Tubi very intelligently put this on on autoplay right after The Thing, and I’d somehow never seen it. Another movie that is very dated and of its time, but, I actually, watching it, assumed it must have from the early to mid ’60s, not 1956. It’s another one of those films that you kind of have to view through the lens of its era, but I can believe that if I had been a teenager in the 1950s and saw this when it came out, without having seen everything later that it shaped, I would have thought it was incredible. I remember not all that long ago, some kids raised on modern, studio-crafted pop saying they couldn’t understand what was so great about the Beatles, and I couldn’t help but think of that watching this. It certainly originated a lot of common tropes: first sci-fi film to feature faster-than-light travel, first one to use an electronic soundtrack, first one set entirely on an alien world, not to mention the use of vivid color photography years before the black-and-white era ended, and in terms of its production and many of the tropes it uses it’s very easy to see the influence on later shows on up until “Star Trek” and beyond. It’s hard to believe it preceded Star Trek by at least 10 years, in that sense it still seems ahead of its time.
