The best proof that a true cinematic sub-genre has been born is the sudden arrival of its first low-budget “knock-off.” And when the subject is Fireside Science-Fiction that milestone is 1958’s From the Earth to the Moon. De la Terre à la Lune—the fourth of Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires—really would seem to have been the next logical stop on the itinerary. And the cast is excellent: Joseph Cotton and George Sanders seem right at home, and Fifties sci-fi stalwart Morris Ankrum makes a highly amusing President U.S. Grant. Even Jules Verne himself puts in a cameo appearance (as impersonated by actor Carl Esmond). So what on earth (or ‘round the moon, for that matter) went so terribly wrong?

I guess the film is just too darn similar to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea—similar enough to make you wish you were watching that far superior movie instead. Like 20,000 Leagues, From the Earth to the Moon attempts some high-minded commentary on the Cold War and on the dangers of allowing Man’s technological development to outpace his moral education. Specifically, the plot involves urbane Baltimore businessman Victor Barbicane (Cotten) and his exploitation of the newly discovered Element X, an incredibly powerful explosive that symbolically stands in for the H-Bomb. Barbicane plans a voyage around the Moon as a stunt to demonstrate the substance’s potential, a voyage which his arch-rival Stuyvesant Nicholl (Sanders) ends up sabotaging because he feels it goes against the will of God. 20,000 Leagues handled similar themes with subtlety and sophistication; its characters are painted in shades of gray and both sides of the debate get a fair hearing. This movie, unfortunately, makes its mind up way too early. Sanders quickly becomes a straw man and the film sides early on with Cotten’s modern “progressive” ideas about industry and the conquest of nature. That there might have been a bit more to say for Stuyvesant’s “reactionary” spiritual concerns (and his warnings about an embryonic “military/industrial complex”) is a notion that simply gets brushed under the rug.

From the Earth to the Moon compares poorly to 20,000 Leagues in other ways as well. Where Disney had steadfastly refused, for instance, to add an arbitrary woman to the story’s all-male cast, the makers of From the Earth to the Moon send the admittedly lovely Debra Paget brazenly to the Moon for the most transparent and unlikely of reasons. Mainly, this film illustrates the crucial importance of good art direction in a Fireside SF film. If, as we’ve posited in these pages, these movies are really early examples of the alternate history genre, then the reason becomes clear. Alternate history needs, even more than most filmed science fiction, to be visually believable. After all, we know what the real 19th century looked like and however wacky our alternative version of it is going to be, our departures must fit realistically into the actual world already recorded onto the pages of history. In From the Earth to the Moon, however, the rocket-to-the-Moon looks like any other 1950s rocket-to-the-Moon. And the sound effects (lifted intact from Louis & Bebe Barron’s electronic score to Forbidden Planet) have an unmistakably modern sound that goes a long way toward killing whatever period atmosphere had been created up to that point. The special effects are bad, too—surprisingly bad given the decent production values on display elsewhere in the film. All of this simply reminds the viewer, over and over, of how good 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea really was…which is not, one suspects, what the filmmakers were aiming at.

Director Byron Haskin gave us much better; his other genre credits include memorable films like War of the Worlds, The Naked Jungle, Captain Sindbad, and Robinson Crusoe on Mars. But here, for the first time in the cycle, Jules Verne actually fares poorly. As a matter of fact, his original story gets a much better send-off at Disneyland Paris, where, as a theme park attraction, it soars—in a way this weak, unconvincing film can only hint at.