20 Million Miles to Earth
Dir. Nathan Juran, 1957
| Rated: NR | Writers | Starring |
| Runtime: 1 hr. 22 min. | Charlott Knight | William Hopper |
| Producer: Charles H. Schneer | Christopher Knopf | Frank Puglia |
| Production Company: Morningside Productions | Bob Williams | Joan Taylor |
Reviewed by Robert Ring. 10.29.08
Look, I'm as much a fan of stop-motion animation master Ray Harryhausen as the next guy. I love his stuff. I used to watch The 7th Voyage of Sinbad ad nauseum when I was young. The thing about special effects, though, is that they can go only so far as the movie allows them. Though the premise of 20 Million Miles to Earth is adequate and the special effects are excellent, the film suffers from mediocre directing and a trudging pace. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you're going to make special effects be the crux of your film, you better include enough of them to keep everyone entertained. Otherwise, we might as well just watch the trailer.
In this movie, a spaceship carrying American astronauts back from a trip to Venus crashes among fishermen off the shore of Venice. Only one of them survives. In the midst of the chaos, a small boy named Pepe finds a tube containing a specimen from the planet. He sells its contents, a gelatinous mass with a vague figure inside, to a local zoologist. When the glob hatches a Venusian dino-humanoid, and when said creature escapes, the U.S. military comes in to contain the situation. There's also a totally arbitrary love story thrown in, which is pretty much requisite for sci-fi films of this period.
Nowadays, this plot would be prime United States invasion/occupation commentary. For this film, though, the criticism seems to be aimed at Italy, portraying it as a country too violent for its own good. Pepe's repeated wish for a cowboy hat from "the great country of Texas" so that he can be like a cowboy is the first indication of this theme. As history would have it, this movie indeed came out only a few years before Italy's spaghetti western trend began, a genre more violent than its American western origin. Other parts of the film reinforce this theme. Though the Americans do pretty much just shove their way into the country, they are trying only to capture the creature, so that they can study it. The Italians, on the other hand, want to kill it to fix the problem the quick and easy way.
The Italians' approach causes the creature to become hostile, and, oh yeah, it's growing bigger and bigger every minute. Eventually it becomes so big and angry that killing it really is the only feasible option. Though Italy's violent tendencies do appear to have been inherited from America, as evidenced in Pepe's infatuation with cowboys as well as in the way the Americans throw their weight around in Italy, in a final analysis it is Italy that is directly causing the problems. Neither country comes out as morally superior; they just have different negative traits.
The film does not spend a lot of time on this idea, though. The vast majority of the movie is spent simply tracking the monster down. For its original audiences, this seems to have been enough, purely because of Harryhausen's wonderful stop-motion animated monster. You can always see the care taken in a film for which he has worked the special effects. Though it is a good-looking monster, and though its animations are pretty fluid, the creature is just not enough to carry the whole movie. I wish there would have been either more monster or more insight into Italy's burgeoning attraction to violence (though I'm not really sure the latter was a purposeful theme).
Unless you're just a huge Harryhausen fan, I would recommend picking another monster movie to watch. King Kong (1933), for instance, has a better story, fuller characterization, and even more monsters (both in number and screen time). In fact, a significant number of moments in 20 Million Miles to Earth seem to try to emulate that great ape movie. It even has a supposedly poignant final line that doesn't work nearly as well as King Kong's: "Why is it always, always so costly for man to move from the present to the future?" This movie put pretty much all its eggs into the special effects basket, and it suffers because the basket wasn't big enough. Sorry, Ray.
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