Destination Moon (film)
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| Destination Moon | |
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 Destination Moon DVD cover |
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| Directed by | Irving Pichel |
| Produced by | George Pal |
| Written by | Robert A. Heinlein James O'Hanlon Rip Van Ronkel |
| Music by | Leith Stevens |
| Cinematography | Lionel Lindon |
| Editing by | Duke Goldstone |
| Release date(s) | 1950 |
| Running time | 91 min. |
| Country | USA |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Destination Moon is a 1950 science fiction film directed by Irving Pichel. The movie was filmed in Technicolor and runs for 92 minutes.
Destination Moon was the first major science-fiction film produced in the United States, and won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects (Lee Zavitz). The noted science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein contributed significantly to the script and invented many of the special effects. He also published, about the same time as the release of the film, Destination Moon, a short story of the same name that was based on the screenplay. Rather than a drama, the film more closely resembles a documentary or a propaganda piece, and it was promoted through an unprecedented onslaught of publicity in the print media. Seven years before Sputnik, the movie clearly spells out a rationale for the space race: the bad guys (clearly the communists) are sabotaging the American space project, and if we don't beat them to the moon, they'll make a base there to drop bombs on us, and take over the world.
The films producer, George Pál, later produced When Worlds Collide (1951), War of the Worlds (1953), and The Time Machine (1960).
Four American astronauts blast off from the Mojave Desert and fly to the Moon (before the Russians get there). They establish a base, but are not certain they have enough fuel to return to Earth...
This film features the notion that US private industry will take it upon itself to fund and produce the first spacecraft to reach the moon, given the Soviet threat at the time, and then the US government will bring itself to buy or lease the machinery. Visionary factory owners are shown trying to raise money amongst themselves to do this. The fictional rocket uses nuclear thermal propulsion, a method that has not been employed in any real launches to date.
It includes an animated segment of Woody Woodpecker illustrating the basics of space flight.
Although there were no scenes of the rocket being constructed, a Douglas aircraft plant in Southern California was shown with workers examining a model of the nuclear spacecraft. The only plot element in the picture is that once on the moon, they do not have enough fuel to return, and so must remove a good deal of equipment from the ship. This movie was not the first such to hit the screens, however; Rocketship X-M stole its thunder. The sets and costumes were used in cheap films subsequently, and even appear in the second episode of The Time Tunnel. Both Destination Moon and Rocketship X-M are polemical films, but with almost diametrically opposed messages: where Rocketship X-M contains a seriously intended antinuclear message, Destination Moon has a nuclear-powered spacecraft taking off in defiance of a court order, and depicts the court order as inspired by irrational fear.
The relationship between the film and the novel Rocket Ship Galileo exists, but is very weak. In the novel, the astronauts are high school boys led by an older scientist, the enemies are the Nazis rather than the Soviets, and the emphasis is on conflict with them. In the movie, sabotage is only vaguely hinted at, the concept of a space race is introduced, the voyage is a massive industrial undertaking, and the plot revolves around the dangers of the voyage. A common element in both stories is that the rocket takes off in defiance of a court order. The movie in fact more similar to Heinlein's novella The Man Who Sold the Moon, which according to its copyright date was written by 1949, although it wasn't published until 1951, the year after Destination Moon came out.
[edit] Radio adaptation
Episode 12 of the Dimension X radio series was called Destination Moon and was based on Heinlein's input to the script of the movie.
