Released: June 1957
Director: Nathan Juran
*****
Let's be honest: no one is lining up for the story or human characters in 20 Million Miles to Earth. The attraction remains the stop motion creature work by Ray Harryhausen. Perhaps a bit underwhelming in today's era of CGI, the work done by Harryhausen and other artists of his ilk is on full display here, with a generally lifelike and graceful moving (for 1957, of course) creature from Venus tangling with an elephant. Just about the only problem with the special effects happens to be the shifting size of both animals in the action finale.
In case anyone is really interested: man's first exploration of Venus crashes into the sea off the coast of Sicily with only one survivor. A container washes up on shore, which a young boy named Pepe, promptly opens up, bringing the contents to a traveling zoologists, Dr. Leonardo. From there, the gelatinous blob hatches, unleashing Ymir onto the world.
In a nutshell, that's all there is to Earth. A straight forward enough story with wooden characters and actors, both playing a distant second fiddle to the creature effects. None of the actors are particularly memorable, either in the story or in their careers. And yet, the film doesn't buckle under them. They're simply placeholders until we can get to the siege of Rome. It is a glorious battle by 1950s standards. Showcasing many more creature effects than it has any real right to, Harryhausen reaffirms his place in history as a pioneer of special effects. And, most likely, of patience, considering the painstaking detail which went into creating every aspect of a show, from something as simple as a tail moving to engaging in a street battle with an elephant.
Whereas the popular notion of creatures born out of nuclear experiments was popular at the time, 20 Million Miles to Earth uses another standby, the then-new space program, to bring Ymir to Earth. The script is horribly lacking in specifics regarding technology or scientific fact, however. Mentions of Ymir eating sulfur and being stopped by electrical impulses notwithstanding, the script gets us from the beginning of the story proper to the first time a full Ymir is seen with all deliberate speed. There's no pretense of reality; just a good monster movie without the current wave of humanizing the creature, of understanding it and helping it get back home. Ymir smash indeed.