Destination Moon
“Destination Moon should be viewed not so much as a fantastic adventure movie with an unusual degree of technical accuracy, but rather as a precision-machined documentary framed in the future tense, upholstered in the Naugahyde afterthoughts of Hollywood melodramatics. Only a few science fiction films live up to the longing some feel for narrative, visual prophecy. Menzies' Things To Come (1936) previewed World War II and its legacy of aerial bombing...but no more than the H.G. Wells book from which the screenplay came.

“Destination Moon was a true synthesis between a basic space story by veteran science fiction author Robert Heinlein, the best informed of contemporary astronautical science, and the most skilled team of craftsmen in three-dimensional animation working at the time. What yielded from that union is a film which is dramatically arid but chillingly accurate in its premonitions. At a time when space flight, ‘even' to the Moon, was comfortably filed as fantasy rather than science, Destination Moon remains as a Technicolor blueprint to the stars.

“Heinlein recounts: ‘...every shot, save for a few before takeoff from Earth, had to involve special effects, trick photography, unheard of lighting problems. In the ordinary motion picture there may be a scene or two with special effects; this picture had to be all special effects, most of them never before tried.' Technician Lee Zavitz devised a rotating, double-gimbals rig for the spaceship scene which presaged the ‘walking on the ceiling' scene in 2001. Astronomical painter Chesley Bonestell was for years our closest eye to the planets until the advent of the Viking missions.

“The success of Destination Moon spurred further film production and is credited for igniting the considerable ‘science fiction boom' of the fifties. Many scientists and astronauts responsible for our small and our great steps for humankind have credited the early stimulation of science fiction for their career goals. The cinema: mirror...or burning glass?”