- Original theatrical poster - image courtesy of Wrong Side of the Art
I warn you/apologize in advance. This review came out, and can only exist as, a semi-stream of consciousness rant. In short: I hated this movie.
If that's all you need or want to know, you can stop reading now and continue on with your day. Now, I have to get this off my chest.
Much as I love, love, love the show, and particularly the cast of, Mystery Science Theater 3000, every hardcore fan of that series has to eventually come around to the fact that sometimes their digs are a little cheap and even more than a little mean. That’s okay, if taken in jest, but not everyone can see past the ridicule, and some of the movies featured on that show (more so the kind of movies, but some specific titles, yes) are far more than the sum of their sometimes broken parts, and deserving of a closer look. For at least one decade, these movies were the tentpole equivalent to our Marvel superhero excesses, and the like, minus the opening weekend insanity, heaven help us.
Even worse than the worst new superhero film (I'm looking at you, Thor), 20 Million Miles to Earth is to date the laziest, least engaging, most poorly acted, seemingly least given-a-crap about movie about either a giant monster or space travel that I’ve ever endured. Which is saying a lot, not so much because I’ve seen plenty of those kinds of movies, but because the center of this film is another wonderful creation by Ray Harryhausen.
If you don’t already know who he is, know this and know it well: he made art out of his special effects creations. The films they starred in may have been lacking, but his contributions were nearly always grand in construction and heart.
Spoiler alert in effect. Here, the Hall of Famer is the Ymir (never actually named in the film, and no, I don’t know how to pronounce it), a creature brought from Venus to Earth, where it is destined for uncontrollable growth spurts, elephant tussles in Rome, and an Italian fisherboy named Pepe (Bart Bradley) who wants to wear a hat from Texas. (Seriously.) Because of this, the world nearly ends. By the time the movie was over, I wish it had gone so far.
The Ymir is a creature of wondrous empathy, created with some of the most touching stop motion ever rendered. It's a beautiful film whenever it's on screen, yet few of the people around seem to have genuinely bought into the fantasy, which is kind of important, critical, and necessary to sell something like, say, an alien character that isn't actually there.
When Fay Wray screams in King Kong, you know she believed in what was before her, and that you should, as well. That’s what some might call movie magic. It’s certainly something, and it’s something that 20 Million yada yada is almost entirely without. Which, I reiterate, is saying something.
In actuality, the production values of the film aren’t even half bad, but that’s all they ever end up being. Movies that are generally worth watching are full of life, or at least have some of it rattling around inside. This one, and all other breed of bad ones, often reek of hollowness or apathy, or both, or worse.
For 82 minutes of this spectacle, it felt as if I was watching a bunch of unhappy people making sure they could collect a paycheck, and it also happened to have a story assembled in basic cinematic fashion. There's also a gag-inducingly infantile romantic thread (it's too bad it's not with the Ymir, which would have made things at least half interesting).
Once, I was part of a student film project shot on VHS and host to such flaws as a corpse that doesn’t stay still. Objectively speaking, and accounting for zero budget, I think it was better.
With some movies, you can only nitpick, because, like an insect-infested chicken carcass, all that’s left on the bones are a few scraps of rotting meat. Within five minutes of watching this film on DVD, I wanted to switch to another language track, as I couldn’t imagine anything being more annoying than the Italian fisherman caricatures that open the film. They’re actually brave characters, investigating a crashed spaceship that lands near them in the bay. I'm rarely bothered by accents in movies, rarely meaning, never before now that I can recall. If only it were a silent film, but I digress. The ship looks to be nearly a quarter mile long. It barely makes a splash.
I’m willing to accept plenty of inconsistencies and continuity errors. Random, tangentially-related fact: watch Harrison Ford's lips in Apocalypse Now, and you'll see that Colonel Kurtz was once named... Leighley. Weird, right? Movies can fool you like that, but they can also insult your intelligence.
Case in point: this seriously giant ship dunks into the bay, its nose seemingly buried under about 200 feet of water and detritus. The Italian guys who've out the stereotype amplifiers and shouldn’t be allowed to talk check it out and manage to rescue two human survivors, at which point the ship rumbles and then sinks in its entirety, more or less straight down.
There are other flaws in how this sequence is assembled, but let's focus on this one. So, did a continental plate just shift a few miles over? Or did you just treat me like a moron, that I'm supposed to believe that? Yes, I was once a science major, but that's just insulting, period. And maybe it's just me, but don't you think that a creature that lives on Venus might not be completely vulnerable to fire? Just a thought. 20 Million Miles to Earth doesn’t just seem to have been made for children: it looks and sounds like it was made by them, too.
The adults in this cast might as well be replaced by the squawking figures of the Peanuts television specials. The lead actor, William Hopper, looks a little like Steve Martin, which got me to thinking that digitally inserting that comedian could make something out of this imploded building of a movie. Maybe the filmmakers couldn’t afford to do extra takes, in which case, they should’ve gotten actors who could pretend to an extent that could be described as dramatically sufficient. The tone is so breezy and the pace so leaden that it may as well be played for laughs. As it is, it’s a comedy of errors where everyone should die.
Actually, I’m not entirely kidding with that statement. The Ymir is so lovable a character that you want him to succeed, to escape, to be happy, and when the army comes after him with grenades they throw like sissies and bazookas that nearly match the destructive power of popcorn, you want him to stomp and pummel and terrorize and chew these idiots. They want to contain the Ymir and study him, intending to learn from him how to adapt to the Venusian environment for when they colonize it. That they’re trying to colonize Venus says enough about their chances of being fit and thus surviving.
But then, there’s Harryhausen, who almost grounds it with his creation, one that (par for the course in his filmography) makes everything around it at least a little more tolerable, if not – as in the many good films the effects master worked on through his career (see The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers) – considerably better. Here, the film is all the more offensive for having wasted it. The Ymir moves with grace and nobility, a sulfur-subsisting species that remains passive until provoked, which is of course all we humans know how to do.
The film seems inordinately drunk on the idea of American superiority, but how it really works is as a kind of inadvertent damnation of our history of foreign policy. The best way to stop terrorism is to stop doing it yourself. Eventually, someone will want to avenge the Ymir. I hope you enjoyed this train wreck of a review.
20 Million Miles to Earth. Dir. Nathan H. Juran. Perf. William Hopper, Joan Taylor, Frank Puglia, John Zaremba, Thomas Browne Henry, Tito Vuolo, Jan Arvan, Arthur Space, Bart Bradley. Warner Bros., 1957. Running Time: 82 min.
