Fantastic!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This is simply one of the best science fiction movies ever filmed. Excellent direction, intelligent script, and superb performances from an outstanding cast make for a masterpiece in the genre. While obviously low budget, the producers make the best of what they have to work with and they do so brilliantly. From start to finish, imaginative sequences are presented with stunning effectiveness. The location shooting in Death Valley mimics perfectly what the Martian landscape would be envisioned as in 1950. This film serves as a cautionary tale as well, with the fate of the civilization on Mars being tied to a nuclear apocalypse. The cast is uniformly excellent and the existential closing scene with the two leads is one of the most shocking and effective ever filmed. The dialog is realistic and profound and certainly unforgettable. It is a sequence, like many in this picture, which will both disturb and uplift. Rocket Ship XM is an underrated motion picture, far ahead of its time, made with passion and imagination. Even with somewhat primitive special effects, this remains on an intellectual par with some of the more thoughtful science fiction ever produced in Hollywood.

Apparently this was marketed as the first ever movie featuring space travel . I don't know about you but I vividly recall seeing a film by George Melies that was produced almost 50 years before that involved a space rocket going to the moon and humans meeting the strange inhabitants living there . Sometimes marketing and the truth are two entirely different things That said this movie does mirror the real life space race going on at the time . George Pal was about to release DESTINATION MOON and this movie beats Pal to the punch . Unfortunately corners are cut and what we have is a very cheap looking film with a very wooden cast so much so there might have been a serious danger that it's so dated to be unwatchable and the only reason for watching is to laugh at it . This may hold true but there is an element of fascination as to how space travel was portrayed in an era when man had not yet travelled in space . The film lacks the cerebral drama and high concept thrills of say THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT and yet remains a film with a completely serious tone . What I found most interesting is that it does try and find a plausible explanation how a space rocket can travel to the Moon - one of using the gravitational pull between the Earth and its satellite to get there . Of course other scientific facts are unknown or ignored which can be distracting . Once the action locates to Mars we have to endure an all too obvious subtext that atomic bombs are bad for civilisation . As it stands the fact ROCKETSHIP XM was produced in an era where the Cold War was heating up and mankind hadn't travelled in to space yet does mean it has a curiosity value

Apparently there was a 'space race' that most of us are unaware of, though in 1950 it was fast and furious. It seems that George Pal had announced a new picture (DESTINATION MOON) that would feature a moon landing and it was to be the first of many similar films made in the 1950s. However, when the makers of ROCKETSHIP X-M heard about this, they decided to rush this film into production and beat them to the punch, so to speak. However, the DESTINATION MOON people cried foul and so when ROCKETSHIP X-M was marketed, they were forced to include a proviso that it was not DESTINATION MOON. Well, I don't know how these films fared at the box office, but as far as quality goes Pal and the rest of the DESTINATION MOON people had little to worry about, as ROCKETSHIP X-M, though a decent film, wasn't nearly as well made or entertaining. It seems that although it was technically first, it certainly wasn't best. I can say this because I saw them one after another today--an interesting way to see these two milestone films.The biggest problem is that while ROCKETSHIP X-M wants to be taken as serious sci-fi, there are just too many elements in it that would soon be recognized as clichés. The most obvious was including a female crew member. This set the stage for a million and one sexist and silly remarks and while the film makers might have been trying to say something positive about women's rights, the crew member really came off as just another piece of meat. The second cliché is finding aliens on their mission, though in this case instead of either little green men or horny space babes (such as in QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE or CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON) they are very primitive and look human. They discover cave men on Mars who apparently like to smash things--including members of the crew. In fact, because the film had so many clichés, when the film was about half-way complete, I predicted to my wife who on the crew would die in what order and I was correct! I'm not THAT smart--the film was just that predictable.In addition to the clichés, the film makers didn't do a very good job of dealing with the scientific aspects of space travel. Part of this might have been ignorance (such as having small objects on the ship float in zero gravity but not bigger ones--as if that mattered) and much of it was probably due to their desire to rush it into production (no pressure suits or other protection when walking on Mars--despite the cold temperatures and pressure difference). This made the film come off as a bit cheap, but at least I was thrilled that inside the space ship it didn't look like a big empty room. It looked a bit more like a real space ship.Overall, the film is entertaining, offers a few mild thrills and abounds with predictability as well as a message that comes off as both preachy AND premature. After only walking about for a few minutes and not even exploring the Martian cities, the scientist among the crew announces that the Martians destroyed themselves with nuclear bombs and the people living like idiot cave people was the result. How did he know this?! And why did everyone just accept this so quickly? For die-hard fans of sci-fi like myself, this is a must-see because of its historical value and it is reasonably entertaining. Others might find it tough going.

I bought "Rocketship X-M" on DVD in a two-pack with "Destination Moon." Now I see why the distributors did that: no one who had ever seen this movie would buy it on its own.I cannot fathom what school system turned out the reviewer who claimed that RXM is "great in its predictions of how space travel would take place..." Launch straight up, and then do a 90-degree right turn and circle faster and faster until you reach escape velocity... I don't think I recall that from the Apollo program. Never mind that the astronauts should be weightless once they shut off the engines, gravity changes directions every time they pass through the hatch to the engine room. Going to the moon, but "missed" it? No problem, it's just a hop-skip-and-a-jump (with a helping hand from divine providence) and you'll be at Mars! And OK, if you want to put life on Mars, given the state of planetary knowledge in 1950, it was a forgivable convention for the sake of the storytelling, but can you make them look at least a LITTLE alien? These Martians looked like extras from the cast of "10,000 B.C." I can accept some scientific mistakes, but this wouldn't pass muster with an above-average second-grader.And that's aside from the screaming plot holes: 12 minutes before launch (as you're reminded of constantly by the nagging P.A. voice saying "X minus so many minutes") the astronauts are giving a press conference! I guess the time crunch is why Dr. Eckstrom didn't change out of his coat and tie before launching into space. And how handy that, even though they were planning to go to the moon and had pressure suits for that, they brought hiking gear (and rifles!) just in case they ended up at Mars. They're lucky they landed anywhere, since apparently the method they had developed for landing was to have Dr.E look out the window and tell the "pilot" (Lloyd Bridges) to tweak down the throttles every now and then. Note to the designers of the XM-2: how about giving the pilot a window seat? Ditto the previous comments on the casual sexism that had eye-candy Dr. Lisa (Osa Massen) doom them all by repeatedly screwing up her fuel calculations, but hey that was the early '50s. She was there to fill her sweater, not a useful function."Rocketship X-M" is notable for being one of the first of the first films to say "ohmigod we're all going to blow ourselves up with these here A-bombs", but one can note that about it without wasting 77 minutes watching such dreck. By the way, that message might have had a bit more impact had there been some money in the budget for actual sets of the Martian city ruins, rather than just matte paintings.I can appreciate "good" bad sci-fi, for the unique way the "future" used to look, and for the inherent (if condescending) humor you can find when when we look back on the naivety of audiences 60 years ago, but this film must have been insulting even then. "Rocketship X-M" isn't even suitable for an MST3K-style lampooning. Sometimes, bad is just... bad.Anybody want to buy a DVD? Used only once, I swear.