World Without End (1956)

Very well executed

Fresh and Exciting

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Gene Roddenberry must have seen this episode and loved it. This is nothing more than a Star Trek episode, 10 years early. The special effects look like 1966, rather than 1956 which makes me more than a little disappointed in the original series of Star Trek. When I see and hear the same noise when automatic doors slide open, I wonder if the original series was as groundbreaking as I thought it was when I was a kid. Anyway, of you loves science fiction B films and the original series of Star Trek, check this one out. If not, take a pass. I watched it only because I had nothing better to do...

I came across this movie, which I had never seen in the 50's. It starred Rod Taylor, who subsequently had great success with "The Time Machine" in 1960, which I remember very well and have a copy of.I find it intriguing watching this oldie for its simplicity, even a little corny, but gave me much pleasure in taking me back to this era of movie making. Watching it on Blu-Ray now, probably gave me a better reproduction than was available then. I remember many old films that I saw in those years and watched them again recently in Blu-Ray. It surprised me that there were parts that I could not distinguish then and now are clear for all to see. Using modern technology to watch old movies is really a wonderful experience in nostalgia.I am happy to give this movie a solid 6 for what it is, but the enjoyment I got out of it is worth 8 out of 10.

There was a question in one of the reviews or messages -- If the mutants were watching all the cave entrances, how could the man and woman go out and look at the Moon? Apparently, they were up on a cliff ledge, which was not accessible from the outside. They use Einstein's relativity and time warps sort of merged together. If you go really fast (the rocket frame of reference), your clocks slow down compared to the laboratory frame of reference (like the people on the Earth). So things look normal to the rocket ship passengers, except that when they return to their starting point, many years may have passed by. "Clocks" here include our biological clocks, the motions of atoms, radioactive decay, and so on. So what is a time warp? I don't know. Going forward in time just results from the apparent slowing down of the fast moving clocks. Going backward in time is a different matter, and it is not clear how to do it. The astute reader might ask - Why can't I assume my rocket ship was not moving at all, but it was the Earth that was moving really fast?. Yes, but the tricky part is that this part of relativity assumes a constant speed and direction. The little comment above about returning to your starting point invalidates that - you have accelerated - that is a change in speed and/or direction. The odd trig functions like tanh, sinh and cosh are the hyperbolic functions and deal with the time, length, and apparent mass changes in relativity. So if you fire a fast bullet from a fast rocket, it will not go faster than light. Say .75 c + .75 c = .96 c using the tanh function to add velocities properly. Not 1.5 c. The wimpy men are more the result of inbreeding than lack of sunshine or exercise, which would still be good for them. Adding 4 more men to the mix, one of whom seems virile because he took his shirt off, is not going to save the human race. How could the intelligent humans know about the "exponential time displacement" that happened somewhere near Mars hundreds of years earlier? Why did it happen leaving Mars and not going there? How did the rocket ship explorers change their orbit around Mars from equatorial to polar? That would take a lot of fuel. Rocketship X-M did something like that when they went straight up and then turned right to leave the Earth. Changing the plane of an orbit is a big deal. If you go 1 Planck length in 1 Planck time you are going as fast as you can - at the speed of light (in a vacuum). The gimmick is to use a wormhole (which is warp-like)-- if space itself can go faster than light, then it's OK, or use a tunnel or wormhole, so it is like a shortcut. Then you don't violate the speed rules. It is not clear if we could ever get to the stars or if we are stuck - going there would take thousands of years or more like the Voyager spacecraft. Time will tell (pun intended).

I'd actually rate this 6 and 1/2 out of 7, but compared to the movie that came out immediately before it ("Forbidden Planet"), this somewhat derivative production comes off looking a bit less than classic. So down it goes to 6 stars.Some of the SFX in the early part of the movie are poor enough to make a modern day fan of this genre wince (think Rocky Jones "Crash Of Moons" poor), but once the movie gets out of outer space and once you get past the ludicrous spider puppets, things look a lot better and you can start concentrating on what's good about the movie instead of what's painful about it.Yes, the screenplay has more than a little resemblance to "The Time Machine", and some of the "underground scenes" and future costumes are undistinguished, but the actors manage to save it. The intrepid astronauts are practically interchangeable as characters, but they are, as I said, intrepid and daring and admirable, and the actors work hard to sell their lines, and somehow, most of the time, things work fine.There are some enjoyable bits of staging here and there, and a nice climactic duel between the chief astronaut and the villain caveman. There's a believable depiction of human nature (and human frailty) in the far future, and a "Wagon's Ho!" coda that will probably put a nostalgic smile of the face of many viewers my age - that sense that hard work, a forward thinking attitude and perfect teeth will always save the day.Worth seeing once for its own sake.