This Island Earth

The best element in This Island Earth (1955) is the evocative title. I’ve always liked that title and last night had a chance to see the film for the first time. In part I was encouraged by an August 22 New York Times review of the newly released DVD that called the film “among the most poetic and dreamlike of 50’s fantasies, full of imagery both wonderfully inventive (the matte paintings that represent the surface of the planet Metalluna, under constant asteroid attack) and pointedly banal (the flying saucer has a polished wooden floor)."

Like most science fiction films of that decade, This Island Earth reflects growing awareness of and concern about science, cosmology, nuclear power, war, and our place in the universe. It shows the obvious mark of the UFO paranoia of those years.

This film is one of the first, if not the first, science fiction films to have a plot that does not involve alien monsters terrorizing earthlings. The plot centers on an alien laboratory hidden in Georgia that recruits earth scientists to conduct research into nuclear energy. The home planet of the aliens is about to run out of energy, most of the alien scientists have been killed in an interstellar war, and the earth scientists are the planet’s last hope.

In the film, the lead alien is named Exeter (Jeff Morrow). He has snow-white hair and an elongated and distorted forehead. He talks like a fusion of Ralph Waldo Emerson, an insurance salesman, and a motivational speaker.

The two best science fiction films from the 1950s in my mind are The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951—one of the best science fiction films ever) and Forbidden Planet (1956). Both are inventive, well made, and highly intelligent. They were clearly groundbreaking films, along with Destination Moon (1950). This Island Earth doesn’t measure up—the special effects are dated, the script weak, the overall tone of the film banal. The acting is poor, and the dialogue is poorly paced. In one scene the lead characters are informed that their brains must be erased—they seem totally unfazed. It's simply a dated film, and the virtues that it does have do not overcome the pervasive flaws.

This Island Earth was based on a novel by Raymond F. Jones, a largely forgotten science fiction writer of the 1950s and 1960s. I don't know his work, but based on what I have read about him, especially his interest in genuine scientific problems, I may have a look at this novel.