The First Men in the Moon (2010)

If you're expecting an action-packed movie of aliens vs. humans like the Alien franchise or the Predator franchise then forget about watching this. This is a family-friendly movie to watch with the family during a lazy afternoon. It was relatively loyal to the novel written by H. G. Wells. It discusses the dangers of imperialism and greed of the era and the pursuit of knowledge at any cost.You have to give credit to Mark Gatiss who despite being in an obviously low-budget movie is able to entertain the viewer. I'm not too familiar with Rory Kinnear's work except that he played a great villain in iBoy and I like his work on the Bond franchise, but he played a great role in this movie too.I have seen Sci-fi movies that have made me nauseous to watch them. However, this movie I believe paid a genuine homage to the 1950-60's science fiction movies. The one thing that I didn't like was the alien's appearance, which was a bit weak and could have used a bit more work.

I had already read the original book by H.G. Wells, so when I found this movie for sale at a local store I bought it.One thing I particularly liked about the movie is the fact it's faithful to the original story, only leaving out a few details (for example, in the book Cavor and Bedford get lost and start hallucinating after eating some of the plants on the moon before being captured) and not adding too much new material (just enough to explain why the moon has no atmosphere anymore). That seems to be a rarity for adaptations of H.G. Wells-stories, because the most well known adaptations of his books are either modernized versions of the story (War of the Worlds) or add a lot of new plot elements (The Time Machine).The special effects are decent enough. It is a television movie after all, so you can expect it won't have the same production values as a Hollywood blockbuster. One thing the movie could have done without however is the short dream sequence Bedford has when he just escaped from the moon, which is filmed in the style of the old silent movie "A Trip to the Moon".Overall, this is a movie that a fan of H.G. Wells' works should see at least once.

Going into things, I expected this movie to be weird and maybe on occasion rude, but I was surprised to find it had a quiet straight-forwardness about it instead. It was not bad, but it wasn't really a movie I would watch again either. I can see the kind of atmosphere that Gatiss was trying to set up when he adapted the story, and I think that the atmosphere he set worked very well with the rudimentary CGI in the film. I was a bit dismayed to see that the old man version of Bedford looked almost exactly like the old man form of the Tenth Doctor from that one episode with the Master in Doctor Who. You would think there could be some variation in the costuming department, or maybe they reused the prosthetic to save money. Either way, it was a nice little movie, though not very memorable.

I cannot find the reason to do such a horrible thing like this. Poor production, horrible effects, bad acting, terrible screenplay, lost directing and so on... The 1964 version is thousands times better than this one, including the effects, so what's the point about doing this? Poor H.G Wells. I read his book in which this thing is based. So many wonderful ideas lost. The changes in the story did it worst so why to change something that was already good and known? I am a screenwriter and a director and I think we can change, adapt, specially old stories, but in order to make it better not worst which is the case here. This movie looks like to have been made by a film student of the first year that missed all the classes. One is too much, I give it zero.