My Favourite Movies: This Island Earth

On his return from a conference on the application of nuclear energy, Dr Cal Meacham’s plane suffers a fatal engine failure. Sure of his certain death he is astonished when control is restored and his plane lands itself safely while pulsing with a ghostly green light. If that wasn’t strange enough on the return to his lab he discovers that requested parts for his equipment have been replaced by ‘beads’ which are both hundreds of times smaller and much more powerful. Intrigued he orders more parts and, with some help, builds an Interocitor – an odd looking communication device. As the screen fills with the image of the strange Exeter (played by Jeff Morrow), Meacham is hooked by his burning curiosity. Accepting a job offer at a secret lab he has little idea of what he is letting himself in for.

I can’t remember how old I was when I first saw this classic 1955 Sci-Fi B movie. I was probably in my early teens I guess. My Dad, being a fan of such things, was constantly watching such movies on TV and I grew to love this genre as much (or maybe even more) than he did. This was definitely a cut above the B movies of the time. Although crude by our standards, the SFX are still pretty good especially when you take into account the fairly low budgets of these movies. One of the many things I liked about this film is the fact that the scientists at the heart of the movie – at least to begin with – actually acting like I would have expected scientists to act. They hypothesised, they experimented and the tested things. They asked lots of questions. Of course being very much of its time it also had more than its fair share of annoying moments – topped off by the behaviour of Dr Ruth Adams, a physics PhD played by Faith Domergue, who not only performed no science on screen but spent most of her time mooning over the hero and running around screaming at the monsters. Given the fact that she would’ve had to prove herself time and again in a very male environment I’d have thought she would have been made of sterner stuff!

The aliens themselves, distinguishable by their enlarged foreheads (and presumably large brains behind them), were OK as aliens go. They were a rather arrogant lot on the whole – especially as they were getting their asses kicked in some kind of interplanetary war. The war itself, what we saw of it, was well handled and had some neat SFX to back it up. Of course most of the science in this SF movie didn’t make a whole lot of sense – having to travel through a ‘heat barrier’ similar to a sound barrier was just silly. The compression/decompression idea was an interesting one except for the obvious flaw that you really couldn’t have some people who had and some people who hadn’t decompressed without bad things happening to them. But such things can be forgiven as signs of the times. All in all this is a fun, if dated, romp with plenty of action and (once you suspend your disbelief enough) a half decent story-line. Definitely one for a wet Sunday afternoon and a movie that should be in any self respecting SF buffs DVD library.