A Cold War classic and a good candidate for the best UFO film ever made. It’s also among the early manifestations of Hollywood’s sci-fi craze of the 1950s. In those films, space aliens are typically a metaphor for the Russians. They’re here to take over. They want to thwart our scientific advances. They want to sneak into our neighborhoods undercover (like spies) and wreak havoc from within.
Here though, the aliens are actually the good guys and it’s the lame-brained humans who are the villains. All that Klaatu the Nice Man From Outer Space (Michael Rennie) wants to do is warn planet Earth that there’s going to be trouble if they take their war-mongering nature and atom bombs into the cosmos. He also wants to talk with Earth’s leaders and share some of the secrets of the universe—but NOPE. Just a few minutes after he lands his saucer in Washington DC, the Army shoots at him. It isn’t long before they’re chasing him all over town and trying to kill him. And all before he’s even able to speak his piece.
The story is simple and engrossing. There’s not an ounce of fat on the whole film. It snaps along nicely with a great Bernard Herrmann score that laces theremin quivers with orchestral bombast. From the film’s first minute, director Robert Wise sucks us into watching a world that’s gathered around their TVs and radios to hear reports on the approaching flying saucer and he doesn’t let us go until it’s all over.