Hitchcoc In the desert an alien presence is made known. It looks like a disembodied eye and could have been a cheesy film. What follows, however, is a really intelligent movie where the realities of such a report are made to be realistic. The press is a factor. There is a sense of disbelief by some of the principle characters. Also, there is serious effort to get a handle on what this thing is. As time goes along, we begin to embrace the characters and their needs an wants. And the alien is enough of a mystery to force us to speculate. Most of the outer space personages of the fifties were killing machines rather than sophisticated beings. See this. It's pretty good.

PimpinAinttEasy Beautiful long shots of barren desserts. And of cars going down empty American highways. Barbara Rush was easy on the eyes. Richard Carlson was sort of an all American leading man. He plays the only sane person in a small desert town which intensely fears the space ship that has landed in the desert.The bubble like creatures from the space ship were good enough for the time this film was made, I guess.Like other sci-fi movies of the time (eg. The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951) the film portrays base human instincts as negative and violent. Even the background score is quite similar to The Day the Earth Stood Still. The movie is based on a story by Ray Bradbury.(6/10)

steffan-szymanski A lot of people will wonder why I've rated this 9 out of 10 ? The answer is simple , Jack Arnolds direction is spot on , the script by Harry Essex , based on a Ray Bradbury story , "The Meteor" , is well above average for 50's sci-fi , the special effects are excellent , for the period , the acting , particularly , by the leads , is excellent , the music is genuinely spooky , the camera-work showing things from the aliens point of view is very effective and it has some original ideas . For example , it was the first movie to have aliens replicating humans and , in an era where the alien was invariably a man in a rubber suit , there was a genuine attempt at making the alien original and scary . All on a budget of less than a million dollars , which for its day was a decent amount and was definitely not a b picture budget ! Comparing it with todays mega bucks films with their CGI special effects is not being in the least bit fair . I note that a lot of reviewers are of the opinion that Space Children was Jack Arnolds favorite movie and his best . I have seen all of Jack Arnolds films and consider Space Children his worst . Even Monster On The Campus was better ! I have looked everywhere and can find no reference to Jack Arnold referring to it as his favorite movie . I suspect it falls into the urban legend category . In my opinion Jack Arnolds best sci-fi movie was The Incredible Shrinking Man , thanks to a superb script by Richard Matheson and what was the most incredible thing about that movie was that the studio heads allowed that ending .

LeonLouisRicci There were many outstanding 1950's Sci-Fi films as well as many not so outstanding. This is one of the former. It is profound at times but some of the dialog can be clunky. Yet, there are some thought provoking themes here and it is at its best fictionalizing and chronicling the Flying Saucer craze that was emerging and grabbing some headlines in real life.Adding to the mirroring of public awareness at the time is the notion of perceived outside threats, such as Communism, and the Movie asks us to step back a bit and be a little less paranoid and reactive. One line that can be read as an ominous Eisenhower era conformity plea...after witnessing and reporting his UFO sighting the Man gets this reaction from an authority figure..."he's an odd one...he's more than odd, he is an individual, a Man alone, a Man who thinks for Himself."That seems to be a threat to the establishment. But the irony is if everyone was so conforming and acted as a collective, that could be called Communism. But weren't they the enemy. So while deriding the Reds, we are told we should shut up, and walk in step. That's the hypocrisy.This is a creepy Movie and is a lot of fun at the same time. It has a number of glitzy looking sets with some futuristic designed apparatus. There are parts that are darkly lit with eerie shadowy figures and some piercing Music. Some cloned Zombie-Men and an effective use of SFX that try, and mostly succeed at being otherWorldly. While this is an excellent Movie, it can be seen as a precursor to a Great Movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).