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Destination Moon Movie Review

Destination Moon is a 1950 science fiction film directed by Irving Pichel. It is a film that did not age well, but it is interesting for many things that it actually predicted.

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“I know one thing: unless these pills work,

space travel isn’t going to be… popular“

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Charles, a rocket scientist, and a group of rocket developers try to launch a space ship to land on the moon. This movie came out 19 years before the actual Moon landing, thus it’s an interesting film to watch as it can be considered a science drama nowadays much more than a SF picture. Obviously, they got some things wrong here, but most of the things they predicted quite successfully.

They predicted the Space Race and how Americans and Russians will engage in this quest solely for political reasons. They also predicted how most of the journey would look like including the escape velocity, the rocket fuel and Moon itself, which actually looked great and very realistic in its mountains and dry basin terrain. The movie undoubtedly deserved its VFX Oscar as it looks fantastic for its time.

The problem here lies in pacing and characterization. The actors are unfamiliar to me, and though they are serviceable, the roles are quite weak and lacking in personality. One of the four is memorable just for a different accent and for being a comic relief basically, but he isn’t particularly funny regardless. The others are indistinguishable from one another.

Destination Moon is also paced weakly. The movie is both uninvolving and lacking in thrills, which is a problem for a fantastical story. The editing, directing and the overall script are all pretty good as is the dialogue, but the movie lacked more memorable genre thrills with the Moon scenes even being somewhat anti-climactic in nature.

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This is the type of sci-fi movie that focuses much more on the sci end of things, which I appreciated, but because this story is now in the past as it did happen in our lifetime, it is interesting mostly to see what they got right than for anything else. The true highlight for me as an animation fan was the whole section with Woody Woodpecker. It was funny, charming and wonderfully executed, being pleasantly reminiscent of all those educational animated shorts released back then.

Destination Moon is a SF movie that did not age well for obvious reasons, but it is still interesting to see how much this film actually predicted about the eventual Moon landing. Slow pacing, anti-climactic ending and weak characters aside, the emphasis on science in its screenplay was fascinating, the Woody Woodpecker segment was endearing and the Oscar-winning VFX were great for its time.

My Rating – 3.5