Every movement has a beginning, and it was DESTINATION  MOON (along with Rocketship X-M) that began the 50s space movie craze, and, with it, the modern space movie--most of the genre, even up to the year 2000, follow the same familiar ground as the earliest films.

     A rocket launch ends in disaster.  The men in charge vow to try again.  

     They enlist a private businessman from an aeronautics firm, and talks to him about building a working moon rocket.  Businessman pulls in a bunch of businessman buddies to help fund the project.  To convince some of the more skeptical among them, enter Woody Woodpecker, in a cartoon from the Walter Lantz Studio.  With this ingenious plot device, it quickly and entertainingly explains scientific concepts explored in the rest of the film so even the least educated viewer can understand them.

     The case is also then convincingly made that, as a matter of personal and world security,  if certain other interests (the communists) were to gain a foothold on the moon in the day of nuclear warheads.  'The first power to control the moon for the launching of missiles will control the Earth.'  

     Preparations begin immediately, and progresses quickly.  The ship is actually built on the pad.

     The only people not on board are the local authorities, who want to stop the launch because of the danger of its nuclear engines.  They suspect someone is mobilizing public opinion against them, intimating foreign interests, so they drastically move up the schedule and launch on very short notice.  

     There are the traditional fascinations with weightlessness, et cetera, and a stuck radar antenna requires a spacewalk, resulting in an emergency rescue when one man becomes detached from the rocket's hull.

     As a vision of the development of spaceflight, it is sheer Hollywood, of course, with typical characters that would become archetypes in the genre, the brilliant, yet hunky, scientist, the elder scientist, the comic relief.  But it also gets the better aspects of Hollywood, and the story is involving and fun, with an excellent score, lush photography, and great spectacle. 

     Of the adaptations of scifi dean Robert A. Heinlein's work (Destination Moon, Project Moonbase, Starship Troopers, Puppet Masters), this is undoubtedly the best, probably as it is the simplest and had his direct involvement.  It firmly shows his influence, in the faith it puts in the private sector over  the government, in the styles and types of the characters, and in the scientific confidence it puts forward.  Based very loosely on his juvenile novel Rocketship Galileo, the story and events are classic Heinlein, though some the worst aspects of his work shows as well in the rather standard characters.

     Other SF contribution came from Chesley Bonestell, noted science-fiction and astronomical artist, who provided the look and paintings of the Moon's surface.

4 rocketships (out of five) 

PLUSES: A fully-realized depiction of the pending age of the coming age of spaceflight (from, of course, a 1950 perspective).

MINUSES: Some of Heinlein's greatest weaknesses show, particularly in the characters, but not enough to make it less fun.