It is difficult and unnecessary to demand from the film of 1964 the convincingness of special effects, but it is still possible to appeal to the account of those features of space, which became clear in practice due to the flights of Gagarin and his followers. A set of oddities (the almost complete absence of weightlessness in flight, the appearance and disappearance of features of lunar gravity, walking on the moon in a diving suit, but with bare hands (!)) could be explained if the film was shot before the era of space flight, when much was really unknown. I can’t believe that in just a few years Kubrick will raise the bar of cinema-sci-fi to such a height, as about the same time Bob Beamon managed to jump at the Olympics in Mexico City in an unattainable quarter of a century. However, the film adaptation of Wells is an obvious retro, or rather, a retro in the square, because the actual compositional framework (an international, under the auspices of the UN expedition, which includes American, speaking English, and Soviet, speaking a Slavic language unknown to me) frames the free interpretation of the novel by a British science fiction writer with a cozy retro of Britain of the late 19th century, where a typical geek from science is found, he is a space pioneer. Imperfect technology deprived the film of some percussion scenes in the novel (for example, the short-term appearance of the lunar atmosphere, when the gas passes from solid to natural due to the heating of the soil by the rays of the Sun). Scenes with selenites are not bad, although they are completely removed underground (moon?), and the image of their civilization contains a typical drawback: in general, the primitive, tribal structure is adjacent to futur-like macrogadgets (perpetual engine made of ice, giving energy for the work of giant flasks for the production of oxygen, etc.). The Great Lunarius (as in Wells), very similar to the notorious Alesenka from Kyshtym, was pleased, but for the most part there is nothing to rejoice, unless one pleases retro-aesthetics as such.
First, the logical contradiction of the plot of the compositional frame is striking, because the latter refers to the realism of modern ideas about the cosmos, and Wells’ ideas almost completely turned out to be only fantasies on a given topic. Therefore, it seems that if the 60s in the film is “our”, then Britain of the late 19th century seems to be in a parallel world, how to combine them, I never understood.
Secondly, despite the solid timekeeping, the plot is carried by a gallop and any event turns out to be easier than an easy one. Find a British flag on the moon in the first minutes of landing? Easy! Find the entrance to the underworld of the Selenite civilization? Easy! Easy! That's the whole movie. It seems that we are in some kind of half-tale where all the characters know each other in advance. It is clear that the principle of literary retardation cannot be fully realized in cinema, but in this case it is somehow completely primitive. And the deviations from the text of Wells are also not too original, except that the motive of the viral threat of an alien civilization, borrowed, as I guess, from the “Martian Chronicles” of Bradbury, pleased.
In conclusion, I want to say that the film is worth watching out of great love for old film fiction, in all other cases it looks too comical.
5 out of 10