A Trip to the Moon, Movie Review Example

Introduction

The Film entitled ‘A Trip to the Moon’ was made in 1902, written by George Melies, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.  The film starred Victor Andre and Bleuette Bernon.  It was a fairly advanced film for its year and had the basic plot of a group of astronomers who took a trip to the moon in order to meet its inhabitants. This film captured the imagination of the audience in terms of man’s ambition to reach the moon in order to find new life forms.  The moon was personified in the face of a person and the rocket resembled a huge hollow bullet which shot the moon in the eye.

Reaction

Landing on the moon in this way portrays a sense of aggression and hurt to our closest planet.  We go not as explorers but more as conquerors.  This is met with equal aggression by the attack of the moon men in the crater until the humans manage to escape and win victory over the King of the Moon men.  Again this illustrates the superiority of humans over other forms of alien life and as such banishes our fear of being insignificant to other more advanced extraterrestrial life forms. In a sense it is an example of the arrogance of man.

In 1902 the pictures and imagery must have stirred the imagination and paved the way for the interest in the conquest of space travel.  In one scene the astronomers bashed the moon men with their umbrellas and the aliens vanished in a puff of smoke. What seems nonsense by today’s standards must have confused and fascinated the audiences in 1902.  Melies created an environment in pictures that had never been seen before and at the very least this captured the imagination of the viewers. A comparison might be to how viewers saw the early Star Trek films and how sophisticated these seemed, yet some 20 years on the technology looked so dated and ridiculous to the point of being laughable.  What we have achieved in technology and space exploration over the last 20 years has been nothing short of remarkable.  Yet we owe much to the early vision of people like George Melies, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells who captured the early imaginations of space discovery.