Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

SincereFinest disgusting, overrated, pointless

filippaberry84 I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

frankiedoodles A sci fi 50's gem. Love this movie and the ending is shocking but extremely well done. This is a classic of epic proportions. Peter Graves and a great supporting cast played this out with heart and passion. Herbert Berghof also played a great part of the Russian scientist. Also, Walter Sande a staple in the golden age of TV did an admirable job. The cold war era was played out well as the Soviets were always making threats of burying the US. The pictures of Stalin in the background of the Russian scenes is a stark reminder of the evil we faced at that time. Extremely well done and worth watching.

utgard14 Radio transmissions believed to be from Mars turn out to have quite different origins in this intriguing Cold War-era sci-fi film that seems to be polarizing today, if IMDb is anything to go by (and I wonder). Peter Graves does a good job but Herbert Berghof steals the show as a former Nazi now working for the Russians. Andrea King is pretty annoying as the hysterical wife of Graves' character. The rest of the cast is solid. I like this movie because it's interesting with a unique plot. It's talky, yes, but that's not inherently a bad thing. It's a thought-provoking movie with some historical interest, not just a special effects spectacle. Because it has political and religious elements, it will trigger Certain Types. If you are one of those, gird your loins before watching.

John Holden Much as I love 1940s-60s sci-fi, this is mostly painful to sit through. There's almost no plot advancement outside of talk, talk, talk. All the main points are spelled out for you. To vary it a little, people yell at each other and yell about the scienceYou'd think it was based on a play ... oh, what a surprise, it's a movie version of the play "Red Planet".The political bits ~ 1/3rd of the way in are good. Lobby groups immediately fight against the potential productivity of Martian soil, oil, ....You know how most of the movies from this period end with a warning? eg. "It's dead but the world needs to be careful with atomic power / space travel / inverse gamma de-polaritization / setting fire to monsters / cooking spicy food for aliens / premarital sex ..." This is a long warning of the above type, with breaks for talky introspection and preaching.

dougdoepke Apparently, 1952 was the year the Big Guy finally got broadcasting rights in the US. Because movies like The Next Voice You Hear (1952) and this one managed to put God in direct communication with us mere mortals courtesy the Hollywood hotline. Of course, it really helped when the Big Guy enlisted on our side against the godless commies, while His Presence also helped clean up Hollywood's image as a commie harboring red nest. You might even call His intervention a godsend for the film industry.Actually, this 90-minutes is to effective propaganda what the sledgehammer is to the fly swatter. At least, its companion movie (The Next…) had the good sense to avoid the obvious, like crude stereotypes. On the other hand, this concoction has no such inhibitions. Commies are uniformly beasts, Russian peasants are uniformly downtrodden, and Americans are uniformly thoughtful. I don't know what Soviet propaganda was like at the time, but it couldn't have been much cruder than this.I will say the movie is well mounted visually. In fact, the skillful complexity of some of the visuals clashes with the simple-mindedness of the script. On the whole, I wish I could say this propaganda piece is nothing more than a clumsy Cold War artifact. But it's not. Unfortunately, it feeds into that current sense of smug self-congratulation that goes by the popular meme of American exceptionalism.