Conquest of Space isn’t an actual to George Pal’s Destination Moon (1950), the film that started the whole 50s American science fiction film boom, but it’s certainly cut from the same cloth. Pal replaced the earlier film’s director, Irving Pichel, with Byron Haskins who he’d worked with on The War of the Worlds (1953) and The Naked Jungle (1954). The result is an inferior and ponderous film that somehow manages to sap a lot of the majesty and excitement of life in space.

In the future, a giant space station, The Wheel, has been built in orbit above the Earth commanded by its designer, Colonel Samuel T. Merritt (Walter Brooke). A large spaceship has been built nearby ready to make Man’s first trip to the moon, but the mission is changed at the last minute to a voyage to Mars instead, with Merritt commanding and a crew that includes his son Barney (Eric Fleming), Sgt Imoto (Benson Fong), Sgt Fodor (Ross Martin), Sgt. Jackie Seigel (Phil Foster) and Merritt’s best friend Sgt. Mahoney (Mickey Shaughnessy) who has stowed away after being rejected for the mission. The rest of the crew are unaware that Merritt senior is suffering from space fatigue and is slowly having a breakdown, beginning to doubt the moral right of the mission, his condition deteriorating further following the death of Fodor, killed by micro-meteors while outside fixing a damaged radar antenna. After 8 months, the crew are approaching Mars but Merritt has now become convinced that Fodor’s death was “God’s judgement” and he attempts to crash the ship into the planet surface. He then tries to sabotage the mission by draining the ship of its vital water supplies which results in Barney accidentally killing his father in a struggle. The surviving crew struggled to survive but are saved when, on Christmas Day, it starts to snow allowing them to replenish their water supply and they prepare to make the rturn trip home.

Perhaps stung by criticisms that Destination Moon was a little too humourless and populated by dull characters, Pal and his screen writers James O’Hanlon, Barre Lyndon, Phil Yordan and George Worthing Yates go in the opposite direction here, frequently undermining the drama with the “comic” behaviour of the Brooklyn-accented Seigel, who comes across as one of those comic-relief GIs that we suffered in many a World War II drama. None of the characters are particularly memorable or even all that easy to distinguish from each other except for Imoto who stands out both for being Japanese (bear in mind that America’s war with Japan had only been over for a decade by the time Conquest of Space was released) and for delivering one of the most bizarre and inexplicable speeches in any 50s science fiction film. In a soliloquy that remains utterly baffling even now, he lectures the rest of the crew on why the Japanese chose to attack Pearl Harbour in 1941 – the Japanese were forced to eat with chopsticks and live in paper houses because they didn’t have the natural resources to do anything (let’s ignore the fact that they clearly had enough to build a highly efficient military machine). Adding insult to injury, he claims that they didn’t have enough food which is why – brace yourself – the Japanese are so small… It’s an eye-wateringly racist and ill-judged moment in a film that feels fairly ill-judged throughout.

It’s very dull stuff, made all the more stultifying by the religious subtext of the kind that Pal was prone to include in his science fiction films (think of the climax of War of the Worlds set in a Los Angeles church, or the Biblical references in When Worlds Collide (1951)). Here, the transformation of Merritt from veteran space soldier to gibbering, Bible-wielding zealot is unconvincing and the idea that the crew are saved by what appears to be an actual miracle on Christmas Day is as unsubtle as it gets. Strangely, elsewhere, the script seems to want to emphasises the scientific accuracy – such that it was in 1955 – of the plot, but often at the expense of the story which has to come to frequent halts for lectures and much technobabble. Unusually for the time, and perhaps indicative of the lack of interest in the perfunctory plot and the character populating it, the cast aren’t credited in the opening titles.

That said, the film is often nicely appointed with decent costumes and good models and props, even if the visual effects are often variable in quality, some shots of the spaceship fringed with very obvious matte lines (though this was a failing that often afflicted genre films of the time). The look of the film was influenced by the great Chesley Bonestell, who had illustrated Willy Ley’s 1949 non-fiction book that the film took its title from – the script also leant heavily on Werner von Braun’s 1952 book The Mars Project (von Braun would join Bonestell as one of the film’s technical advisers) and the 1956 book The Exploration of Mars by Ley, von Braun, and Bonestell. It results in a film that’s scientifically solid but too dry for its own good, too hidebound by its verisimilitude to be really entertaining, though the burial in space of Fodor has a poignancy and sense of wonder that the rest of the film lacks – more of that would have been welcome.

Conquest of Space flopped at the box office and it was the first of pal’s films to fail to make its money back. Stung by the reaction, he swore off science fiction for another five years, abandoning plans to make a sequel to When Worlds Collide and forsaking the genre until he returned to produce and direct The Time Machine in 1960. Conquest of Space has to be seen as the least successful on every level of Pal’s genre films, a well-meaning and often nicely made film that finds it even harder to lift off the launch pad than the astronauts trying to get home from Mars.

It’s been suggested that the film was an influence of Stanley Kubrick when he made 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and it’s certainly true that Kubrick watched many of the existing space dramas while preparing his masterpiece. There are moments when the two films appear to intersect (both films feature an astronaut being killed while on a spacewalk to fix a supposedly broken component) and the circular design of the space station might have played a part in the creation of the similar structure in Kubrick’s film but otherwise, the two couldn’t be more dissimilar, Kubrick’s film managing to be far more riveting and thought-provoking despite being the slower-moving film.