I did not know much about this movie, but it is one of 25 Paramount movies that I could get for free for buying a gallon of milk at Walmart. Actually I got 5 movies per gallon and I got two gallons, so I was picking almost half of the movies offered. This one got reasonably good grades and sounded interesting: a sci-fi flick about the earth being destroyed and scientists building a rocket to escape their fate. No wonder I wanted to be a scientist when I was a kid.
Made before the space program really got going, but after the sound barrier was broken, the science is pretty weak. The movie is low budget so there are no big stars (other than the incoming star that is going to destroy earth) and the special effects are obviously little models. Still, it is fun seeing dated science and a 1951 view of space exploration. Disappointingly, most of the movie takes place in offices as they discover the star and plan what to do. The ship they build can only hold 40 people, so most everyone on earth is going to be toast. It does bring up some classic dilemmas that are dealt with reasonably well. Still, the plot isn’t that intricate and there just isn’t that much drama considering the world is about to end. It was still worth watching and some aspects are kind of clever.
Despite this being a really old movie, I don’t want to give away the plot in my review. What I thought was clever was that this incoming star of destruction would have a planet orbiting it and they could hitch a ride on it just before earth is destroyed. What made less sense is they waited until a couple of weeks after that planet passed to launch just before the sun, meaning they would have to catch up with the planet? I think it was just to add some suspense, though the movie has very little suspense.
The whole setup is they are making a modern Noah’s Ark, but since a spacecraft is involved, weight is at a premium. And they take horses? Also, it seem like you would want specific skills from the crew rather than just having a lottery of your workers. And maybe let some black people go, but instead the entire crew is white. And of course people are going to try to take the ship. If that was the only ship with a chance, then even the government would try to take it. But so soon after World War II, the government wasn’t the bad guy yet.
Another is issue I had was they couldn’t look at this planet and see if it is habitable or not? It was their only hope admittedly, but why bother if the planet is Venus and you can’t possibly live on it? I did like that one guy was getting ready to walk off the ship onto the new planet and for a second others acted like he needed to test the air and he shrugged it off and said this was their only chance regardless, which was true. Also I was thinking they could go with an Adam and Eve kind of thing like Twilight Zone might do (and they are actually landing on Earth). Or, as a dark twist, have the ship pass a load of people from the new planet who think their chances are better on earth and then everybody gets wiped out. Or have people already on the planet. I’m not sure why they portrayed the planet as rotating around its star faster than earth.
Any time you have a movie like this, it certainly opens a big can of worms, so the writer has to decide where that focus is going to be. They touched on a number of things, but the main story seemed to revolve around a romance and the conniving evil capitalist (though there were benevolent capitalists too). The astronomers are initially called out as crackpots, but it seems like they had good evidence and eventually the scientific community agreed with them. That seems like it would have happened in a matter of days since it doesn’t take long to confirm astronomical observations.
Reading about the book that the movie was based on helps. Originally it was a gas giant planet and a terrestial planet, not a sun. And the planet had been inhabited, but they all died when the two planets were ripped away from their sun. In the book, there is a close call, but the planets are captured by the sun’s gravity which then makes the big planet intersect earth, but the little planet is now in a stable orbit. That may be why the mountains in the background on the new planet seem to have artificially made features (like windows or columns). The movie left out a lot, even left a lot out that was in the Wikipedia article. Described as a sci-fi epic, the movie is less than 90 minutes long though.