When Worlds Collide (1951)

(On Cable TV, February 2020) The scientific basis of When Worlds Collide is garbage, but the film itself is interesting in a few ways. The most striking of these is that it’s an early example of the disaster movie subgenre, with the Earth being threatened by a collision with another celestial object. (Hence the garbage thing—in adapting an early Science Fiction novel from 1933, the film posits a rogue star with an accompanying planet where survivors can land and colonize, which is patently absurd. But while modern SF has a more refined bestiary of celestial objects with the potential to hit our planet, the premise of Earth being slated for destruction remains irresistible across the ages—descendants of When Worlds Collide include 1978’s Meteor, 1998’s Deep Impact and Armageddon, as well as 2009’s near-spiritual remake 2012. So, it is rather fun to go back to the 1950s and see how they did it, with the special effects of the time and the specific period detail. The melodrama and social/political conditions of the time may not have impressed reviewers at the time, but they’re now a charming time capsule—you could try a retro-themed version of the same story today and still not quite capture what the film does. If nothing else, the film’s producer George Pal thinks big and sets up the kind of spectacle that Hollywood would increasingly turn to as the 1950s advanced and television started being a competition for audiences. (It’s significant that 1950–1951 represents the birth of the Science Fiction genre at the movies, in between this, Destination Moon and The Day the Earth Stood Still.) Now, the specifics of the film are certainly to be quibbled with—I vehemently disagree with the idea that 99% of the population needs to die to save the rest, even if the film features plenty of biblical references in “support” of this idea. (Also, the odds are that the film’s happy ending is momentary—alien microorganisms will kill everyone within weeks—but let’s keep the illusion intact!) The point of seeing When Worlds Collide is that it is quaint, dated and yet timeless in Hollywood terms. Good or bad almost doesn’t mean anything here—the spectacle is what’s always worth watching.