This Island Earth

April 27, 2005

Very imaginative: a group of scientists receive a blueprint for a strange machine, which they succeed in constructing, thereby passing the test devised by aliens who are on Earth to get help from our planet's greatest scientists. The whole film takes place at breakneck speed, as the spacecraft must suddenly take off, reaching some unknown planet (in what seems like a few minutes) just in time for the planet to be almost destroyed, and the captured Earth people must fight their way back to the ship to escape, returning to Earth just as fast... Well, I don't think the film is in the class of the novel of the same name by Raymond F. Jones, but it's worth a look as a futuristic adventure that was, for its time, a state-of-the-art SF film.