World Without End (1956)

Memorable, crazy movie

Excellent adaptation.

Disturbing yet enthralling

A Disappointing Continuation

The strength of this movie lies with the story. In the world of story-telling, I give this a ten easily. It fully captures the imagination of the viewer and has some really good points to explore and contemplate on. Space is always an interesting subject and if you add time-travel to it anything goes thus this movie. Who doesn't wonder about what things would be like hundreds of years from now? It is impossible to nail this premise down so we rely on any scenario to get us started. This story does that. These men manage to make it to Mars, map it and start back for home. From there, they encounter the unknown and because they survived it we have a story to be told. Another good thing about this movie is the ending which is left open for the viewer to imagine that anything is possible and it leaves you on that note. This movie also draws on the famous and most necessary theme of a "second chance" something every human being must have and craves. Hindsight sets this up nicely as we all discover what does not work and then we immediately want another opportunity to explore again. This is also known as "another bite of the apple" in our vernacular. Without that opportunity to begin again, our ending is guaranteed. The bible refers to it as "insight" and correctly states without it we will perish. Great movie to eat with while watching with a tasty drink and a snack to follow. If this movie was to be brought current and redone it would be on par with Star Trek or Star Wars as we start to explore the planet Earth all-over again especially after its near demise. Include the mutations of all life, survivor lessons and success stories too. The premise remains open-ended which gives it legs. Enjoy

There was a question in one of the reviews or messages -- If the mutants were watching all the cave entrances, how could the man and woman go out and look at the Moon? Apparently, they were up on a cliff ledge, which was not accessible from the outside. They use Einstein's relativity and time warps sort of merged together. If you go really fast (the rocket frame of reference), your clocks slow down compared to the laboratory frame of reference (like the people on the Earth). So things look normal to the rocket ship passengers, except that when they return to their starting point, many years may have passed by. "Clocks" here include our biological clocks, the motions of atoms, radioactive decay, and so on. So what is a time warp? I don't know. Going forward in time just results from the apparent slowing down of the fast moving clocks. Going backward in time is a different matter, and it is not clear how to do it. The astute reader might ask - Why can't I assume my rocket ship was not moving at all, but it was the Earth that was moving really fast?. Yes, but the tricky part is that this part of relativity assumes a constant speed and direction. The little comment above about returning to your starting point invalidates that - you have accelerated - that is a change in speed and/or direction. The odd trig functions like tanh, sinh and cosh are the hyperbolic functions and deal with the time, length, and apparent mass changes in relativity. So if you fire a fast bullet from a fast rocket, it will not go faster than light. Say .75 c + .75 c = .96 c using the tanh function to add velocities properly. Not 1.5 c. The wimpy men are more the result of inbreeding than lack of sunshine or exercise, which would still be good for them. Adding 4 more men to the mix, one of whom seems virile because he took his shirt off, is not going to save the human race. How could the intelligent humans know about the "exponential time displacement" that happened somewhere near Mars hundreds of years earlier? Why did it happen leaving Mars and not going there? How did the rocket ship explorers change their orbit around Mars from equatorial to polar? That would take a lot of fuel. Rocketship X-M did something like that when they went straight up and then turned right to leave the Earth. Changing the plane of an orbit is a big deal. If you go 1 Planck length in 1 Planck time you are going as fast as you can - at the speed of light (in a vacuum). The gimmick is to use a wormhole (which is warp-like)-- if space itself can go faster than light, then it's OK, or use a tunnel or wormhole, so it is like a shortcut. Then you don't violate the speed rules. It is not clear if we could ever get to the stars or if we are stuck - going there would take thousands of years or more like the Voyager spacecraft. Time will tell (pun intended).

It is not surprising to see how much mankind's (and woman-kind's) knowledge has advanced over the last 60 years but when you watch this movie you will be struck by the blunders that the writers of this mediocre sci-fi movie made. Several examples include things that were known at the time by almost anyone who had taken a high school biology course: These include spiders on the earth of the future who were the size of dogs, which is impossible given the oxygen rate in the atmosphere and the level of planetary gravity on earth which limits the size of spiders all over the world. Another thing is when the space travelers encounter a spider they worry about it "stinging" them when in fact spiders only bite and none have stings. It is like this throughout the movie which makes you wonder who the technical advisers were and what they were smoking. StocktonRob

***SPOILERS*** Top of the line Allied Artists motion picture in both Technicolor and Wide Screen, reserved for the biggest blockbusters of major films studios back in the 1950's, has a quartet of US astronauts end up getting caught in a time warp. This cause their space craft accelerate beyond the speed of light that takes them form the year 1957 to 2508 in a matter of seconds on their maiden flight to Mars as the first men in outer space! Landing on this mysterious and forbidden planet the boys from space John Borden, Hugh Marlow, Dr. Galbarithe,Nelson Leigh, Herbert Ellis, Rod Taylor, & Hank Jaffe, Chris Dark, are at first in the dark to where they are. It's after being attacked by giant spiders as well as mutant and for the most part one eyed cave men that they get the picture, in escaping into an underground cave complex, that the place or planet their on is the good old earth itself!Taken in by the few humans still left on the planet the fly or space boys learn that a nuclear war had broken out in the 22th century and destroyed almost the entire human race. As for the surviving humans lead by the dilapidated and undernourished looking Timmak, Everett Glass, who've over the years had lost their nerve or willingness to fight the mutants and are now satisfied to live out their entire lives underground without as much as even seeing the light of day! It's when the astronauts get a look at the women in the cave who all look like their in their early 20's who just stepped out of a 1950's girlie magazine that they changed their minds about coming back to 20th century earth if that's at all possible. With all the shapely women flocking to the astronauts it's Mories, Booth Colman, one of the wimpy men in the cave , who for some reason all wear shower caps, who plans to discredit the time travelers to his leader Timmak. Mories does this by murdering one of of his fellow futuristic humans James, William Vadder, and then blaming his death on the innocent astronauts.Astronaut John Boden and his men have a tough time proving their innocence but it's young Deena, Lisa Montell, who saw Morise murder James who rats him out to her leader Timmak who was ready to thrown the time traveler out in the wild and at the mercy of the mutant cavemen. This has Morise now exposed as James' murderer run for his life outside the safety of the cave complex only to get caught and brutally beaten to death by the mutant one eye cave-men who were waiting for him outside! By then Borden & Co. finally convinced Timmak and the some 2,000 humans cave dwellers that he's in charge of to finally get their act together, by making and taking up arms, and fight off the mutants before they all end up becoming extinct! In that by them and their offspring's by not getting enough sunlight or vitamin "D" the cave complex populations birth rate has just about dropped to zero!Even though the flight crew were supposed to be future astronauts they wore 10 year old WWII style surplus US Army Air Force bomber and flight jackets not the air tight silvery and robot like astronaut outfits we became used to seeing in the many space flight, by both the US & USSR, over the years since the film was released. There's also Aussie actor Rod Taylor who some four years later would again travel into the future in the movie "The Time Machine" desperately trying to hide his very pronounced Australian accent, and sound American, but being totally unable to do it!