This Island Earth

A core classic 1950s Science Fiction film with the decade's most poetic title, This Island Earth was the first interstellar space opera in color. Its story comes right out of the pulp magazines, featuring a two-fisted scientist playboy hero who matches wits with extraterrestrials and sexy Faith Domergue. As with Star Wars twenty-two years later, we're lifted from the mundane cares of a complacent world into the middle of an interplanetary war.  

The Technicolor production was a huge expense for Universal, which committed a sizeable budget to a story requiring costly props, costumes and wall-to-wall optical effects. It was the high point of William Alland's monster cycle and the cost may have broken the studio's commitment to Science Fiction: After This Island Earth fantastic subject matter at Universal tapered off -- with the exception of the marvelous The Incredible Shrinking Man, a wonder film produced outside the Alland unit.

The print ads and posters for This Island Earth promised the heavens to Sci Fi fans. In 1955 the realm of fantastic films was beginning to taper off into low-budget production, and save for the infrequent George Pal extravaganza, space movies had given way to more economical monster thrillers. Ad art for the Universal release showed a vast alien landscape and hordes of bug-brained mutated extraterrestrials, plus the added pulp thrill of warring space armadas clashing in the skies.

In its dramatics, This Island Earth is barely above the level of 'space cadet' television programming. Its conception of science and scientists is naïve. Cal Meachum is the kind of nuclear physicist that David Maclean of Invaders from Mars might imagine, a guy who knows his way around a do-it-yourself project like assembling an alien electronics kit. Deeply invested in military research, Cal flies his own Air Force jet, hobnobs with 'the big boys' at the Pentagon (no Oppenheimer he) and goes in for quickie romances at summer seminars in Vermont. The wholly independent Cal is able to determine his own agenda, even if it means ducking his responsibilities to volunteer to be 'kidnapped' by the benevolently brainy Exeter.

One of the film's genuinely warm touches is its sympathetic farewell to Cal's assistant Joe Wilson (Robert Nichols of The Thing from Another World). Exciting space adventures and sexy partners are the exclusive domain of handsome heroes. Poor Joe watches his boss disappear, and has to walk away alone in the fog.

Once installed in Exeter's secret lab (in the state of Georgia!), Cal finds himself with a group of international scientists working to synthesize new sources of atomic power. Incredibly trusting, Cal, Ruth and Steve Carlson go along with the mysterious mission until they decide that (duh) there's a lot about Exeter and his odd associates that they don't understand: Exeter and his creepy assistant Brack (Lance Fuller) both have the same "subtle" indentations in their foreheads ... 

Politically, the film is a silly mess, with America's top scientists foolishly lending their talents to what looks like a blatant conspiracy of 'foreigners' to steal our top tech secrets -- a 'brain drain.' The scientists determine that they're really coddled prisoners and decide to escape. That's when the real poetry of This Island Earth kicks in. The space-age trappings catch up to the kiddie plot, and Cal & Ruth are "hurtled into an adventure beyond the stars" to "challenge the unearthly furies of an outlaw planet gone mad." (spoiler) Exeter is really an enlistment agent for his home planet of Metaluna, which is desperate for outside technical assistance. Exeter's superiors are fighting a losing war with the planet Zahgon, whose dart-shaped siege spaceships are blasting Metaluna to bits. With their 'ionization shield' about to give out, Metaluna has Exeter bring Cal and Ruth with him across the galaxy, to help formulate a last-ditch defense.

This last third of the film goes rather quickly and consists mostly of an intergalactic Cook's Tour to Exeter's doomed home world. Some effects are expressive shorthand for more bizarre literary sci-fi concepts. In the same way that the space soldiers in Forbidden Planet need to be dematerialized while their ship slips into "Hyperdrive," the passengers on Exeter's palatial spaceship must have their molecules reconfigured to exist in the altered conditions on Metaluna. Cal and Ruth enter narrow tubes and are electronically disintegrated and reconstructed before our eyes, almost like Claude Rains in the Invisible Man movies. The simple matte effect is a startling expression of Science Fiction's 'fear of the unknown": To exist in the unnatural future, we'll have to be transformed by our own technology.

Our Earth couple stays on Metaluna barely long enough to see what's going on, as it's all about to be incinerated by Zahgonian missiles. We get the idea that Metaluna was an advanced but perhaps too cultured society that didn't properly prioritize planetary defense, and is now suffering annihilation at the hands of a barbaric enemy. We see no ordinary citizens, just ruins. "That was an educational complex," wails Exeter, letting all of us Earthly intellectuals know that our right to higher thinking has been secured only through military vigilance. The sympathetic Exeter has little stomach for expedient brutality, and rebels when the sinister Monitor (Douglas Spencer) orders that Cal and Ruth be immediately brainwashed.

When Exeter's humanitarian sentiments turn out to be contrary to general Metalunan policies, we're no longer certain that Metaluna can still call itself "the good guys." The Monitor behaves like Hitler in his bunker, desperate to hold off implacable invaders. For all we know, the Zahgonians may actually be avenging greater Metalunan war crimes.

The film is a visual knockout, using special effects that are state-of-the-art for 1955. The concepts of a robot plane as a modern version of a "ghost coach" and a cat that detects Neutrino Rays mix well with outrageous ideas such as an entire green hill revealed to be a hidden flying saucer, or an airplane captured in the belly of a gigantic spaceship. The planet Metaluna is surrounded by a crumbling outer shell dotted with 'Swiss cheese' craters. This outside barrier is scarred by Zahgonian bombs that have penetrated an artificial force field, which is itself giving way to constant bombardment.

If the visuals are poetry, the script is at least half pulp junk, much of it klunky exposition inconsistent with what we're seeing on screen. Scientist Cal 'protects' the suddenly cowering Ruth and when things get tough comes up with stalwart Hero-speak. The craziest line reads as if it were inserted to assure church groups that Faith still rules the moral fabric of futurism: "Our true size is the size of our God." When Cal says that, we really expect the entire cast -- Exeter, The Monitor, and even the Mutant -- to stare at each other in search of an explanation. At the finale, Exeter under-reacts to the obliteration of an entire planet with the trite 'feel good' observation that maybe it will become a new star and provide sunshine for 'some other world.' That sounds similar to the Fascist sentiment that the best use for 'unfortunate races' is to become the fertilzer for a more deserving society.

None of the dialogue has much gravity and the characters aren't very well defined, except perhaps for Jeff Morrow's Exeter, the Alien Without A Country who tries to remain a moral being amid all the interplanetary double-crossing. Exeter is interesting because, unlike the faultless (and somewhat clueless) leads, his integrity is heavily compromised: Transporting Atomic Scientists across State Lines to Build Weapons of Mass Destruction? This Island Earth is hobbled by its split between high pulp art and artless dime-store scripting, but its juvenile surface hides a fascinating interior.

This Island Earth established a benchmark for space opera not surpassed until the far more sophisticated MGM production values of the next year's Forbidden Planet. Universal's special effects have a gaudy Technicolor sheen yet are lacking in depth and detail. The flying saucer model actually looks smaller than it is, while too much of Metaluna is created through matte paintings with faulty perspectives. Just the same, the general look of Metaluna comes closer to the pulp-novel ethos than any other 50s sci fi film. Real rocketry science would soon make this romantic view of outer space obsolete.

The movie was almost too big a project for Universal International, which had just finished spending a small fortune on rubber suits for its Creature monster and wasn't interested in repeating the experience. Both the Metaluna Mutant from this film and the upcoming Mole People wear substantial clothing to simplify their design. Over the course of filming the studio cancelled a number of planned shots, so the supervising optical wizard David S. Horsley quit and was never hired back. The studio had no intention of making expensive effects pictures an ongoing habit.  

Some sources state that the film was shot in 3-Strip Technicolor, which author/researcher Robert Skotak confirms is partly true. Live action without effects was done 3-Strip but material needing optical effects was not. Behind-the-scenes stills show ordinary Mitchell cameras being used on the special effects stage. Technicolor printing made possible some jarringly photogenic effects tricks, as when Neutrino ray explosions are rendered in contrasting primary colors.  (Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant)