H.G Well's First Men in the Moon

No the title is not a typo, I was thrown off at first too. This is actually an old 50's sci-fi I mostly watched because of Ray Harryhausen having worked on it. He is one of pioneers of stop motion animation and I'm a sucker for that shit. I think a lot of it is because I failed so badly at my attempts at it that I love to see it done really well. In my quest to see that, I started looking to the classic Harryhausen movies, and this is the first one I ended up with.

It's always interesting going into a movie you know absolutely nothing about. Where you have no idea what the story will be, who the characters are, or anything at all really. That was the case with this movie. I had never even heard of it before sitting down to watch it so I was going in with a completely blank slate.

The movie tells the story about the first moon landing (which I don't think had actually happened at the time this movie was made) and the Americans that land there. However once they are there they discover a British flag, along with a note indicating that someone else had been there in 1899. So the movie appears to be about a British man telling the story about how he was actually the first person to walk on the moon. It's mostly about how he finds this guy who has built a machine that will take them there, and all of the problems they encounter along the way.

Then the aliens show up.

Yes about halfway through this the movie takes a complete left turn and the inside of the moon turns out to be inhabited by these bizarre looking fly like creatures. There are even these giant (stop motion animated!!!) slugs to contend with as well. This was pretty cool stuff. I was only mildly interested in the first part of the movie but as far as I'm concerned, things really picked up once they actually landed on the moon.

Overall the movie was pretty decent. The stuff on the moon and dealing with the aliens was the coolest stuff, since that's what I was in it for in the first place. Everything leading up to that is interesting, but often pretty boring as well.

6.5/10