While the saucers prepare for their final assault, the scientists race to figure out a way to defeat the seemingly invulnerable craft. Will they succeed?
Released in 1956, this movie epitomises what I think of as a fifties mindset: aliens are here to conquer us and we are going to annihilate them. The frame of reference I have for this movie is Stephen King’s review in his 1981 tome Danse Macabre. He has a lot of fun ripping into the movie’s simplistic morality and post-WW2 US militarism.
While the political allegory is not subtle, it is part of the movie's charm. What I liked and disliked about the movie is how straightforward it is.
That bluntness does mean certain elements - like character development - are ignored, but there is a childlike pleasure to be had from watching alien ships destroy/crash into famous landmarks (a quality that Tim Burton would milk for black laughs in Mars Attacks!).
The movie is clearly made without a lot of money but that makes its adherence to whatever entertainment it can wring out of said resources is weirdly enjoyable.
A lot of the production value is derived from judicious use of stock footage - the early action sequences showing the flying saucers attacking the US space programme are fine examples of this technique, with Harryhausen’s models interacting with footage of boats, planes and a real V2 rocket exploding(?!).
Because of the stock footage, the authoritative narration and use of montage, the movie feels more like a non-ironic mockumentary, or a film about a hypothetical alien invasion.
There is something minor key about Hugh Marlowe in the lead role - the character always feels like it is about to lean into machismo but never gets there.
The rest of the cast are serviceable but this movie is all plot. Character development is non-existent, and despite good chemistry with her onscreen husband, lead actress Joan Taylor does not get much to do.
The aliens are more interesting than I was expecting. This movie drew on then-accounts of sightings and abductions for its imagery, which feels cliche now but what is intriguing about them is how vulnerable they are - they require lumbering suits to leave their ship, and they admit that they would prefer surrender to a drawn-out invasion. These invaders also reveal that they are survivors of a dead world. For unstoppable antagonists, there is a tragic dimension to their plight which the movie completely ignores.
In another version of this movie, Marlowe and co. would negotiate with the aliens to de-escalate the situation and arrive at some kind of peaceful solution. Or maybe Marlowe would agonise over the destruction of an entire species. Not that this movie needed that kind of nuance, but the portrayal of the aliens brings up some quandaries that the movie is not designed to confront.
For a movie that I expected to be super-Americana, there is a seed of an interesting idea to the ending - all the components for the device which sabotages the saucers come from all over the world. Marlowe’s initial idea fails and he ends up building on another idea by an Indian scientist that saves the day, with different parts of the weapon built and shipped from around the world.
It is the micro-budget version of the Independence Day ending (we never see the Indian scientist or anyone else involved), and the movie’s canvas strains as it heads into the finish but Ray Harryhausen does provide some neat images of saucers crashing into famous Washington DC landmarks.
While it is among the least interesting of the Harryhausen movies I have seen, it moves well and ends before it loses momentum. There is a cheap, unpretentious quality to it that makes it more fun than it has any right to be.
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