Review – It Came from Outer Space

Elsewhere I’ve suggested pairing up The Thing from Another World with The Day the Earth Stood Still in order to provide some contrast between different views of aliens (and perhaps the Communists they were at least in some ways intended to stand in for). But I wonder now if perhaps this same-era piece based on a short story by Ray Bradbury wouldn’t make a better compare-and-contrast. For starters, like the Howard Hawks Thing, this one’s told from the perspective of the humans, not the alien. In the face of ugly monsters kidnapping random townspeople, the only reason we have to trust them – aside from their own say-so – is that the hero trusts them. As it turns out, he’s right. Thus this becomes a valuable lesson in avoiding the temptation to give in to our prejudices, more so than when Michael Rennie fails to evoke those prejudices to begin with. Mildly amusing