richardv-johnson Not quite awful, but extremely slow and melodramatic in the worst sense. For anyone expecting something like Metropolis, with the same director and writer, forget about it. I feel like I just wasted 3 hours to learn little or nothing. Surprised so many liked it. I'm generally good for anything science fiction but at the moment I'd rather see Zsa Zsa as the Queen of Venus than this (not available, unfortunately). I don't applaud Filmstruck for making this available to waste my precious time. Music was execrable, which didn't help. A few technological points for multistage rockets. A few extreme negative scientific points for, like, not knowing that the Moon doesn't have a breathable atmosphere. And that, for sure, was certainly known in 1929.

Hitchcoc Although there is about an hour of intrigue, leading up to the actual launch, this is a masterwork. To be honest, I had never heard of this film, but, of course, was very aware of the great Fritz Lang. This is a very long film and begins with a visit by a man named Heilius to a wacko old professor who has come up with a way to travel to the moon. He is incredibly poor and his motives are a bit suspect (he is interested in gold on the moon). His colleagues laugh at him and ridicule his ideas. But Helius has faith in him and, being independently wealthy, has a rocket in production. He also loves woman (Thea von Harbaugh) who is engaged to marry his business partner, a self centered jerk named Hans. Soon, a sort of consortium of evil businessmen send a strange man (with the weirdest hair style I've ever seen) to steal the documentation for the flight. He plans on taking the moon trip, also interested in the gold. Soon Helius must get in league with these guys or risk the safety of his rocket and his friends. Eventually, the rocket is launched with the young woman. Someone did a masterful job of anticipating the scientific realities of space flight (remember, this is 1929). What the did not do well was have the people dress the part (they are wearing clothes that look like they are going to the tennis club). They also have made assumptions about the atmosphere on the far side. When they get to the mood, the old guy uses a divining rod to find water (with all the positives, this is real clunker). Couldn't they have come up with a drill or a sensor of some kind? On the way, they find a stowaway. A boy who lives near Helius. He has studied moon travel by reading John Carter stories in tabloids. He turns out to be quite helpful. But the whole gang has trouble from the start. Hans goes along in order to impress his fiancée, but soon regrets his reasoning and demands they turn back. He becomes a really sore point and quite dangerous to all, as is the greedy bad-hair guy. The romance with the young woman wanes and things fall apart. All these negatives aside, this two-and-a-half hour film really grabs one. The music, added later, is wonderful and contributes immensely to the action of the movie. See this if you can.

Rosabel The new Kino DVD release of 'Woman In The Moon' is a great addition to anyone's Fritz Lang collection. Once again, the new music composed for the film adds tremendously to the experience. I was astounded by how ahead of its time this movie was in terms of its science, and it was no surprise to read that Ufa had a team of science consultants working with Lang to supply realistic details. The use of the rotation of the Earth to provide extra impetus to the rocket, the way the booster rockets were discarded as the spaceship moved further out of the Earth's atmosphere - having grown up watching real moon launches in the 60s, it was astonishing to see the actuality echoed by fiction decades earlier. There was clearly a lot of attention to detail; they even figured out ways of conveying weightlessness in space, which were pretty advanced for the time. The special effect of trying to pour a bottle of wine without gravity was both funny and impressive. The movie is not one of Lang's great masterpieces, and I agree with other comments that point out that it tends to slow down in places. Lang always did like making long, long movies, and when he settled down to tell a story, he could really take his time getting everything perfect. When this involves people just sitting or standing in a room talking, it can get a little tiresome - in one scene, Helius is trying to get through on the phone to his partner Windegger, and it takes so long he has time to snip to pieces a big bouquet of flowers on the table in front of him. I swear, it seems to be happening in real time; if there were something exciting happening in the meantime somewhere else it might have passed more quickly, but we just keep cutting between a scene of a man impatiently holding a phone to his ear and snipping at flowers, and a scene of people sitting at a dinner table listening to a speech. Not even Lang can make this gripping, though I think he was defiantly determined to try. On the other hand, there are places where it works well. The long buildup to the rocket launch is terrific - I would have enjoyed it if it were even longer. The hangar in the darkening scene, lit with jumpy spotlights as the moon begins to rise, the slow, smooth monumental sliding of that massive machinery as the rocket glides forward to its launch position, dwarfing the human beings walking alongside it, and all the beautiful changes of camera angle to draw in the viewer, are very moving. I can see why the Nazis liked Lang and wanted to get their claws into him; if they could have harnessed him to make THEIR kind of movies, he'd have been a real prize for them, another Riefenstahl. 'Woman In The Moon' wasn't a hit at the time, mainly because Lang (as usual) wouldn't listen to the studio heads who wanted some concessions to the coming of sound technology, so it was a dinosaur silent movie when the public was engrossed with something new. But it is definitely worth watching, and its strong points are worth sitting through some tedious slow patches to enjoy.

jim-papageorge I saw the original premiere presentation director's cut of this movie in January of 2003, with excellent musical accompaniment by Dennis James at the Paramount theater. Perfect, restored print, a movie that I have always wanted to see (since it was mentioned in Carlos Clarens "Horror Movies" first published in 1967). HOWEVER... The tendency toward "original, premiere presntation" director's cut reached new heights of lunacy (pun intended) with this movie. It ran more than three hours and 40 minutes! According to it's IMDB entry the original version that ran in the US was 95 minutes with longer versions (running time up to 2 and a half hours) running in Europe. At times I felt as if I had been placed in hypersleep in prep for a deep space expedition of my own! The film certainly lived up to advance billing, yet certain things, like the 45-minute opening dinner scene, were obviously way longer than they needed to be. One doesn't need to be a genius to know that after the premiere, Fritz Lang probably cut the dinner scene to about three minutes, removed whole sections, and generally tightened up an otherwise improbable story. For example, the moon is portrayed as a rather pleasant (if poorly stocked with resources for survival) beach resort. Everyone runs around in sweaters and jodhpurs, and true love seems destined to survive the wait for a return rescue rocket. Other stuff was great: the launch pad, countdown and the experience of the G forces on blastoff were, well the archetypal events for all the space operas to follow. A good movie, but probably seen to much better effect on video or in the shorter release version (if either ever turns up).