This Island Earth
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This Island Earth is a 1955 science fiction film directed by Joseph M. Newman. The film is also known as War of the Planets. It was filmed in Technicolor and re-released (significantly cut and with much additional non-TIE footage) in 1996 as Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie.
This Island Earth stars Jeff Morrow as the alien Exeter, Faith Domergue as Dr. Ruth Adams, and Rex Reason as Dr. Cal Meacham.
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Plot
Dr. Cal Meacham, a noted scientist, receives a mysterious package, which appears to be a catalog. He begins ordering parts from it, and eventually builds a communication device called an interociter. He then receives a message on it: A mysterious man named Exeter tells him he has passed the test he was given. His ability to build the interociter demonstrates that he is gifted enough to be part of the special research project Exeter is running.
Intrigued, Meacham accepts an invitation to visit Exeter's facility, and finds an international group of top-flight scientists already present--including an old flame, Dr. Ruth Adams. But Cal is almost immediately suspicious of the odd-looking group of men leading the mission.
Cal and Ruth decide to slip away from the facility, but as they take off in a small plane they watch as the facility and all its inhabitants are incinerated, and their plane is drawn up inside a flying saucer.
It is then that Cal and Ruth learn that Exeter and his band are aliens from the planet Metaluna, come to Earth seeking scientists to help them defend their planet in the war against the evil Zagons. Though they protest, he informs them that he is taking them back with to his war-torn planet, in the hope that they can do something to aid it.
After a mind-bending journey, they arrive to find the planet under full bombardment and falling quickly to the enemy. Metalunan society is breaking down and there is little hope. Seeing that his trip has been useless, Exeter pleads with his overlords to be allowed to take Cal and Ruth home, but is overruled and told to take the pair to a brain-reprogramming facility.
On the way, Cal overpowers the creature guarding them and the three make their escape and journey back to Earth. As they enter Earth's atmosphere, Exeter sends the two on their way in their small plane, but he himself is too wounded from his adventures to continue, and he allows the saucer to crash into the sea. Cal and Ruth return home.
The special effects are gorgeous for the time, though decidedly eclipsed by modern effects, and the flying saucer, though relatively orthodox, is well-designed and detailed.
Trivia
The scientists (and aliens) are deeply involved in what was the cutting-edge research of the day. Columbia Broadcasting System had come out with a form of color television which used one electron gun and one set of phosphors, rather than the three that won out. This worked by having a little television screen inside the big television receiver. Between it and the larger screen that the viewers would look at was a disk divided into three transparent sectors, colored red, blue, and green. The disk was intended to turn synchonously to match the signals sent from the broadcasting station: first a whole red image, then a blue one, and then a green one. It is this to which the disk of the Metalunans' "Interociter" refers. At the time, only black-and-white television was available commercially.
Another achievement of the period was the flying of a bomber across the Atlantic entirely automatically. This was touted as a triumph for robotics that would someday be used to enable passenger aircraft to fly without pilots. However, it really was used to try out early cruise missile technology, which was of very low capability. Similarly, jets were not yet proven for commercial travel, so the scenes of Jeff Morrow's character flying one made him appear exciting.
The show strives to get some excitement in the plot, though the monster doesn't really do much. There is a scene of being trapped in a vertical, transparent cylinder whose purpose is to avoid the bends on reaching the planet; similar tubes appear in the Lost in Space television show.
Even though the episodic nature of the film makes its script seem to have been slapped together by the studio, it comes from a novel written by Raymond F. Jones in 1952.
At the time, some European film reviewers noted the similarity to the Earth scientists being recruited by aliens to help them fight a war against other aliens with the American acquisition of German and other European scientists to help fight the Cold War.
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The original motion picture This Island Earth is considerably longer than the edited version aired in Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, which removes several sequences, some important (like a sequence of the Zagon fleet attacking Metaluna), both in order to make the film fit a shorter 73-minute running time and to accommodate several "host segments."