the bland and rather anonymous Destination Moon, I would maintain, despite the opinions cited above, that the oddities of Project Moonbase can be directly related to themes and concerns expressed in Heinlein’s written science fiction; and for that reason, if only for that reason, the film merits closer consideration than it has previously received.
The movie must first be understood in the overall context of Heinlein’s career at the time. Between 1945 and 1958, Heinlein primarily wanted, as he later reported in Expanded Universe, “to break out from the limitations and low rates of pulp science-fiction magazines into anything and everything: slicks, books, motion pictures, general fiction, specialized fiction not intended for SF magazines, and nonfiction.”26 Whenever Heinlein first entered a new market, he made himself appear very eager to please, and his early efforts in each field seem to conform completely to its usual conventions. However, as soon as Heinlein achieved some success in a given market, he began to push at the boundaries of those conventions, gradually moving toward an approach that combined a conventional surface with unconventional undercurrents. Thus, as is frequently discussed, Heinlein’s juvenile novels gradually moved from the simplistic melodrama of Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) and Space Cadet (1948) to the complex tensions of The Star Beast (1954) and Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958); and two of his later stories for the mass-market magazines, which both appeared in December, 1949, had unexpected features: “Delilah and the Space Rigger,” as H. Bruce Franklin notes, “shows a relatively high level of consciousness about one form of the oppression of women”;27 and “The Long Watch,” though originally published in The American Legion Magazine, surprisingly criticizes the military, since the menace in the story is a planned military takeover of the government.
This pattern of initial acquiescence to generic conventions, and later efforts to bend and stretch those conventions, can be seen in Heinlein’s two screenplays. Destination Moon is primarily a straightforward and unchallenging depiction of a first flight to the Moon, with few disturbing elements or unexpected touches; Project Moonbase, apparently a retelling of the same story with some added juvenile adventure, repeatedly offers some surprising features and dark undercurrents.
To describe what is conventional, and what is unconventional, about Project Moonbase, one could speak of a series of tensions between the apparent messages, and the actual messages, in the movie. Four of these are most prominent.
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First, there is the conflict of The ordinariness of space versus The strangeness of space. In most scenes of the movie, there is no particular effort to make the environment of space seem disorienting: as in other films of the period, the spaceship itself is a typically roomy two-story chamber, an obvious set with no discomfiting features. Once they are on the Moon, the space travelers often do not move in any peculiar way in the lower gravity, and the final scene of their marriage ceremony is thoroughly conventional.
However, other scenes reveal the influence of an author who understands just how strange life in space can be. Some of them recall scenes in Destination Moon: the facial contortions of the space travelers during the launch, the effortless lifting of massive weights in the low lunar gravity, and the soundless fall of the saboteur down a lunar mountain. Others are more innovative: when the discovery that one crew member is an enemy imposter triggers both sudden acceleration of the spaceship and a hand-to-hand battle, the fight is carried out in eerie slow motion, as heroic Major Bill Moore (Ross Ford) and the fake Dr. Wernher (Larry Johns) struggle against the force of acceleration to gain the upper hand.
The most striking scenes in the movie, however, take place during the brief visit to the space station. As soon as they disembark, Colonel Briteis (Donna Martell), Moore, and “Wernher” walk down a corridor, to be greeted by a station resident walking in the opposite direction—upside down on the ceiling—which resembles a space scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. They next walk past a sign, “Please Do Not Walk on the Walls,” an example of Heinlein humor.28 Finally, they enter a room for a discussion with the station commanders—who are seated on the opposite wall at a ninety-degree angle to them. While there is nothing impressive about the special effects involved—crudely spliced split-screen footage—these scenes do establish how disorienting it would be to live in a zero-gravity environment, and they do so far more effectively than the later and more expensive film Conquest of Space, which included extended scenes on a large space station with little attention to the effects of zero gravity.29 Wright also singled out this portion of the film for praise, saying that the “sequences set on the zero-gravity space station are rather nice....anticipating similar scenes in 2001” (28).30
More so than many other writers of the postwar period, Heinlein recognized the importance of space stations in the coming exploration of space, and his stories during this time regularly featured space stations (although often in a very minor role).31 It is appropriate, then, that Project Moonbase is, to my knowledge, the first of many films to depict a space station. And the fact that it remains, surprisingly, one of the most imaginative of those films must be credited primarily to Heinlein’s insight.
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The second conflict is Glorification of the American military versus Criticism of the American military. In many ways, to be sure, Project Moonbase presents itself as a glowing endorsement of the work of American military forces. The written prologue that scrolls down the screen proudly describes how the United States military has established a space station “as a military guardian in the sky...to consolidate the safety of the world,” and the film displays America’s triumph over evil foreign saboteurs trying to destroy the station—implicitly arguing that the participation of other nations in the space program would only cause problems. The two space travelers of the film are military officers, under the command of a general. The one civilian added to the mission, a scientist named Wernher taken along to photograph the back side of the Moon, is included, the commander tells his astronauts, exclusively as a gimmick—playing the “science angle”—in order to get the flight approved; and, since enemy agents succeed in replacing him with an imposter who almost destroys the space station, the civilian element is clearly projected as the weak link in the program. When the spaceship crashes on the Moon, orders from the Pentagon establish the site as an American military base. Thus, while other movies at the time at least gesture toward a civilian and international presence in the space program—a character in the original screenplay of Heinlein’s other film Destination Moon announces that “the only Government to control the Moon must be a sovereign government of the whole of man” (cited in Franklin 97)—Project Moonbase appears to celebrate an entirely American, and entirely military, space program as most desirable.
However, scenes in the later part of the movie seem designed to ridicule the military mind. When the stranded space travelers finally establish contact with their commanding officer, General “Pappy” Greene (Hayden Rorke), and inform him that they have unexpectedly crash-landed on the Moon, his surprise and confusion are almost comically exaggerated; he must check with his superiors, he tells them, before he can say anything at all. When he calls them back, his first announcement is that their mission has been officially reclassified as “Project Moonbase”—so their accidental landing is now cast, after the fact, as a deliberate effort to establish a base on the Moon. Only after issuing these incongruous orders does the general tell the space travelers that, by the way, vital supplies will soon be rocketed to them. Surely, the scene is designed to function as a scathing critique of the bureaucratic mind—an overt attempt to disguise a major failure by an after-the-fact renaming which makes it seem a success—and surely any space travelers in this position would be baffled and irritated by the priority given this message. (Imagine, for example, two early aviators on a pioneering military flight
