Customer Reviews

Conquest of Space [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

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"Man's every move, his every thought, his every action is in there somewhere, recorded or predicted. Every move except... this one. According to the Bible, Man was created on the Earth. Nothing is ever mentioned of his going to other planets. Not one blessed word."

The least regarded and least successful of George Pal's 50s sci-fi films, Conquest of Space is a much better film than its reputation. The first of an intended trilogy than never got off the ground when this flopped rather spectacularly, it's an admirable attempt to make a thinking man's science fiction film at a time when the genre was obsessed with alien invasions, flying saucers and filling the local drive-ins. It's certainly a 1950s view of the future, but it's tempered with some consideration of the wider consequences and, despite the 50s melodramatics, it's never as cut and dried simplistic as Danny Boyle's Sunshine, which reduced Pal's debate between science and religion into a shoddily executed slasher movie. Early on the film sets out is stall in examining the physical and psychological pressures of working in space in a way no film has really attempted to deal with since, and there's an element of ambiguity over how much that affects the film's attempt to address the very real debate at the time between scientists and theologians so that, when Walter Brooke's commander of a mission to Mars starts to question whether a God who limited man's dominion to the four corners of the Earth would regard what he is doing as blasphemy, the film does actually address the issue, making a case for and against, rather than just using it as an excuse for a killing rampage. Throughout, the film never quite takes a stand either way: while Brooke is clearly having a breakdown, the film doesn't shy away from his argument, the section on Mars veering from godforsaken desolation to absurdly miraculous to disastrous, ending with the ground literally falling away beneath its explorers' feet.

Despite its shortcomings, the film also influenced some better films as well: the lengthy preamble on a wheel in space where astronauts are in training and assembling a spacecraft couldn't have gone unnoticed by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, though despite the theological overtones of the second act, this is a much more practical affair than a mystical one. The space program may be multinational but it's clearly a military operation and one that's driven by the need to replenish Earth's diminishing natural resources. And while it may have its mind on higher things, it still populates the cast with standard service movie characters - Eric Fleming's General's reluctant son all but Shanghaied onto the program, Mickey Shaughnessy's devoted Irish sergeant, Sheldon Leonard's Bwooklin comic relief, Ross Martin's dead meat nice guy (you know when they wheel his mother on to TV to urge him to come home that he's not going to make it to the end titles). Yet even here it surprises, only ten years after WW2 giving the film's sense of hope and purpose - and its best speech - to Benson Fong. It may be the work of four writers and have some hokey lines like "We'll have no unnecessary floating aboard this ship" or "Set gyros for Mars!", but for all the critical brickbats it received the screenplay is a lot better than you might expect in places, never seeming rushed despite its comparatively short 80-minute running time, rarely overexplaining the science but taking most of it for granted as the characters would and keeping the plentiful special effects from entirely overshadowing the story. These may be dated and inconsistent by modern standards (some, like the wheel, must have seemed pretty poor even in 1955), and the very visible matte lines are a problem but at their best there is an impressive and distinctive look to the film that owes much to Chesley Bonestell and Willy Levy's non-fiction book `imagining' the future of space exploration (though Bonestell claimed never to have seen the film after it departed from his Martian designs). You even get giant screen LCD TVs some 45 years before they became commonplace!

It's easy to see why this was such a resounding flop at the time. Pal was attempting to address a debate that the audience simply wasn't interested in, in a genre that serious critics simply didn't take seriously, satisfying neither. It's just as easy to see why the film's dated look and stock characterisation has prevented it from gaining any kind of reputation in the five decades since. It may be inconsistent and never quite pull it off, but you can't fault the ambition to make a big-budget science fiction film with something on its mind. Conquest of Space may be a minor part of Pal's science-fiction canon, but it's certainly a more interesting and engrossing film than its reputation implies.

No extras on Paramount's Region 1 NTSC DVD, but a decent widescreen transfer.

This George Pal production from 1955 is directed by Byron Haskin whose other credits as director include War Of The Worlds and From The Earth To The Moon and is, unfortunately, more the standard of the latter than the former.To put it simply - it's pretty dull.

It starts off encouragingly enough; a rocket is sent to Mars manned by an international crew. Naturally, the commander is American, an army General,who brings along his son,an army Captain (due to low budgets and small casts nepotism is rampant in nearly all 1950's sci-fi).All goes well, if not very interestingly, on their journey, but as they make their final approach General Merrit suddenly suffers a religous conversion and tries to sabotage the mission.

Naturally, he doesn't succeed or all those patrons who'd paid to see special fx of Mars would probably have wrecked the movie house, but what little fx they, and we, do get to see are mainly of a space station, a revolving wheel al la 2001, which in fairness are mostly pretty good. The scenes on Mars are fairly perfunctory and only occupy the last few minutes of the movie before they set off home again.The other 70 odd (in all senses of the word) minutes are taken up with a deeply pedestrian melodrama.I'd buy this if it was cheap, but otherwise I wouldn't bother, because it's certainly nowhere near as entertaining as Earth V The Flying Saucers,Them,Rocketship XM,When Worlds Collide or any of the first rank cheapo(ish) 50's sci-fi.

ok this is a chinese import but it is still and excellent copy great sound and options to turn the chinese/korean subtitles off and then enjoy this classic sci-fi tale of mans first mars flight superb effects of the wheel in space and the mars ship and credable in space shots which for the time are very good, well worth adding to the collection after war of the worlds i think this was the second sci-fi film i remenmber as a kid buy it enjoy it

The truth is I really hate giving this movie a mediocre rating. Because there is so much I genuinely admire in it.

Perhaps the best place to start is with Destination Moon, which the producer, George Pal, released five years earlier. Destination Moon is a pure piece of hard science fiction. It's not a film with much interest in human relationships or emotions, and doesn't pretend otherwise. And taken simply for what it is, Destination Moon is superb. Made in the 1940's and released in 1950, seven years before the launch of Sputnik, it nevertheless depicted space travel in a serious and realistic way - and as something that could actually be achieved in the near-term. For 1950, this was an incredible triumph of imagination and insight. And blessed with the talents of famed space artist Chesley Bonestell, Destination Moon was at times truly awe inspiring to look upon. The lunar landscape backdrop is breathtaking even today.

Five years on and still two years before the launch of Sputnik, Pal released this film: Conquest of Space. And almost everything I just said about Destination Moon could equally well be applied to Conquest of Space. Judged purely as a piece of hard science fiction, Conquest of Space is also a masterpiece. It should further be added that the special effects are even more impressive than those found in Destination Moon.

But Conquest of Space tries to be more than this. It tries to tell a story of real psychological depth. It deals with how humans might respond to the demands and deprivations of long term space travel. In this it is clearly influenced by the problem of what was then termed "battle fatigue" (today we would say post traumatic stress) that would have been so familiar from WWII and the war in Korea.

It is in trying to tell this more psychologically complex tale that Conquest of Space gets into trouble. To be brutally frank, the talents of the actors and the screenwriters simply aren't up to the task. The workman-like performances (and in this pre Sigourney Weaver era, they were all men) that were entirely adequate, even appropriate in Destination Moon just don't deliver the goods in Conquest of Space. Which is why, as much as I hate to say it, when judged as a movie, Conquest of Space falls flat.

And yet... Even given all this, as I said in the beginning, I still find much to admire in this work. It certainly does not deserve the obscurity it languishes in today. For all its flaws, I would unhesitatingly recommend Conquest of Space to any serious fan of hard science fiction.

Theo.