War Of The Satellites!

Roger Corman delves into science fiction with his 1958 flick War of the Satellites. It's hard to really tell what "satellite" means in this movie, but what we see are three powerful rockets which head into orbit and then conjoin certain elements to make an de facto space station of sorts. It's certainly the roomiest spacecraft I can remember and certainly despite an slap in the direction of keeping it real, the movie is really just a fantasy about aliens who destroy man's efforts to reach space.

Our hero is Dick Miller and our heroine is Susan Cabot. They of course seem to have a romance brewing though Richard Devon, the leader of the project might want to throw his hand in also. He though gets taken down by the aliens early on and becomes the villain of the show, using hypnotism and an uncanny ability to split himself into multiples and so be in many places at once.

There's a lot of finagling in this one about what man should do when confronted with threat from the denizens of space who don't want us out there with them. The movie checks in at the United Nations often as the debate is used to stretch out the playing time. Frankly the big hole here is that there is not enough story for the running time and we end up with a lot of sound and fury and time wasting on all fronts. A few more plot wrinkles would have been most welcome.

Despite a strong cast, I cannot really recommend this save to Corman purists. Of the multitude of space movies made in this era as the United States and the U.S.S.R. raced to orbit and then to the Moon, this one is a cleanly done and overly sedate offering.

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