Review – When Worlds Collide

Despite the years that have passed since this sci fi classic first came out in 1951, its essential quality lives on. To be sure, it suffers from many of the weaknesses endemic to its era: poor script, cardboard characters, rampant sexism and tacit racism, and special effects that – though quite impressive for the time – leave a little to be desired by today’s standards. Despite all that, however, the thing that makes this an enduring end-of-the-world classic is the sheer implacability of the menace. From our easy chairs in the new millennium we can sit back and scoff at things like asteroids and global thermonuclear war. But the idea that another solar system might intersect with ours provides such an inescapable threat that it’s impossible to bargain with it psychologically, at least without resorting to observations about the obviously pseudo-scientific rationale behind the plot (and even then the question is not possibility or even probability as much as time frame and other astrophysical trivia). The only thing that might have made this more entertaining would have been a more cynical ending, something completely out of the question in a George Pal movie. Worth seeing