Rocketship X-M (1950)

Too much of everything

Excellent but underrated film

Beautiful, moving film.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I've been reading some of the reviews here and am bemused by the number of times Destination Moon is mentioned as a rival product. In England the two films were shown as a double bill so by definition there was no rivalry as audiences were not asked to see one at the expense of the other. As to the film itself, seen today it's ludicrous and lacks credibility. The crew of the spaceship wear their ordinary clothes and are firmly anchored to the floor and free to move as they will without 'floating' i.e. no account is taken of the effects of gravity. Also conveniently ignored is how they eat, drink, and go to the toilet. Rather than a computer or even push buttons the ship is manoeuvred by levers that resemble the landing-gear controls of an airplane. Okay, maybe in 1950 audiences were happy to swallow all this but then is then and now is now.

This is simply one of the best science fiction movies ever filmed. Excellent direction, intelligent script, and superb performances from an outstanding cast make for a masterpiece in the genre. While obviously low budget, the producers make the best of what they have to work with and they do so brilliantly. From start to finish, imaginative sequences are presented with stunning effectiveness. The location shooting in Death Valley mimics perfectly what the Martian landscape would be envisioned as in 1950. This film serves as a cautionary tale as well, with the fate of the civilization on Mars being tied to a nuclear apocalypse. The cast is uniformly excellent and the existential closing scene with the two leads is one of the most shocking and effective ever filmed. The dialog is realistic and profound and certainly unforgettable. It is a sequence, like many in this picture, which will both disturb and uplift. Rocket Ship XM is an underrated motion picture, far ahead of its time, made with passion and imagination. Even with somewhat primitive special effects, this remains on an intellectual par with some of the more thoughtful science fiction ever produced in Hollywood.

*Spoiler/plot- Rocketship X-M, 1950, During the very early years of the Space Race, an American scientific group designs and crews a spaceship to go to the moon. However during the mission an incident occurs and they are knocked unconscious. The ship overshoots the moon, heading for Mars. They decide to land on Mars. They find evidence of a dead, advanced, and human-like civilization and several hostile Martians. Only a few of the crew survive a martian attack to leave Mars for their trip back to Earth. And the rocket ship crashes back to Earth with no survivors.*Special Stars- Osa Massen, Lloyd Bridges, Noak Beery Jr, Hugh O'Brian, Morris Ankrum, John Emery.*Theme- Hope and progress in scientific matters is the best motivation for success.*Trivia/location/goofs- B & W. This was a low-budget rival for theater tickets when George Pal's expensive film, 'Destination Moon' came out near the same time. The Martian scenes were originally tinted red to add to the viewer's appreciation & drama and this film's Martian location is California's famous other-worldly Red Rock Canyon of HWY 395, outside Ridgecrest CA. With a very early role for Hugh o'Brian, viewers should watch for his 'beefcake' scenes near the movie's end. The film was re-cut in the 1980's to take advantage of better & modern film Efx shots replacing the very dated old V-2 rocket stock footage. Some of the 1980's footage is still in the film and not all removed. in the rocket ship Mar's landing & take-off sequences and Earth landing. There's a longer version of this film with more scenes about the doomed Martian civilization and it's destruction. That version seems to have been lost. These dramatic scenes are in error with science: When the first stage is jettisoned, it could not overtake the main powered stage & cause a collision. Also since gravity on Mars is half of the Earth, the martians throwing rocks at the crew would not be so deadly to kill. There is no rain on Mars. There is an inconsistency or screen continuity between spaceship designs in the film from WW2 V-2 and sleek bullet shaped spacecraft substituted in the 1980 film scene re-shoots.*Emotion- A very dramatic and memorable film about 1950's space travel to the moon. An excellent cast of B-Movie lead and character actors support an interesting script well on camera. Unfortunately this film was overshadowed and often confused with George Pal's film that had similar plot but more expensive production elements. While others were focusing on the moon, this film goes one better and deals with Mars. This is a fun and exciting film of a different time in space science.

When I saw this as a young teen (early 1950s, on broadcast television), I was immensely moved by the tragic love story, immensely glad to find--finally--some movie out there actually saying what most of us growing up in the shadow of the Bomb were secretly feeling: that nuclear war was hardly a help to sacrosanct "National Security" but, rather, a threat to all life on Earth; just as the explorers in Rocketship XM were to find on Mars, nuclear bombs could indeed destroy a civilization, turn a world to desert. I don't think it was mere teenage romanticism that made the lovers' heroic, passionate, tragic deaths so unforgettable, either; this was a film about the struggle of life against doom. And I am delighted to learn, here on IMDb, that the film was written by Dalton Trumbo, the politically astute author whose novel Brave Cowboy, as the film Lonely Are the Brave, with its anti-Establishment hero riding his horse toward Mexico and shooting down the pursuing police helicopter, ushered in, for some of us in Berkeley, California, in early autumn 1964, the whole Movement era.