text: The actors are so bland that it's almost impossible to tell them apart (Pauline Kael said of this movie: "The actors have names, but they're truly anonymous"), and the special effects are really bad. They simulate weightlessness with people hanging on cables and by recycling the trick that let Fred Astaire dance on the ceiling in "Royal Wedding" (but none of these guys move well enough to make it look convincing). <br /><br />The low point of the movie is when one of the characters, an airplane tycoon, is trying to convince some other "giants of industry" to come in with him in a moon-rocket consortium, and he shows them a Woody Woodpecker cartoon that explains how a rocket works at a 2nd grade level! (And to think that Robert Heinlein worked on the screenplay...)<br /><br />The only plus is that the production design manages to communicate a sort of "Amazing Stories" sensibility, and even that is done much better in the producer's (George Pal) subsequent movie "When Worlds Collide", which has similar bad acting, but is much more entertaining. However, Pal's best sci-fi movie has to be "The Time Machine".