A Trip to the Moon

Two Englishmen fall upward to the Moon in 1899. One comes back. The other starts sending messages. Kent, 1899. A bankrupt playwright and a small, humming man of science build a sphere that gravity cannot hold, seal themselves inside, and fall upward. Nobody knows they have gone. The Moon they reach is not dead. At sunrise its frozen atmosphere boils back into air, and growth tears out of the dust and dies again within a single lunar day. Beneath the crust lies a lit, working world, and a people who breed each child into the shape of the one task it will ever perform. The men are taken below. One fights his way home with gold in his pockets and a story nobody believes. The other stays. Months later a faint signal reaches Earth: Cavor, guest of the Grand Lunar, is explaining mankind to his hosts, honestly, wars and all. Then the signal stops.

Based on "The First Men in the Moon" by H. G. Wells (1901). Poster after Georges Méliès, "Le Voyage dans la Lune" (1902). Public domain.

A NOTE FROM US

You know the poster. In 1902 a Paris magician fired a shell into the Moon's eye, and it is still the most famous joke in cinema. The story he borrowed it from was not a joke. H. G. Wells wrote it straight: two men, no rescue, a quarter of a million miles from help, and something intelligent under the ground. It has not been filmed for the cinema since 1964, and a living Moon is not something a studio builds lightly. We can. This is electronic cinema: written, directed and edited by people, with every image generated, from the lunar sunrise to the faces of the two men, and held to a single standard, that you forget it was. So far it is an idea and a poster. Back it, and we find out what was on the other side of that face.