That was an excellent one.

hyped garbage

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This had to be a second feature when debuting in the mid-50s. It was a weak execution of an interesting plot. A crew of astronauts launch from England into outer space on a rocket which can serve as a satellite. Their mission is to test a new bomb, but after the bomb fails to repel itself from the ship, the crew has only a matter of hours to defuse or destroy the weapon before it explodes. A typical 50s movie with a little romance budding between the stowaway and one of the crew. A little morality and indignation thrown in regarding a nuclear weapon in outer space. A bit more conflict among the crew might have added some spice. Considering their circumstances they should have been at each other's throats more. Saw it on TCM. Unfortunately, it is not worthy of even being considered a classic. Forbidden Planet was filmed the same year and there is absolutely no comparison that can be made. Satellite in the Sky bombed way before the ending.

We can forgive them because it was 1956, but this is a real pedestrian space yarn with a lot of holes in it. It's in the middle of the Cold War and the development of a rocket to the stratosphere is commandeered to test a bomb-to-end-all-bombs. This will create what we in the late 20th Century called detente. Even the crew is ignorant of the whole process, but some government zealots go off half cocked with little regard for the dangers, in order to scare the world out of developing any further weapons, fighting any future wars. Of course, the whole thing has to go off just right, and we know it isn't. Once again we have the obligatory pushy female (a reporter who stows away on the rocket) who pushes everyone's buttons. Just to show you what a progressive time she lives in, she ends up making coffee and sandwiches for the guys. There is the idea that science is advancing too fast. In the end, this is a movie about dealing with the realities of miscalculation. The slipshod methods make this less than it could have been. It does have decent special effects or its time.

This is one of those 1950's serious science fiction space travel extravaganzas in color, but one of the only British ones. They predicted a lot of things right, got a few things wrong (we still have not militarized space, thank goodness), but still it is amazing that this film was made in 1956, even prior to Sputnik going up.The model work of the spaceship/rocket is top notch for 1956, even if it doesn't fool one living soul in 2013.We're all here for the action stuff about test flights and launching the rocket, and the (inevitable) Crisis In Outer Space (tm) that all serious science fiction efforts seem to gravitate (har har) toward.We're here less so for the political back story, machinations and intrigue, and philosophical battle about the value of taking risks and the sense of discovery that science provides contrasted with all those other issues that require money down here on li'l old Earth, which goes on between the Space Cadet commander and the Spunky Female Reporter (tm also). Did women have ANY profession other than reporter in a movie made prior to 1967? And we're definitely not here for the limp attempts at delving into some of the characters' love lives.But this is entertaining for its time. There are some slow bits, true, but ultimately they do not forget about what we are all there to see, and we get back to glamour shots of the spaceship eventually.If you're a fan of 1950's science fiction, and you haven't seen it, you could do a lot worse than Satellite in the Sky.

Paul Dickson directed this British early Sci-Fi film about an experimental rocket ship sent to deploy and detonate a tritonium bomb meant to dissuade future wars and aggression. Unfortunately, the bomb becomes attached to the rear-end of the ship, forcing the crew to take emergency actions to detach it and send it off on its way into space, before they are all blown up. Lois Maxwell plays a reporter who stows away(!) on the ship, and Kieron Moore plays the lead astronaut. Despite the presence of a bomb, the film isn't that bad, but is a pretty dated and dull affair, much too talky and static to succeed. Though it does have a good cast, obscure film is forgettable.