A Trip to the Moon (reaction paper)

A Trip to the Moon is one of the first movies ever made. It is a French silent film based off of Jules Verne’s novels namely From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. If viewed from a modern day perspective, the movie would appear very lackluster and unappealing. However, if I were a person during that time period, I would be highly impressed and greatly entertained. This is not only due to a unique plot, but also because of the novelty of using film for the first time.

To begin with, the show’s unique sci-fi inspired plot line and ideas definitely capture the audiences’ interests. The thought of travelling through space to the moon riding on a giant canon shell is as absurd as it is fascinating. It takes us on a journey to a world that we’ve only pondered and imagined about and shows us the wonders that this unknown world contains. It gave us a picture of what it may be like in the surface of the moon; it was depicted to be lush as a rainforest with different and very unique vegetation growing all around. The show also introduced Moon Men, or in other words, aliens that lived on the moon’s surface. All in all, this sense of adventure and science fiction blended in with humor created such a masterpiece which answers the curiosity of the public without losing any entertainment value.

A large part of what makes the show fascinating is the fact that it’s one of the first shows to be actually be recorded on film and shown as a movie. Despite just looking like a play due to the fixed camera angle, there are some things that were only possible in a film like depicting certain scenes like when the craft fell of the cliff and the fade in/fade out of the construction montage. This use of “special effects” adds to the greatness of the film which was already great to begin with.