Customer Reviews

20 Million Miles to Earth

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3 star:		(6)
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Released in June 1957, "20 Million Miles to Earth" is an important film in the canon of visual effects genius Ray Harryhausen. It was the last of the black and white science-fiction films he worked on during the 50s. It was also the first film based on one of his own ideas. It set the stage for his color fantasy films triumphs that would follow.

Harryhausen had originally developed a story about the frost giant Ymir from Norse mythology. He then changed the creature to a cyclops-satyr mix from another planet who rampages on modern Earth, but still kept the name Ymir. (The Cyclops-satyr would later show up in "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.") When the film finally went before the cameras, the Ymir had become a humanoid-reptilian beast from Venus. Brought to Earth in a crashed rocket, the Ymir emerges as only a few inches high, but starts growing rapidly in the Earth's atmosphere. Originally peaceful, the Ymir is provoked into violence by frightened humans. The movie climaxes in Rome when the captive Ymir bursts loose and starts smashing famous monuments in the Eternal City.

The parallels to King Kong are obvious, and Harryhausen intended the Ymir to also be a sympathetic, misunderstood creature. He succeeded grandly: "20 Millions Miles to Earth" is Harryhausen's best early film. The direction from Nathan Juran and the human actors are perfunctory and clichéd, but the effects are still stunning today, and the Ymir is a superb actor. Designed along human lines, but with dinosaur features, the Ymir elicits strong emotions and exudes tremendous personality. The scene of it hatching from its `pod' (made of gelatin) and exploring the strange world around it for the first time is one of the high points of Harryhausen's career, and a sequence of which he rightly feels great pride. The scene of the full-sized, fifteen-foot Ymir wrestling an elephant (also animated) is also a stunning piece of work.

(Harryhausen's love of the Ymir extended to late in his career. In his last film, "The Clash of the Titans," he used the Ymir as the basis for the design of the multiple-armed monster the Kraken -- the heads and bodies are almost the same.)

The DVD presents the film in widescreen format for the first time since its theatrical release. The image is crystal clear and lets Harryhausen's work shine. There are a few extras. "The Harryhausen Chronicles," a lengthy documentary, does an excellent overview of the man's career. This same documentary appears on most of Columbia's Harryhausen DVDs, so if you're a fan of the animator you've probably seen this before. Also included is a vintage featurette about the animation process, called "This is Dynamation." It was made for the release of "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad," so it actually has nothing to do with "20 Million Miles to Earth."

This is a must-have DVD for any Harryhausen fan and any admirer of 50s science fiction. It's one of the highlights of giant monster cinema.

Ray Harryhausen's genius as an artist, sculptor and animator is shown off to great effect in the classic but nearly forgotten 1957 black and white monster movie "20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH" available for the first time in a digitally mastered DVD.

The story may be trite and the screenplay not particularly noteworthy, but the illusion of life given the Ymir, a reptilian biped creature brought unwillingly from Venus to earth as an egg, is truly astonishing, and sometimes grotesquely beautiful. Even more amazingly, we respond to the Ymir as a living, breathing creature. Just knowing it's not an actor in a monster suit nor a drawn cartoon adds immeasurably to the effect. After it hatches, the small gestures as it rubs its eyes and reacts to light in the increasingly hostile earthly environment make it particularly endearing. In fact, we are inclined to root for this alien beast as it fights to survive while traveling from a tiny Sicilian fishing village to Rome where, of course, it wreaks havoc as a now understandably angry behemoth with very destructive proclivities. The black and white photography, no doubt a result of budget concerns, is especially dynamic and appropriately moody with scenes richly shadowed. This new edition includes nice wide and full screen transfers as well as trailers and featurettes.

Ray Harryhausen's life was inexorably changed when, as a teen, he saw "King Kong" (1933) at Grauman's Chinese theater in Hollywood. The life-like puppet animation of the great ape by Willis O'Brien so captured his fancy that Ray went home and immediately attempted to duplicate the effects, making dinosuar models and animating them -- at 24 moves for every second of finished film -- within his own detailed miniature sets and hand-painted backgrounds.

His early efforts were quite good and his parents encouraged Ray to continue with his hobby which, in fact, was becoming more of an obsession. He even cut up one of his mother's fur coats to make a lifelike pelt for one of his creations -- and was not reprimanded. In 1938, at a science fiction club, he met another teen named Ray -- Ray Bradbury -- who had similar interests. They encouraged each other and became life-long friends. Harryhausen went to art school near Los Angeles. The quality of his designs and miniatures greatly improved and soon he was invited by his idol, Willis O'Brien, to work on the stop-motion ape movie "Mighty Joe Young."

In the age of eye-popping, super photorealistic computer generated animation, there's still something uniquely enthralling about seeing the interaction of fantastical three dimensional creatures with human actors. Maybe it's the hands-on-touch of these clay, fur and metal-armatured creations that gives them the illusion of life in a way that CGI can never achieve. Even the tiny flaws and mistakes -- like the uneven movement of fur and sometimes even the fleeting fingerprints of the animators -- add an element of emotional realism that is hard to describe in words alone. The mind knows the puppet is not alive but the eye and heart appreciate the art to such a degree that one is filled with astonishment and affection at this hand-crafted art. This is something much more than merely the willing suspension of disbelief that all the story-telling arts demand. And no man did it better than Ray Harryhausen. He has referred to the craft as "playing God by molding life from clay." And maybe that's the truer subtext of the metaphor to which we respond with such delight and wonder.

Columbia/Tristar also distributes on DVD Harryhausen's "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger," "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad," "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" and "Jason and the Argonauts" the latter with the incredible fighting skeletons, perhaps Harryhausen's most widely praised sequence.

Ymir is one of my favorite monsters. He looks totally cool and has the same sympathetic nature as King Kong. Ray Harryhausen (Earth vs. The Flying Saucers) crafted a very memorable beasty! Taken from it's home planet (Venus), Ymir's egg is brought back to earth. The rocket that held it crashes into the Mediterranean sea, killing all but one astronaut and sending Ymir's holding-capsule onto the beach. A boy finds the capsule and takes it to a local scientist. Of course, Ymir's egg hatches and the fun begins! Growing at an astounding rate, Ymir begins looking for it's favorite food (sulfur) and terrifying all who come in contact with it. Poor Ymir is just alone and frightened, trying to survive in an alien world. Well, we humans do what we do best and hunt Ymir down so we can kill it! The final battle in the Roman colosseum is almost as good as Kong's Empire State building climb! However, my favorite scene is Ymir's fight with the elephant. A true battle of the giants! A must for the true sci-fi / Harryhausen maniac...

I've really liked this movie since I was a kid. I'll spare you my analysis of it...enough people have done that already in their reviews. My comments are directed to the so-called "widescreen" version. This DVD has both full-screen and widescreen.....but they're both the same. The widescreen version is simply the full-screen with black bars superimposed. It is so obvious. The studio is ripping you off. I have found several other DVDs that are like this. Somebody needs to raise a red flag.

This is one of the better done "creature features" of the golden age. The creature has a realistic look and the direction of Juran is very good. The creature is mostly harmless until the human race decides to "study" him with the help of bullets, a pitchfork and electric shock. Torturing a creature that grows two or three feet a day is not wise. This they learn as the movie moves along. One of best of the genre.

Wow! This is just no comparing this pristine transfer to ANY previously-available format. If you're a fan of black & white movies, you'll appreciate the job Columbia has done with this one. As for the movie, it's somewhat less fanciful than much of Harryhausen's work. A terrific Italian setting, possibly THE best stop-motion creation from the Master (love those mouth movements!), and a lean script make for 83 fun-filled minutes.

Note: If you've got the Sinbad movies or some of the other Harryhausen DVD's, you've already got all the extras here. If not, THE HARRYHAUSEN CHRONICLES, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, will be a real treat for you. In fact, I only held back one star in the rating because of the complete lack of new supplemental materials.

A long time ago, in a land far, far away, a young wide-eyed boy attended the local Saturday movie matinee. Here he met Ymir, the towering, bellowing monster from Venus who crash-lands on Earth in "20 Million Miles to Earth". The young boy was me. A routine story-line and a tepid romance do little for 1957's "20 Million Miles to Earth", but the stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen has rarely been equaled. Like the early film classics, the monster here is portrayed with compassion and respect. It is one of Harryhausen's most sympathetic creations. Early in the movie, police and villagers chase the monster, evoking the original "Frankenstein". In the finale, the wounded beast clings to the crumbling walls of Rome's Coliseum(shades of 1933's "King Kong"). The references are not random. They're done with reverence. As a wide-eyed boy, Harryhausen first worked on 80% of the animation for "Mighty Joe Young" in 1949. At the end of his career, he was enlisted for Disney's charming remake of "Mighty Joe Young". This time he was an actor. He had come full cycle. 1957's "20 Million Miles to Earth" stars William Hopper(son of Hedda/father of Dennis) as Col. Calder, the astronaut assigned to tame the creature. Just a few years later, Hopper would become immortalized on TV's "Perry Mason". This handsome Columbia TriStar 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer is nearly pristine. The generous DVD has 2 trailers, a promo for Harryhausen's "7th Voyage of Sinbad", and a one-hour documentary from 1997: "The Harryhausen Chronicles". It sparkles with clips from every fantasy feature this Academy Award-winning animator has enhanced. It's astounding. "20 Million Miles to Earth" is not a classic. The story creaks here and there. But the special effects resonate back to hand-made, sympathetic creations considered far too expensive in today's world of rote CGI. More than anything, "20 Million" will appeal to young, wide-eyed little boys. No matter how old they are.

There is something endearing about 1950's B&W sci-fi...perhaps they are the visual equivalent of "comfort food". "20 Million Miles To Earth" is one of those films. Famed FX-meister Ray Harryhausen's creature (hatched from an egg brought to Earth by returning astronauts) is truly one of the creepiest and most affecting "stop motion" creations in the genre (with physical similarities that cast more than a little suspicion on the "creators" of the monster in the "Alien" films). Much standard "armed forces vs. the creature" mayhem ensues (and we all know that there's only one crowd-pleasing reason a monster scales a high object toward the end of a sci-fi film...thank you Isaac Newton). The mostly Italian cast provides unintentional chuckles in a "MST 3K" fashion, but Harryhausen's magic saves the day. And besides, how many films can you name that feature a WWF-style throwdown between an elephant and a lizard-primate from Venus?

Ray Harryhausen's TWENTY MILLION MILES TO EARTH is good science fiction. The special effects are effective and work seamlessly with the story. The spaceship crashing into the Mediterranean was very good and very convincing. Ymir made a great monster and as usual had several moments of pathos making him the classic creature of forlornness trapped in an alien environment. William Hopper gave a better than usual performance showing sympathy to Ymir's plight. This is a winner all the way.

After the success of "It Came from Beneath the Sea" and "Earth vs the Flying Saucers", Charles Schneer (producer) and Ray Harryhausen (effects) kept the ball rolling with this top notch sci-fi thriller. A Venus probe returns to earth with an alien egg. Once it hatches, the earth's atmosphere causes the alien to grow to gigantic proportions. Harryhausen's last B&W film contains his best effects up to 1957. The creature is believable and scary, especially in the barn sequence. The combination of animated monster and real backgrounds is impressive, especially when you consider when this movie was made.
Today teams of men and dozens of computers create effects. Back in 1957, Harryhausen alone created amazingly lifelike creatures. When you see one of his films, you'll want to see them all.