IMDb data: 1 hour and 23 minutes, rated 6.7 by 5824.
‘The End of Days is nigh!’ The Earth is doomed! Repent ye GOP voters!
Yes, astronomers have once again spotted a heavenly body intent on smashing the Earth, styled ‘Bellus’ and its attendant satellite ‘Zyra.’ Travelling thousands of kilometres a second, they will pass close to Earth in a few months and the passages will wreak havoc on Earth. The oceans will rise in giant tsunamis. The mountains will crack open to spew lava. The plains will continue to vote Republican. Much stock footage will be shown.
Or so claims the Lone Voice, while all his colleagues fatten their CVs by debunking his claims. Nonetheless Lone Voice pressed on and his conviction and data convince some backers to fund his fantastic scheme. Larry Keating of ‘Mr Ed’ played Lone Voice with great integrity and authority.
The plan is to build a rocket ship and hop onto Bellus as it passes. One of his financiers is a hard case, played by the ever reliable John Hoyt who gives the best performance in the ensemble. A team of six hundred specialists is recruited to build the ship and from those ranks, forty will be chosen at the last minute to make the flight. At every point the risks and uncertainties are emphasised. It is all rather Calvinist. Work as if chosen, but nothing can insure it. Most will have laboured in vain.
To equip the ship with knowledge a team of women sit at 1951 photocopiers rendering a reference library into microfilm. That was a nice touch. Though I did not notice Plato’s ‘Republic’ being included. Now where will they be packing the 1951 microfilm reader?
Everyone on Earth will die, that being the only way to kill the GOP virus.
Those that take flight may perish in the flight, die in a crash on Bellus, default on their AMEX payments, or find Bellus uninhabitable. Note, while passing by it will destroy Earth, but Bellus is unaffected in scriptwriter’s logic. The number forty was decided by bodyweight ever so finely calculated, though at the end Lone Voice added Barbara Rush’s boyfriend, a waif, and the waif’s pet dog. But to make way for them he stayed behind with the troublesome financier to face certain death. Is this noble of what. Babs, by the way, went on to ‘It Came from Outer Space’ in 1955 to cement her Sy Fy credentials.
The fatalism is out of time for 1951, when most Sy Fy movies overcame all odds.
There are conflicts among the rocketeers who are widely mocked by the ever responsible media, until the Earth moves under their feet. Then they mob the rocket site and have to be fended off. Good thing there was an arsenal included in the research grant. The testy financier had predicted this reaction and prepared for it while dreamy scientists had not.
For reasons known only to rocket science the passengers wear a uniform of brown sweat suits and fly economy class without overhead storage bins for roll-aboards.
When the crunch comes, despite all efforts to avoid conflict, conflict occurs and the launch is compromised, but the ending is upbeat. While the Earth is split in an apocalypse, Bellus is green fields and blue skies (in pictures that look like they were ripped from a kindergarten classroom wall, as what must have been a late addition to the production, so out of keeping they are with the forgoing standard).
They made it and humanity can start its cycle of destruction anew! Whew!
There is much location shooting and an altogether big budget, mostly spent on the effects and not on big name actors.
The opening scene is an observatory in a remote South African location, and there are several subsequent references to other spaceship projects in other countries, but there is no technology transfer or cooperation among them. That seems realistic. There are never KPIs for cooperation.
The draw of the final forty seems to have been random, so it might yield forty tech heads who have never seen a vegetable or daylight. Neither does the six hundred nor the forty include any brown, red, yellow, or black faces. All whitebread, though, credit where it is due, many are women. For a New Eden science declares women are necessary. Amen, sighed the fraternity brothers.
Another Sy Fy offering from producer George Pal, known as the Happy Hungarian for his sunny disposition. He has many Sy Fy credits, some excellent, like ‘Destination Moon’ (1950) and the execrable ‘Conquest of Space’ (1957). Both are reviewed elsewhere on this blog. He tried to get the science right within the limits of the genre, the budget, and the capacities of the cast and crew.
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