The British people are not playing against stereotypes when they walk out of their moon orb and decide it will be a nice colony as they claim the moon for Queen Victoria and the British Empire.
Also, I super like the mountainous lunar landscape they have here. Very unearthly and neat.
Love how they have un-gloved hands as they step out onto the Moon, I mean who needs hands, right?
No gloves, but a Union Jack, that is disturbingly accurate for this clown island, "Brits on holiday"
So I guess to land our knobby space orb we have to somehow adjust it to counter the gravity of the moon and slow down, but the landing sequence mostly involves us holding on to the ropes as the ball rolls across the moon and bounces violently before settling to a stop.
I think I did a landing on the Mun like that in Kerbal Space Program once.
@blue still better than a Cybertruck #Monsterdon
45 minutes in and nobody has gotten close to leaving Earth
Girls might be nice to look at, but they are a blasted nuisance when one is engaged in serious business like painting anti-gravity goop on a sphere, and tuba solo
After being upset, Kate (the fancy lady) decides to help, by gathering useful foraging supplies for the moon expedition. These supplies include:
* live chickens (for fresh food)
* a giant elephant gun
In her defense, if you asked a 19th century person what supplies people would need for a moon expedition most of them would probably include "live chickens" and "giant guns" on that list. At least she's not handing him a Maxim gun to shoot the moon natives.
"Dear Reddit, all British dudes all want to fly to the moon in a sphere their neighbour built, right? That's a normal 'British Dude' thing, right? "
Steampunks are squirming at the "scientific" props in this movie
Man hotboxed in his new sphere and lost 4 hours inside....
#Monsterdon #420
Can we add some more brass gears and steam pipes?
#monsterdon
#Monsterdon I believe the good doctor has a mood disorder.
"That's meth. I'm cooking up a big batch of meth."
Characters so far:
Playwright - fancy guy, has aristocratic debts, early adopter of car technology
The Girl (tm) - fancy lady, pragmatic salesperson, hospitable, has giant hat
Science Mustache - a respectable eccentric
Future Astronauts (irrelevant)
Future British People (also irrelevant)
he's mansplaining gravity to a research scientist. #monsterdon
reach in, and pull out The Glaive ! #monsterdon
Okay, so the fancy boy explains that he might have to sell his nice cottage because debts, which makes the fancy girl he's engaged too mildly worried.
We then encounter our third character, a bald mustached scientist who arrives, as all scientists do, on a cross country bicycle. I guess this is the guy who they find in an attic later.
Displaying hospitality, the fancy lady makes the scientist tea; he offers to buy the cottage so he can have a secret research lab.
is that guy in the bad wig Hitchcock?!?
Chekovs gun above the fireplace there....
The pacing of this movie matches that of Devil Girl from Mars. #monsterdon
She's going to start singing "Cheer up, Charlie" any minute now
Not 5 minutes ago there were guys on the moon. The is all over the place. #monsterdon
"I lost my money on a self produced, self written play....and whores"
Of all the Moon, they land on the bit which the Brits had landed on already...
"Let's have a look at the environment telemetry."
Yeah, that's a thing someone would say.
There's a lot to unpackβsome of it from Victorian-era writing, some of it from 1960s-era propaganda, but I do think it's interesting to see astronauts from the US, UK, and USSR on the same moon mission. That was a resounding message of hope for 1964.
Thanks so much to @Taweret for hosting, @Cherizilla for #MonsterdonBingo, and to all of you for making it fun!
Here are a few images I took last week while at the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville.
@bstacey @ramsey @Louisa fair play to the amount of Worldbuilding HG Wells did for his stories #Monsterdon #HGWells #Worldbuilding
@Zerofactorial @ohiofi apparently they were made to add Kate by Columbia Pictures so that women could relate to the film, so def the movie's fault #Monsterdon
Did H.G. Wells write anything good?
Syphilis?
So⦠what happened with the boots?
Wow, the reporters are pretty rough with the old nurse
Meanwhile, on the space television, the present astronauts have found the Selenite city, which seems to be abandoned and now lies in ruin.
We conclude that the astronauts from Earth may have brought an infection to the moon, which killed all the moon people in a case of accidental genocide. Oops. Or maybe the moon people left for another planet. This is left for the audience to decide.
π¦#MONSTERDON ποΈ
This is the only time that you will see a Ray Harryhausen film in this wide format. I think he used the extra space well.
they did an HOUR of characterization and setting up the plot with kate and the guy and then they did absolutely nothing with it, not even a nod at the end #monsterdon
In a Shocking Plot Twist, while Kate and Bedford prepare to leave, Cavor says "nah, I'm going to stay here, there's stuff to learn here, I'll explain later." and goes off to chill with the Selenites.
Which is kind of cool; I guess he wants to do more space anthropology and maybe stop earthlings from invading the Moon.
We learn the old guy they found in an attic was Bedford the whole time, and we fast forward to the present.
Tell me of the wars of your homeworld, Usul.
Do not let these Human's escape, we're bastards.
So far the Selenites seem actually rather chill about the alien visitors from Earth. They take them to their city, learn how to talk to them and then just... kind of let them wander around unsupervised.
Like the worst they've done is dismantle their spaceship a little bit.. but they don't really treat the astronauts as enemies really, at least not yet?
The Brain Alien's voice is very ASMR...
Turns out the sun down was just an eclipse, after which the machine turns back on and the Selenites wake up.
In a bit of foreshadowing, we see a lens directing the sunlight to the machine.
Selenite nap time. So they haven't invented batteries yet. That seems like a thing solar powered people would come up with for emergencies.
#Monsterdon #FirstMenintheMoon
So it's...perpetual motion, but solar-powered?
Having played X-Com before, the moon people know that reverse engineering alien technology is a good way to deal with invaders and so are melting the cavorite to try to figure out how to synthesize it.
They also freeze some of their workers when their jobs are done, by putting them into some kind of cocoon that Cavor rudely messes with. He thinks this is a good way of handling unemployment, while Kate points out that they might freeze them later also, which scares her.
And I do want to know how this is different from the normal day/night cycle
Do the Selenites not have batteries?
The whole place goes dark during an Eclipse?
Did they not see that one coming? Eclipses can be predicted without needing calculators or anything.
Perhaps they're really strict on work breaks?
They were doing so well with the vocal f/x and then they screwed it up
that moment felt very what his name playing the neoconfederate in National Treasure.
Ed Harris!
Aliens speak English!
They talk like more polite Darleks.
I think gen alpha should start saying "It's absolutely imperial."
The aliens and vocal f/x are almost worth the first hour of Brit stupidity
They've already figured out our most innovative technology and how we speak.....Humanity is fucked.
The symbolism of giant space insects is embarrassingly Freudian
Is that a skeleton of one of those caterpillers?
So I also like this interior moon cave set with the weird mushrooms and weird crystals. That seems appropriately unearthly to me.
I also like the giant stop motion caterpillar that chases them... it's not a modern special effect and is chopped into the scene oddly but it is a very detailed looking monster.
I want one of these guys to be crushed in the door like the cyclops in Krull, which was a much better movie
As the boys start wandering through a tunnel, we cut to the space orb, which the moon people have dragged into a cave and are crawling over it and trying to open it like a giant puzzle box. Kate is scared by this and so grabs the elephant gun and tries to deter them by shooting it.
This noise alerts the boys, who start moving toward the orb through a fields of crystals and cave mushrooms, whence they are ambushed by a giant stop motion caterpillar.
MOONTHRA! MOONTHRA! MOONTHRA!
#Monsterdon The selenites closely resemble Greedo from #StarWars
I also like the shot of the earth over the mountainous lunar landscape in this movie. That was pretty cool.
Those fake crystals were unavoidable in 1960s England
So we manage to find our helmet, but then we also find some moon people, which we call "Selenites" because that sounds more scientific than "moon people".
They look like little bug eyed green guys with horns and kind of an elephant nose, sort of like a cross between Greedo from Star Wars A New Hope and a goblin.
Believable: antigravity paint, moon sphincter, fly people
Unbelievable: another named female character
Okay, so while bumbling on the moon we encounter civilization, in the form of a giant skylight that opens revealing a long tunnel going deep into the moon, and some air is blowing out of it, which seems like a waste of air.
The two boys decide to go down because one of them dropped his helmet down the tunnel (which has air) it but they don't tell the girl first so she probably doesn't know where they are.
They find a shiny rock prism and some bubbling slime soup.
is this like our third movie where it turns out moon caves have air?
For the Queen! Screw her and her cursed bloodline.
#Monsterdon #FirstMenintheMoon
#Monsterdon uh⦠your skin on your hands would be where the rest of your body would squish through on its way to pressure equilibrium with nothing but space.
"Stop touching things with your woman fingers, Kate!"
A bow and arrow would work in vacuum but a gun would not......
Roll for initiative!
#Monsterdon HG Wells on 4/20. Itβs downright poetic.
Where is the toilet in this capsule?
Do they shit in a bag like Apollo?
So while Kate is pouting in her cottage waiting for the playwright to come back, she is visited by the bank that reports that they actually own the cottage, which angers her.
Her boyfriend has apparently chosen lunar wealth over love, and is chilling with Cavor in the space orb.
Cavor is more thoughtful and frees his geese before going on a moon mission.
@ricci oh wait, opening the blinds somehow controls it, of course!
Did I miss the reason why they're going to the Moon and not just flying off into Space to die in the infinite void?
He starts the car by turning the crank. She just gets in and drives away
Obviously you wear tweed for going into Space.....
After passive aggressively handing him thoughtful moon supplies (chickens and guns, the machinery of life and death, respectively), Kate decides to give the playwright an ultimatum where she can either go with the science weirdo and probably die or stay with her.
So, you can have either love or cool moon adventures, but not both!
I have bad news for these people about the importance of a water cycle in getting you good mineral veins.
Women always leavinβ the door to the lab openβ¦ amirite?
#monsterdon
*he* doesn't close the door either #monsterdon
new favorite character: the greenhouse geese who chirp but, according to the scientist, are just like dogs.
someone should take some geese to the moon someday.
We're just going to accept that they're calling that thing a "sphere"?
A watched furnace never boils. Wait, whoβs watching the furnace?
Zephram Cochrane there only wanting to make money from the new wonder device......
Oh, the old anti-gravity paste cooked up by a sweaty British eccentric in a bucolic cottage trope
"Anti-gravity shielding" does sound like some cool Space Opera technology though.
could do without the comedy brass music though, is that an integral part of it?
This could have been a voice over. I want creatures!
#monsterdon
...what do you mean this movie is in cooperation with NASA?
So his family owns but he's behind on the rent and tuba solo
Can you really sell a house as easily as that?
The masculine urge to buy out your neighbours' homes to isolate yourself #Monsterdon
I wonder how the moon's doing.
This exposition is Boer-ing