Rocketship X-M (1950) on Netflix
Col. Floyd Graham and four crewmates lift off aboard the RX-M, the first crewed expedition to the Moon. Engine trouble and a fuel miscalculation send them far past it, toward Mars.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb4.9/102,796 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
At White Sands Proving Ground, Col. Floyd Graham, Dr. Lisa Van Horn, Dr. Karl Eckstrom, Maj. William Corrigan and Harry Chamberlain board the RX-M, named for Rocketship Expedition-Moon, and blast off toward the Moon. Past the halfway point the engines die, the crew recalculates their fuel ratios and restarts them, and the ship tears out of control beyond its target. The acceleration leaves them unconscious, and they come to days later, 50 million miles out and 50,000 miles from Mars. The RX-M sets down there, and the five step out in oxygen masks, finding a metal face sculpture, ruined buildings and radiation readings that point to an atomic war.
Cast
- John Dutraas Physician
- Tom Colemanas Reporter (uncredited)
- James Conatyas Doctor Taking Lisa's Blood Pressure (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Rocketship X-M (1950)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Because George Pal's Destination Moon had been delayed by production issues, Rocketship X-M was shot in just 18 days on a $94,000 budget and rushed into theaters 25 days before the Pal film, cashing in on Destination Moon's national publicity.
- Ferde Grofé's score for Rocketship X-M used a theremin, which the film calls the first use of an electronic musical instrument in a science-fiction film.
- In 1973 the film turned up on a list compiled by Dalton Trumbo's family of scripts the black-listed writer had worked on without credit, though later family-authorized biographies of Trumbo did not mention Rocketship X-M.
- The film's Martian surface was faked with remote Southern California locations, and the spot where the crew leaves the ship to explore is Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park.
- In the 1970s, Kansas City film exhibitor, theater owner and later video distributor Wade Williams acquired the rights to Rocketship X-M and had some of its special effects scenes reshot to improve the film's overall continuity.
- Short of time and budget, the producers omitted some special effects scenes and substituted stock footage of American V-2 rocket launches and flight, which created very noticeable continuity problems.
- Rocketship X-M was the first film drama to explore the dangers of nuclear warfare and atomic radiation through science fiction; those themes became recurrent in many 1950s science fiction films.
- The clusters of fast-moving meteoroids in the film look identical because the same prop meteoroids were shot from different angles and positions, then optically printed in tandem at different sizes on the master negative.
