1st Movie You Must See Before You Die: A Trip to the Moon

For over 10 years, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die has been the yearly-changed bucket list of every serious film buff. I believe it’s high time I took a crack at it and try to take on the challenge. Keep in mind, I will only look at the entries in the most recent 2017 entries. Other reviewers like to take on EVERY film mentioned in all the combined volumes, but this recent edition is the most relevant, and reviewing EVERY single movie would devalue the 1001 number. With every new volume, previous entries are replaced with new ones, usually from the year that edition is published, to give that updated version its own voice from past ones, while older ones remain largely untouched. For example, the oldest entry to be left out of the 2017 volume was 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire. So to give a more meaningful and relevant review series, I will be sticking strictly to the new volume. That doesn’t mean that I’ll never look at movies from previous editions but, strictly for these reviews, I want to focus on the ones that have withstood the test of time and new editions.

Georges Melies, already a popular French illusionist, once witnessed the magic of playing images one after another to give the impression of actual movement, when he saw the Lumiere Brothers’ work in 1895. Such films only depicted mundane actions like a train arriving in a station and employees leaving a factory. It wasn’t long until he decided to apply his magic sensibilities to this budding art form by creating his own camera, which would become his wand while the screen became his stage and a studio became his workshop.

It was from there that he pioneered new techniques with this medium like superimposing, dissolves, and special effects. He even, albeit accidentally, coined the concept of editing when his camera jammed in the middle of a shot, making it appear that a bus had turned into a hearse. Surely, Melies was exactly the visionary and dreamer needed to prevent film from being just a passing trend.

All though many of his films have been lost, the ones that have survived are amazing examples of what Melies was able to achieve with such limitations. All though we know more about how he accomplished such amazing sights, the fact that he was able to come up with such solutions is what makes them so charming and A Trip to the Moon is no exception.

Decades before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took those steps on the moon, man walking on that gray, round rock in the sky was an idea that only existed in the wildest of fantasy, particularly in the 19th Century with the boom of the science fiction genre started by the likes of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Just as literature, an ancient form of storytelling, was starting to convey the idea of Lunar travel, another rising art form called cinema, which combines science and illusion, peaked with this film that was so magical and surreal, it could only have been made by a stage magician.

It’s really charming seeing what is now such a mundane concept presented in a way that only makes sense in your wildest dreams. The movie’s explanation on how a trip to the moon could work is so farfetched that it could only be accepted in a time like the very beginning of the 20th Century, when the very idea was deemed impossible. The whole film is a product of its time in the most wonderful way. Back at its release, the idea walking on the moon was the product of man’s imagination. But since we know that that is possible, if you asked a child how it could be achieved, their explanation would probably sound like something in Melies’s film. The concept isn’t silly and whimsical now but the method is.

Instead of people in suits in front of computers, the astronomers of the story (who are led by Melies himself playing Professor Barbenfouillis) are men in robes with pointy hats and telescopes. Instead of rockets or command modules, they travel to the moon in a capsule launched from a canon. Instead of suffocating and dying instantly from the lack of oxygen, they walk on the surface with no problems at all. Instead of a barren wasteland with no life, they realize the moon is a place of rapidly growing mushrooms and shrimp people who want to kill any strangers that come to their world but die in a puff of smoke. Instead of a plain, white surface, the moon has a human face into whose eye the capsule lands, an image that been THE image of the art of film itself.

A Trip to the Moon, along with other sci-fi stories that were achieved in real life like 20,000 Leagues, reminds us of a time when man’s knowledge was so limited that explanations could only be found in imagination. As our accomplishments grow and grow and our goals become more and more fulfilled, methods become more sophisticated and practical, which makes us remember fondly when those methods were less complicated and came from our dreams. The film makes me remember that every equation, every technological advancement, and every discovery starts with the human desire of doing the impossible.

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