To me, this movie is perfection.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

(Flash Review)This was just shy of 3 hours and felt longer. Uff-dah for a silent film. The duration could have easily been hacked in half and been just as effective. The first overly long and forgettable portion is about a scientific professor who has a goal to prove there is a wealth of gold in the moon's rocks and surface ground. His hypothesis is greeted by skeptical laughter by his peers. Fast forward to the actual voyage to the moon. It was rather amusing and had improved creativity and cinematography than the first long portion. There are portrayals of the takeoff, approach, landing and comical moon adventures. And either Fritz believed there was oxygen on the moon or used that as a way to get the helmets off the actors to show their expressions. Will they find gold? Will they be able to get home to prove the professors hypothesis? Overall, the film dragged on and on and it was not a space adventure version of Fritz's masterwork Metropolis that I had hoped it might be.

Not quite awful, but extremely slow and melodramatic in the worst sense. For anyone expecting something like Metropolis, with the same director and writer, forget about it. I feel like I just wasted 3 hours to learn little or nothing. Surprised so many liked it. I'm generally good for anything science fiction but at the moment I'd rather see Zsa Zsa as the Queen of Venus than this (not available, unfortunately). I don't applaud Filmstruck for making this available to waste my precious time. Music was execrable, which didn't help. A few technological points for multistage rockets. A few extreme negative scientific points for, like, not knowing that the Moon doesn't have a breathable atmosphere. And that, for sure, was certainly known in 1929.

This early sci-fi from Fritz Lang never quite reaches the epic proportions of his earlier Metropolis, and for much of the time it is earthbound and mired in a tortuous sort of espionage plot combined with a dull ménage-a-trois which really makes the first section of the film – about an hour-and-a-half – a real chore to get through. Each scene seems to last about twenty minutes and is filled with moody stares or exaggerated gestures. I'm not sure why Lang felt it necessary to go into quite so much detail over every aspect of the plot at such length – he could quite easily have told us all we needed to know in a fraction of the time.Anyway, things pick up considerably once we're into space, and things begin to resemble the Nick Carter space comic little stowaway Gustav is always reading. The spaceship is a blast. Some of its design and mechanics was based on scientific theory that still holds water today, but much of it is also way off the mark. The first thing you notice is all the straps hanging from the ceilings of the spaceship, and all the foot straps on the floor. These are to counter the effect of weightlessness brought about by zero gravity. And in preparation for lift off our intrepid explorers all don thick woollies and strap themselves to their bunks. The force of lift off is anticipated by Lang, and his astronauts need all their strength to twiddle the giant dials necessary to ensure they don't all – well, I don't know: explode? Implode? Melt? Your guess is as good as mine.The surface of the moon and the landing are quite good, although on this moon men can breathe – although they must dodge bubbling puddles of sludge. Oh yeah, and the mountains are made of gold, which sends the obligatory mad professor off on a paroxysm if heightened madness when he lays his hands on them.I suppose I'm spending so much time on the accuracy – or lack thereof – of the flight to the moon because the plot is so dull and uninvolving. Lang seems to emphasise the clean rigid, lines of man-made earth, shooting through doorways (two at a time sometimes) to contrast with the rugged, disorganised landscape of the moon, perhaps to suggest the unravelling of the astronauts' minds as they nearly all succumb to some kind of madness (greed, fear, love) once they land on its surface. If you're not a great fan of silent films you'll definitely find the sedate pace and hysterical acting difficult to stomach for such a long (nearly three hours) running time.

I saw the original premiere presentation director's cut of this movie in January of 2003, with excellent musical accompaniment by Dennis James at the Paramount theater. Perfect, restored print, a movie that I have always wanted to see (since it was mentioned in Carlos Clarens "Horror Movies" first published in 1967). HOWEVER... The tendency toward "original, premiere presntation" director's cut reached new heights of lunacy (pun intended) with this movie. It ran more than three hours and 40 minutes! According to it's IMDB entry the original version that ran in the US was 95 minutes with longer versions (running time up to 2 and a half hours) running in Europe. At times I felt as if I had been placed in hypersleep in prep for a deep space expedition of my own! The film certainly lived up to advance billing, yet certain things, like the 45-minute opening dinner scene, were obviously way longer than they needed to be. One doesn't need to be a genius to know that after the premiere, Fritz Lang probably cut the dinner scene to about three minutes, removed whole sections, and generally tightened up an otherwise improbable story. For example, the moon is portrayed as a rather pleasant (if poorly stocked with resources for survival) beach resort. Everyone runs around in sweaters and jodhpurs, and true love seems destined to survive the wait for a return rescue rocket. Other stuff was great: the launch pad, countdown and the experience of the G forces on blastoff were, well the archetypal events for all the space operas to follow. A good movie, but probably seen to much better effect on video or in the shorter release version (if either ever turns up).