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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A decent second half saves this Italian sci-fi release, 14 Jan 2006
Halfway through Assignment: Outer Space (also known as Space Men), I thought this Italian effort had to be the worst, most boring science fiction movie I had ever seen in my life. Then a funny thing happened – the story suddenly became interesting, a couple of the characters actually acquired something resembling a personality, and I actually had to begin rooting for the annoying reporter character who made the first forty-five minutes such an insufferably painful experience. I'm not going to declare the movie good, but neither am I going to declare it bad. It is interesting in its own peculiar ways, and – though I hate to admit it – I actually enjoyed it.Here's the basic story. Roy Peterson (Rick Van Nutter) plays an annoying reporter sent into deep space for a story on the guys manning the space stations. None of the astronauts want him there, especially the station commander – and that's even before they learn first-hand just what a pain in the patootie he really is. Peterson's behavior doesn't help, as he's a know-it-all who doesn't believe in asking permission to do whatever he wants to do. When the base commander receives urgent orders to travel to Mars, Peterson uses his connections to get himself invited along. He doesn't know that it is a secret mission to save the Earth from a rogue space station rushing toward it; radiating incredible heat for a radius of 5,000 miles, it will turn the Earth into a blob of boiling mud once it goes into orbit. Good old Earth looks like it's down for the count on this one. It's going to take a miracle to get out of this jam, as all the bravery and heroics in the world can't seem to penetrate the heat shield and stop the tin can of death from its fateful rendezvous with the Earth. You don't see a lot of Italian science fiction films from the 1960s. Assignment: Outer Space was, in fact, one of the pioneering efforts. The brainchild of Antonio Margheriti, this 1960 film was shot and completed (and that includes the special effects) in a mere 20 days for less than $30,000. The color of this film is so faded that I spent most of its 73 minutes trying to figure out whether or not I was actually watching a black and white print. The special effects may be laughable today, but some (certainly not all) of them really weren't bad at all for their time (1960). The explosion shots are pretty weak, the Mars scenes are best left forgotten (it's amazing how a moon can sneak up on you when you're not paying attention), but at least some thought went into many of the spaceship/space station shots (featuring vehicle separations, landings, spacewalks, and even a deep space refueling). Here's a tidbit of trivia I found fascinating: knowing that viewers would undoubtedly look for the wires above the models, Margheriti attached wires to the bottoms of his models and filmed everything upside down. Brilliant!
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