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La Morte viene dallo Spazio
The Day the Sky Exploded
Italy/France 1958
produced by Guido Giambartolomei for Lux Film, Royal Film, Compagnie Cinématographique de France
directed by Paolo Heusch
starring Paul Hubschmid, Fiorella Mari, Madeleine Fischer, Ivo Garrani, Dario Michelis, Peter Meersman, Jean-Jacques Delbo, Massimo Zeppieri, Sam Galter, annie Bernal, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Gérard Landry, S.Louis Costa
story by Virgilio Sabel, screenplay by Sandro Continenza, Marcello Coscia, music by Carlo Rustichelli, cinematography by Mario Bava
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Astronaut John McLaren (Paul Hubschmid) is supposed to be the first man
to launch into space and circle the moon in an atom-powered missile, but
even before he leaves the atmosphere he has to bail out. The missile goes
boom somewhere in outer space, which shouldn't be too big of a problem,
only a swarm of meteroites happens to be passing by at the time of the
explosion, and triggered by the big bang, the swarm decides to change its
direction and head towards earth to desroy the blue planet as we know it.
Everybody panics of course, especially since natural disasters precede the
projected destruction of earth, but astronaut John McLaren and his team of
scientists keep cool heads and figure out a way to destroy the meteorites:
Simply bombard them with all of earths nuclear warheads while still in
outer space should do the trick, right? Thing is, there's obviously only
one computer in the whole world (these were the 1950's, remember) to
calculate the correct trajectory, so times pressing pretty quickly, and
when a scientist (Peter Meersman) goes mad and tries to destroy the
computer's power supply, that doesn't help either ... but ultimately earth
is saved - by the very weapons created to destroy it. Watching
this film, one can't but notice the pacifist and conciliatory message it
was transmitting while in the real world, the Cold War was at one of its
heights. But one also can't help but notice the fact that this film is
incredibly talky, and while its basic plot might suggest an effects-laden
spectacle, pretty much all the audience gets is characters discussing the
situation and subplots doing nothing to further the plot. Now of course
I'm aware that this is all done for budgetary reasons, but a low budget
has never been a good excuse to turn a possibly exciting storyline into a
hell of a bore. At least some shots of missile launchs towards the end of
the film are pretty interesting, but they are merely stock footage one
would expect from a documentary on the subject rather than a feature film. That
all said, the film might still be entertaining to cold war nostalgia trash
afficionados - but only mildly entertaining.
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