directed by Fred F. Sears
USA
83 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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As a fan of practical effects, it pains me to admit that I have little experience with Ray Harryhausen. I've seen his work in gifs and through its influence on the tokusatsu films and television that I love, but aside from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms - which I adored - I've hardly ever sat down and watched any movies he was involved in. I'm working on fixing that.
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is one of those movies that, after a point, I was mostly watching for the effects, because the plot had gone off in directions I found unfavorable. The movie started out strong: Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor play off of each other fairly well, and that remains consistent through the whole film - the two of them, though not necessarily rife with chemistry, did convince me that their characters were in love with each other, and while the social climate of the time meant that Carol was portrayed as kind of second fiddle to her manly army man husband, she did at least feel like she mattered. (It's my blog and I can write as many run-on sentences as I like.)
But the opening scene also introduced something that became a problem throughout the film, which is that the characters occasionally reacted to things in ways that I just had trouble seeing the logic of. The couple witnesses a flying saucer looming enormously over their car as they drive through the desert, and yet they convince themselves so thoroughly that they didn't actually see it - and this despite the film's opening narration making it explicitly clear that UFO sightings are on the rise - that it takes a total accident (Russell having left a tape recorder running and capturing the sound of the UFO) for them to realize they did really see a UFO. That just felt kind of ridiculous to me. That and a lot of the other decisions people make could be easily explained by saying that nobody really would know how to react to a UFO, but again: this movie takes place in a time when everybody has been seeing UFOs.
The whole affair is in general a very Us vs. Them story about humankind taking back what we believe to be rightfully ours from a horde of literally faceless Others bent on invading us, and all the unfortunate moral implications that entails. In the first UFO landing scene, with no provocation whatever, the U.S. Army begins shooting at the aliens who emerge from the ship, killing one of them immediately. The aliens then retaliate, using far superior technology to not just kill the Army forces but totally disintegrate them - justification #1, "They have scarier weapons than us, so we had to!". This is fairly par for the course for a movie of this kind, but what really got me was that afterward it feels like the blame for this gets pinned on the aliens. We learn that they had tried to communicate with us peacefully prior to the landing but did not account for (or assumed that we would account for) a fundamental difference in perception of time, which rendered their message unintelligible. So the movie ostensibly frames the Army's violent reaction as "Oh, no! We didn't listen, so we reacted on instinct!" but what underlies that is actually "We didn't listen, but it was because they didn't make a good enough effort to convey their message, so our violence was still justified".
It's gross, man, I don't know what else to say.
But what isn't gross is the practical effects. It's a little odd seeing Harryhausen do UFOs - from what I've seen he seems to be known more for animating living creatures, skeletons and Gorgons and dinosaurs and whatnot, but as is very clear when you watch this movie, he also knocks it out of the park with his UFO effects too. There are one or two green-screen shots that come off a little awkward, but on the whole the compositing is actually done remarkably well for the time, and mostly you can't even tell when the UFOs are superimposed onto the scenery. The perspective is also really interesting, because I see a lot of sci-fi movies show UFOs either super far away or extremely close (usually using 1:1 scale models of a section of the ship for the actors to interact with), but Earth vs. the Flying Saucers gives us a lot of shots where the UFOs are so low to the ground as to be nearly on top of us, or aerial shots from either near or above the UFO's level, and the effect is really visually striking. It honestly reminded me of a lot of shots from Nope.
I also enjoyed the aliens themselves. They do look very goofy, but something about it works. It somehow fits that they look so awkward, lumbering around in their bulky suits (which we are told only weigh a few ounces, in reality). A lot of tokusatsu movies also feature aliens who are physically unassuming, or even weak and fragile, but possess powerful technology. I can see a lot of this movie's influence on Japanese cinema of the time - the interior shots of the spaceship particularly remind me of the Gamera series' spaceship interiors.
So, this turned out to be a very lengthy review of a movie where my opinion is basically "Nice effects, too much chest-beating". Nothing yucked me out in this vein more than the ending scene, featuring a white, able-bodied, heterosexual American couple frolicking on the beach and declaring the planet to be theirs. I can't really call this movie out more so than any other given atomic-age sci-fi movie, though, considering that pretty much all of them are like this. And at least this one has cool practical effects.
