When they arrive, the Fenwick explorers meet up with U.S. By the end of the movie, Grand Fenwick’s lonely science officer, with the help from the Prime Minister’s son, builds a viable rocket using wine as fuel and blasts off to the Moon. (The next year, Lester would direct A Hard Day’s Night.) In the film, the small country of Grand Fenwick cons the United States and USSR to donate funds to its space program, while diverting the money to repair the royal castle’s hot water plumbing. While many of science fiction movies are serious in tone, Richard Lester’s The Mouse on the Moon stands out as a comedy about the space race. “If you can find a hook of truth to hang your plot elements on, making it not just pure fantasy, then your audience will come along for the ride.”
#FIRST MAN ON THE MOON MOVIE 1964 CREATURE MOVIE#
“Astronomers were trying to justify their conceits, and I believe the mark of a good science fiction movie is not that, that it's scientifically accurate but that it's believable,” Bennington said. Bret Bennington, chair of the Department of Geology at Hofstra University and co-director of the “One Giant Leap: Apollo 50” conference hosted by the Hofstra Cultural Center and the Cradle of Aviation in Garden City, N.Y., what makes for good science fiction is fantasy based on truth.
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The best science fiction takes what we know and push the boundaries of what is believable. Mid-twentieth century films incorporated innovations like rocket technology and space suits while still pushing the boundary of imagination with nuclear-powered spaceships and living in space stations. As our knowledge of space and astrophysics grew, so did the imagination of filmmakers and audiences alike. Early films depicted outlandish theories of the Moon, based on fantastical theories such as aliens inhabiting the Moon’s craters or being able to breathe on the far side of the Moon. At a time with many unanswered questions about the reality of space, movies depicting rockets and the Moon helped to spark the curiosity of audiences.
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The filmmakers of the 20th century used a combination of science and imagination to create a future vision of space travel.