DESTINATION MOON Explained. Groundbreaking Sci-fi!

From time to time, I refer to a film that may not be outstanding compared to other science fiction productions, but is certainly still important enough that it would be a crime to let it gather dust. Such is the groundbreaking Destination Moon from 1950. This year marks its 75th anniversary, and although the production has aged significantly (not only in terms of its production quality), it still contains several important aspects worth our attention.

Let’s imagine this. Let’s transport ourselves to the post-World War II era, around 1946. The conflict has been resolved, and people could part ways. However, while tending to the wounds, the world faced a great challenge, hidden in the question – how to redirect energy so that it can create and conquer, not destroy? The war brought a lot of pain and suffering, but it is also worth emphasizing that it brought significant technological development. German designers of deadly weapons quickly found a new field for realizing their visions, and their workplace became the USA. Space began to appear as a mysterious space, offering the opportunity to prove human power by planting a flag on previously unexplored land. Dreams of its conquest began to sprout slowly, with an awareness of the limitations hanging over them. What was impossible in the 1950s in reality, was however possible for the fantasists – the prophets of space expansion.

It’s not that Destination Moon is the first film to address the topic of traveling to the moon. You surely know that the dream of an expedition to the stars had already been pursued in literature and cinema at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. A symbolic example of this is, of course, A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès. The thing is, that during the early days of cinema, which conventionally lasted until the outbreak of World War II, science fiction content was largely infantilized, focusing more on shocking the audience than offering probable, speculative visions supported by science (this trend, by the way, also became a feature of later genre films). Apart from a few exceptions, there wasn’t much serious approach to the topic. Destination Moon was the first major post-war science fiction film in which the fundamental themes for the genre were supported by expert analyses.

In fact, to be precise, this isn’t the first, but the second post-war space adventure film. The first one was Rocketship X-M, made in the same year, hastily shot in eighteen days, with much smaller funds, clearly relying on the media hype of Destination Moon and trying to latch onto free promotion. It premiered twenty-five days before Destination Moon, and unlike it, it was a deserved box office failure. The audience sensed the fake. They knew which film they were waiting for – the one on the front pages of the newspapers. A film about people who are the first to set foot on the moon was an obvious success for marketers of the time. The intense promotion of the film, both in general family magazines and in many science fiction periodicals, focused on emphasizing the visual setting, Technicolor, and the script created in collaboration with experts. Destination Moon gained such fame even before its premiere that its success seemed certain.

I wonder if the viewers knew back then that the person responsible for the film was a specialist in… puppets. Producer George Pal was a man who had previously worked solely on short animated films called puppetoons (among other things, his expertise in this area contributed to the inclusion of an animated Woody Woodpecker in a scene explaining the intricacies of space flight). After several Oscar nominations for animated films, in 1949 George Pal wanted to focus on producing feature films. He convinced the independent company Eagle-Lion Films to co-finance his first two films. While his family film The Christmas Gift flopped at the box office, Destination Moon became a huge hit. Pal must have felt the market trend, as he would later return to science fiction topics, having a hand in the production of films like Conquest of Space, The War of the Worlds, and The Time Machine.

And what about the experts? Does Destination Moon truly radiate science? Undoubtedly, yes. It must be admitted that even today, from the perspective of a layperson, one can sense in the film the foretaste of the coming hard science fiction, a kind of revolution in the approach to key science fiction issues. Its leading representative, writer Arthur C. Clarke, creator of the Space Odyssey series, once commented on Destination Moon:

It is an incredibly exciting and often very beautiful film – the first journey into space in Technicolor. After years of comic-book treatment of interplanetary travel, Hollywood finally made a serious and scientifically accurate film on this subject, with full cooperation from astronomers and rocket experts. The result is worthy of the great effort that, of course, was involved, and is a tribute to the equally obvious enthusiasm of the people responsible.

It turns out that achieving this effect was made possible through cooperation with another famous science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein (yes, the same one whose novel was later adapted into Starship Troopers). Although George Pal ordered the initial script from James O’Hanlon and Rip Van Ronkel, it was Heinlein who significantly contributed to the final script of Destination Moon, also serving as the film’s technical advisor. Some elements from Heinlein’s earlier works were adapted for the final film script. Rocket Ship Galileo and The Man Who Sold the Moon were used for this purpose (the latter was published only after the film’s release). Interestingly, Heinlein also published a novella based on the film’s script, similarly titled.

Okay, but even if producer George Pal found the money and screenwriters to sketch out the cosmic vision, he still needed someone to guide this project from the director’s chair. That someone turned out to be, again, surprisingly, actor Irving Pichel. In fact, actor and director in one, as this artist, who began his career in the 1920s and 1930s, had already directed dozens of films by the time he took on Destination Moon. A curious fact is that Pichel was on the so-called Hollywood blacklist, where he was listed among the artists and show-business people who collaborated with communists in the 1940s. However, he was never called to testify. He passed away a few years after the release of Destination Moon.

Although the 1950 film turned out to be a box office success, as it managed to turn a $500,000 budget into $5 million in revenue, winning an Oscar for special effects along the way, it still receives critical feedback. Not everyone sees it as a significant work for the genre. To be fair to the critics, it should be noted that not much happens in Destination Moon. It’s just an ordinary trip there and back, devoid of fireworks. With such an approach, we might just as well fail to appreciate the archaic Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station by the Lumière brothers, since it doesn’t show anything groundbreaking and is, moreover, predictably dull. However, I always encourage taking the right perspective in such situations. After all, the films mentioned were a sensation for their audiences precisely because they made an important step in the field of cinematic spectacle. Destination Moon used moving, color images to transform the comic portrayal of space conquest into something that for the first time made the audience take the subject seriously and believe in it.

In the last scene of the film, when the crew is already approaching Earth, the traditional “The End” title card is followed by the phrase “of the Beginning”, signaling the arrival of the space age. The continuation of this story is well-known to us because it is still unfolding, right before our eyes. The Apollo program, initiated by J.F. Kennedy, led to the first moon landing. This took place in 1969, nineteen years after the premiere of Destination Moon, sixty-seven years after A Trip to the Moon, and one hundred and four years after the publication of From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne. I don’t know if the next step for humanity will be the long-announced conquest of Mars, but I know one thing – let’s be careful about what we dream of, because it often comes true.