If you’re looking for campy, outrageous 60s sci-fi or a breezy adventure flick, this first film from Italian genre maven Antonio Margheriti is the last place you should go. The pace is slow, the budget is low and the effects are your regular tin can, pie plate take on outer space (which I love). What saves it is that there is a twinkle of ambition here to make something that kinda sorta approaches real science-fiction. This doesn’t have space monsters; it has technical talk about how rocket ships might work. It doesn’t have laser fights; it has tension among a crew of scientists who are way out there in the cosmos, bumping into Mars and Venus. It’s still pulp and not serious enough to accurately depict space as a soundless vacuum, but it is an actual science-fiction film, not a horror film, action flick or western with space suits.
The villain is technology. After about a half-hour of getting-to-know-ya’s with the main characters (a pompadour-sporting journalist who tags along with the space crew for a press article, the stern team leader who thinks that our reporter is a nuisance who’s getting in the way of their work and the sole woman on the ship for a little romantic tension), something of consequence finally happens.
Another ship from Earth out there has a mishap and their crew dies. The ship’s “electronic brain” then takes over and makes a beeline back to the home planet, but there’s a problem: due to B-movie science, that unmanned ship is going to crash land and explode on impact and somehow destroy the world. I don’t get how that’s possible, but who am I to argue with rocket scientists in the year 2116?
The good news is that this means that our heroes finally have something to do other than bicker with each other on cheap studio sets.
Relative to literature, it’s a very 1930s vision. Its kicks are simple. “Outer space, wow!” about sums it up. That’s okay, though. Science-fiction in films has always lagged decades behind literature. Still does, even today. If you like movies, you accept this in order to enjoy yourself.
And this is an enjoyable movie as long as you’re not rarin’ up for a rollercoaster.