up, because there weren’t other movies that tried to engage on that level, science-fiction-wise.