Woman In the Moon
|
List Price: Our Price: $15.91 You Save: $14.00 (47%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $12.61 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of Woman In the Moon
Movie Review: The launch sequence is unforgettable!
Summary: 4 Stars
The many reviews already listed touch upon most of the salient aspects of this masterpiece. But I would like to underline what a previous (3-star rating) reviewer pointed out. The launch sequence has to be considered one of the most powerful, riveting, and exhilarating sequences in the history of film. This is so from both an artistic and intellectual perspective. The gradual, extended, relentless buildup to the actual launch has an epic quality which is perhaps unmatched in science fiction films, and which manages to convey--through the imaginative force of its artistry--the strangeness and wonder of the event almost more vividly than what we experienced at the time of the actual moon landing just four decades after the film was made. This creative leap of the imagination is all that science fiction can hope to be--as the opening motto states: 'Never' does not exist for the human mind...only 'Not Yet.'Movie Review: Classic Science Fiction
Summary: 4 Stars
This copy has the full dinner scene which is a bit lengthy for a modern audience. However it does make the film complete.
It is classic, so little else to say. If you are a fan of silents, Fritz Lang, or Science Fiction, this is a worthy addition to have if not to watch.
Movie Review: Die Frau im Mond
Summary: 3 Stars
Painstaking direction by Fritz Lang combines with sometimes ridiculous overwriting by wife Thea von Harbau to produce a mixed masterpiece. The movie can be described as 1) crime thriller segueing into 2) eerily prescient science fiction descending into 3) soapy melodrama. Lang's influence is most obvious in the middle section but the cumbersome plotline slows down the beginning and end.
We open with handsome Doctor Helius chewing scenery with an aged professor driven into poverty and near-insanity by the rejection of his theory that the moon's mountains are full of gold. The good Doctor still believes in him, as do the 5 potentates (!) who control the world's gold supply and wish to corral the moon's as well. This introduces an underworld spy played quite suavely by Fritz Rasp.
We also meet the eponymous Woman, Gerda Maurus, a lady with expressive eyes, no particular figure and a rather bad hair-do. She is a jolly sort, though, as well as a much stronger individual than the jelly-backboned dames who pollute the post-WWII genre, and serves well enough as the love interest for both the good Doctor and his (mostly) loyal engineer Hans.
This all gets sticky for about an hour until we finally meet the Rocketship. The roll-out of the Ship is a sequence of monumental power as the massive craft and supporting structure are slowly rolled out of the assembly building to the launch pad as the moon rises out of the searchlit gloom and crowds and photographers swarm beneath the juggernaut to the accompaniment of radio voice-over which, though completely unheard in a silent film, is so beautifully gestured that we understand exactly what the announcer is saying.
The whole launch and countdown scene is one of the greatest sequences in science fiction, full of painstaking detail, creating immense drive and drama but in a vein of complete human reality. The added film score by Marsalis lends impetus particularly to this sequence.
Scenes of the craft in weightlessness are also well-grounded in physics (rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth was technical consultant). Unfortunately the landing on the moon also lands us right back in the Harlequin romance script. The lunar scenery leaves reality completely behind, while the whole hour-long Gold Syndicate subplot at the beginning basically evaporates into a bit of wrestling in the sand.
The romantic triangle is a good enough romantic triangle. It just seems like a long way to go to have a soap opera.
Even so, the amazing middle part contains maybe the most powerful dramatization of real science that I have seen, inventing the countdown sequence now used routinely in space and military launches. These scenes can be watched separately as a smaller, almost self-contained masterpiece within the much longer film.
Movie Review: Echoes of the 1950s -- in 1929
Summary: 3 Stars
You'd think you were watching a spaceflight film from the 1950s. All the ingredients are there. A homemade spaceship with room for standing, cabinets with dials and levers, a few men -- including one sage one, and one evil -- and a woman. And (oh!) and a young stowaway.
But this was made over 20 years earlier. B&W. No sound. Heavy melodramatic plot and acting.
And it goes on for 2 hours and 48 minutes, developing at a very slow pace. Too slow for most of today's audiences. But I was fairly engrossed. Director Fritz Lang was a master of his style of storytelling and filmmaking.
Good points are the efforts at scientific accuracy -- it was surprisingly prescient at times, supremely silly at others. The direction and cinematography were topnotch, too.
It was a bit distracting that the villain was made to look like Adoph Hitler. Lang was staunchly anti-Nazi and left Germany around 1933.
Movie Review: Bad "feature"
Summary: 3 Stars
For some inexplicable reason, Amazon has removed the rate movie feature from the main product page. One must now write a review in order to rate a movie and generate recommendations. This is not a review, but merely a means to allow me to rate this movie and improve my recommendations. If you are as annoyed by this new "feature" as I am, please register your protest w/ Amazon help.