Project Moonbase

This has to be one of the cheesiest science fiction films I've ever seen. It's certainly no PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE but it would be stretching a point to even call it a B movie. That is surprising seeing as how Robert A. Heinlein is credited as one of the creators. He had little time for cheesiness.The story is a simple one of conceived in the cold war. The US is sending a reconnaissance ship around the moon to gather information prior to a landing attempt. The Soviets are desperate to stop the effort and infiltrate an agent onto the crew as a saboteur. He is not caught out soon enough and, in the chaos of the fight, the ship goes off course. The only choice for survival is to go ahead and land.There is more going on in the story than just the race to the moon and the cold war. The mission was originally assigned to an up and coming major (male). For political reasons, he is reassigned as co-pilot and command is given to a woman, a Col. Briteis (pronounced "Bright Eyes"). She is not a bad woman but it is apparent that she has been promoted to colonel for PR reasons and because she looks good in a skirt. Her indecisiveness and tendency to turn towards her co-pilot for advice and help is somewhat demeaning of what women are able to accomplish.Possibly the silliest thing about the film is the costumes. The uniform for the US Space Force seems to be shorts, a t-shirt and the dumbest looking skullcap ever to grace the screen. The sets are fairly low budget as well.All of that seems bad but I did find the show entertaining to a degree. It captured the spirit of the 50s and was fun in small doses. The "science" is rudimentary but generally correct. That must be Heinlein's doing. I suspect a female commander and a female US president were also. This show, while not as technically excellent as DESTINATION MOON, did have more of a story to it.

Space station built! What next? Go to the Moon or to Mars? In this 1953 movie, it's the Moon first!Moon vehicle (Magellan): The crew compartment sits atop a 3-legged framework enclosing 6 fuel tanks with a single thruster. Crew capacity: 3.Mission: Undock from station, orient for translunar injection, fire engine until attaining a circumlunar trajectory. Once behind the Moon, photograph its surface, and then continue on a free-return trajectory back towards Earth, brake for insertion into the station's Earth orbit and dock.Colonel Briteis: command pilot. She was the first astronaut to orbit the Earth. Originally, Major Moore was scheduled for that flight, but then it was decided that Briteis would be the better choice. Unfortunately, this chilled their romance.Major Moore: copilot. Originally slated to be pilot, he was replaced by Colonel Briteis. Now their romance is downright polar!Doctor Wernher: mission scientist. He may be a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball fan, but we will never know.General Greene: USSF SPACOM commander. He is humorously unaware of his nonprofessional conduct.Overall, Project Moonbase is a good movie. It is pure science fiction with reasonable extrapolations of science and technology into the future of 1953. Unfortunately the shoddy sets, the cheap special effects (with a few exceptions), and weak acting by some detract from the film. There are some silly elements, the silliest occurs when rockets are firing; even if you have seen this movie several times, you are still going to laugh.Finally, the mission goes awry, and Magellan lands in a deep crater on the western edge of the moon.Picture: good. No cropping. Sound: good. Volume: low.If you prefer to go to Mars first, check out: Conquest of Space  Conquest of Space  .

I have a very time finding something to praise for this Galaxy Pictures film (released by Lippert Pictures). Though it has a woman in command of the moon voyage in the form of Colonel Briteis, in the end she requests her co-worker be promoted to Brigadier-General before she agrees to marry him. Does she want to be in charge or not? In the end, no, she wants a man to order her around. Feminists will be steamed seeing this. The special effects are bad and there are ridiculous scenes of Colonel Briteis sitting in front of a screen changing the scenes for no reason. Much of the script is half-baked--in spite of Heinlein's name in the credits--and unconvincing. Much the best part is the film opens from the point of view of "the enemies of Freedom" trying to sabotage the mission. Maybe the film would have been better if it stayed at the "enemies of Freedom" POV. The film is a victim of Cold War politics and is hard to watch now. Also it is too short at 63 minutes. Perhaps it was the initial chapter of a serial--that would have been interesting; perhaps a 1953 version of "Space:1999" would have resulted. Come to think of it, "Space: 1999" was better than this. The villain is found out too easily and too conveniently dies falling off a rocky hill on the moon. The film had much potential that failed to follow through. I suspect if they added half an hour and improved the special effects just a little it would have been a classic. This is no classic, this is a bad movie. And to compare it to Kubrick's "2001" is worse than ludicrous. I would have liked to see Colonel Briteis slug the guy for being the jerk he was. But women aren't supposed to beat up men, more's the pity.

This film gets two stars purely for comedy value. The general threatens to put the female colonel over his knee and spank her, and she just caves in! There are a few real gems like that in there but I won't give too much away. The one thing that would fit in perfectly today is the political spin. After the spaceship lands on the moon and can't take off they reclassify it from a spaceship to a moonbase. Brilliant.

Excellent well done movie for science fiction fans. This movie was ahead of its time.Would have been even better if filmed in colour like the first movie I purchased from this same writer called DESTINATION MOON a George Pal production written by Robert A.Heinlein a man with a vision of the future released august 1 1950.Project Moonbase was released Two years later in B/W.I would guess that filming in colour was very expensive in the early 50s which has become a standard today.Shipping was very fast and excellent packaging from Amazon.ca.Much appreciated THANKYOU.

Video quality is pretty bad, I'd certainly love to see this remastered, but as early sci-fi adventure movies go this is definitely one worth checking out. And of course it's based on a Robert Heinlein story so it's actually a must see for fans of the genre.

excellent dvd and movie too. All these old movies bring back good souvenirs about TV shows, I recommand it to my friends