Review of First Men in the Moon (1964)
Seen in 2017.
A pleasant matinee. The opening—a framing device of a semi-realistic UN trip to the moon with 1960s technology—suggests a crude Japanese B movie, and even has a Japanese reporter repeating the news of the landing, but the flashback heads off in a different direction, mixing steampunk fantasy adventure with an unusually peaceful and inquisitive if not actually cerebral alien encounter. The ending is poor, hastily adding the conclusion from The War of the Worlds (1897) to an already careless treatment of Wells’s 1901 original, which in turn is not to be confused with Verne’s earlier Round the Moon (1870).
References here: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971).