Rating: Summary: Must have Review: This is a must-have for those interested in older Sci-Fi films, the space program, or film buff completists. The film is one of the first sf films in technicolor (including a Woody Woodpeckier animated sequence), and won an Academy Award for best special effects. It also lead to an award for the writer, Robert Heinlein, from NASA, over 35 years later.
Rating: Summary: A Must For Any Serious Collector Review: This is a significant movie in the history of science fiction cinema, but it's hit and miss as a movie. The special effects, especially the matte paintings by Chesley Bonestell, are outstanding, but the story is pretty thin and the characters are strictly two dimensional. It was one of the first movies to treat space travel scientifically and that was both a good and bad thing. It created a sense of reality in the story that is fairly effective, but at the same time some of the exposition is pretty dry (even Woody Woodpecker can only do so much with it) and the big crisis at the end of the movie doesn't involve us as much as it should.The DVD is also hit and miss. When it's good, the video is pretty impressive for a 50 year old movie, but there are a lot of frames marred by scratches. The color is true and the picture is sharp but the scratches become distracting at times. The audio also displays a surprising amount of noise for a DVD transfer. It's a shame this movie hasn't been restored to better condition. There are no extras except for an interesting printed history of the film on the despised snap case. Despite my caveats, I do think this is a must for any serious collector of sci-fi film. As others have commented, Destination Moon made space travel believable to the public and paved the way for the real space program. And it is especially desirable for any Heinlein fan. Even with its faults, this is certainly the best treatment his work has had on film so far.
Rating: Summary: Magnificent!-Jamie Teller, 13 Review: This is a very strong movie about the first trip to the moon. The acting ranges from melodramatic to hilarious. The special effects are about 90% believable. All in all, the flaws are negligible, and one can enjoy 90 minutes of entertainment, listening to one of the best music scores ever composed.
Rating: Summary: Excellent, serious sci-fi movie Review: This is one of the first science-fiction movies released in the USA, and the plot and storyline are far more accurate and serious than later films of the same genre. Since many of the events depicted here actually happened, I wonder if it's fair to describe "Destination Moon" as science fiction. I'm sure some of the engineering aspects of the movie were inaccurate. Anyway, there are no monsters or space aliens here; rather the story deals with a group of men who want to reach the moon and the obstacles they encounter. Unlike many space movies, "Destination Moon" accurately depicts the weighlessness of space and other dangers. The addition of Dick Wesson in this movie is somewhat peculiar; I guess the producers wanted to liven things up a bit. Anyway, this is an above-average sci-fi movie that deserves to be seen at least once.
Rating: Summary: WARNING - NOT CAPTIONED Review: This otherwise excellent Geroge Pal movie, fully restored, and one of the only ones where Robert Heinlein participated in the production, is useless to anyone with a hearing impairment. Nade Williams Collections, Corinth Films and Image Entertainment have produced this movie and another like it, (Rocket XM) which I purchased, and neither of them are captioned. Having recently lost my hearing, I depend on Closed Captioning for nearly everything on TV or video. Therefore, these old classics which I wanted for my own are worthless in their present condition.
Rating: Summary: kind of fun to watch, much better than some early scifi Review: You have a patriotic industrialist to do the job the U.S. govt. couldn't, that's a common theme of the time as were many other elements of the movie. In spite of that it was a fun movie to watch, even with the cheap spacesuits(of course no one had ever seen one in 1950)and the inaccurate lunar surface (hadn't really seen that either)Actually the Woody Woodpecker cartoon shown to garner fellow industrialist's support early in the movie was the weirdest part. Today that would get you less respect than showing slides of the Face on Mars, I can't imagine anyone ever really doing that.
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