20 Million Miles to Earth

20 Million Miles to Earth
by Nathan Juran, Richard Schickel

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Movie Reviews of 20 Million Miles to Earth

Movie Review: HARRYHAUSEN'S MAGIC TOUCH
Summary: 5 Stars

The story may be trite and the screenplay not particularly noteworthy, but the illusion of life given the Ymir, a reptilian biped creature brought unwillingly from Venus to earth as an egg, is truly astonishing, and sometimes grotesquely beautiful. Even more amazingly, we respond to the Ymir as a living, breathing creature. Just knowing it's not an actor in a monster suit nor a drawn cartoon adds immeasurably to the effect. After it hatches, the small gestures as it rubs its eyes and reacts to light in the increasingly hostile earthly environment make it particularly endearing. In fact, we are inclined to root for this alien beast as it fights to survive while traveling from a tiny Sicilian fishing village to Rome where, of course, it wreaks havoc as a now understandably angry behemoth with very destructive proclivities. The black and white photography, no doubt a result of budget concerns, is especially dynamic and appropriately moody with scenes richly shadowed. This new edition includes nice wide and full screen transfers as well as trailers and featurettes.

Ray Harryhausen's life was inexorably changed when, as a teen, he saw "King Kong" (1933) at Grauman's Chinese theater in Hollywood. The life-like puppet animation of the great ape by Willis O'Brien so captured his fancy that Ray went home and immediately attempted to duplicate the effects, making dinosuar models and animating them -- at 24 moves for every second of finished film -- within his own detailed miniature sets and hand-painted backgrounds.

His early efforts were quite good and his parents encouraged Ray to continue with his hobby which, in fact, was becoming more of an obsession. He even cut up one of his mother's fur coats to make a lifelike pelt for one of his creations -- and was not reprimanded. In 1938, at a science fiction club, he met another teen named Ray -- Ray Bradbury -- who had similar interests. They encouraged each other and became life-long friends. Harryhausen went to art school near Los Angeles. The quality of his designs and miniatures greatly improved and soon he was invited by his idol, Willis O'Brien, to work on the stop-motion ape movie "Mighty Joe Young."

In the age of eye-popping, super photorealistic computer generated animation, there's still something uniquely enthralling about seeing the interaction of fantastical three dimensional creatures with human actors. Maybe it's the hands-on-touch of these clay, fur and metal-armatured creations that gives them the illusion of life in a way that CGI can never achieve. Even the tiny flaws and mistakes -- like the uneven movement of fur and sometimes even the fleeting fingerprints of the animators -- add an element of emotional realism that is hard to describe in words alone. The mind knows the puppet is not alive but the eye and heart appreciate the art to such a degree that one is filled with astonishment and affection at this hand-crafted art. This is something much more than merely the willing suspension of disbelief that all the story-telling arts demand. And no man did it better than Ray Harryhausen. He has referred to the craft as "playing God by molding life from clay." And maybe that's the truer subtext of the metaphor to which we respond with such delight and wonder.

Columbia/Tristar also distributes on DVD Harryhausen's "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger," "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad," "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" and "Jason and the Argonauts" the latter with the incredible fighting skeletons, perhaps Harryhausen's most widely praised sequence.

Summary of 20 Million Miles to Earth