You may notice the tag line at the top of this page reads
‘Reviewing 100 Years of Film’; well I’m going back even further here with
Georges Melies fantastic Le Voyage dans
la lune (A Trip to the Moon). The most famous of Melies many hundreds of
short films, A Trip to the Moon is
loosely based on two popular turn of the century novels, From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells. At a meeting of
astronomers, one man proposes a trip to the Moon. Despite some discord among
the members, five people agree to travel with the man and launch from a giant
gun inside a bullet shaped rocket. When they get to the Moon they witness
incredible celestial sights from its surface before encountering aliens who ‘take
them to their leader’.
Despite looking fairly primitive now one hundred and ten
years after its release, A Trip to the
Moon was, for its time, incredibly advanced both in story and execution and
is considered as the first Science Fiction film ever to be produced. The film
features some incredible animation which is mixed with physical props, effects
and editing to create a surreal vision of the Moon over sixty-five years before
man ever set foot upon its surface.
