A Trip to Mars (1910)

I think the list of films I've reviewed is still looking a bit short, so it's time for me to do again what I last did a couple of months ago: pad it out a bit with a couple of short, early silent films which are available online. Yes, I know. Shameless. I saw this film to the gloriously anachronistic soundtrack of Rise by Public Image Ltd, which happened to be playing in my iTunes library at the time. The film is shorter than the song.

This little gem is another one from no less a figure than Thomas Edison, a name which instantly shocks you into grasping just how long ago this was made. The film should not be confused with Méliès' Le Voyage dans la Lune. I've seen Edison being unfairly criticised for this film being a rip-of of the earlier film and it isn't; it's entirely different, just a similar broad concept, which is fair game. Of course, Edison did in fact rip off Méliès by distributing his film without regard to copyright, but that has nothing to do with A Trip to Mars.

The plot is simple, as it would have to be in a film this length, and delightfully bonkers. A mad scientist, with a rather jolly looking skeleton hanging on the wall of his lab, invents a Cavorite-style anti-gravity thingy. Said McGuffin promptly lifts our hero out of the window and (wisely glossing over the inconvenient fact of, you know, thousands of miles of utter vacuum) to Mars. There he encounters a bunch of tree people whose costumes, as ever for these early films, evoke theatre rather than any suggestion of realism. He is then picked up by a giant devil-type creature, who blows freezing air on him so he's in the middle of a snowball, and throws the snowball all the way back to just outside his window on earth. We end on some anti-gravity hi-jinks as the room spins around.

If that didn't already sound fun enough, the effects are great too. It's a wonderful, wonderful film. Put the title into a search engine and watch it now. It's only five minutes of your life.