The Phantom Planet

This wasn't a great movie, but it has everything I love about early scifi. Made years before the first human space flight, this film tries to imagine what interplanetary species might be like and uses way more imagination than the standard, "good guys and evil guys riding around in spaceships". When envisioning what a super advanced civilization looks like, most scifi writers assume, "Really fast, really big spaceships.", the same technology we have now, bigger and better. This movie's different. I'll take 10 films like this that take massive swings and try to do something innovative over a safe, by-the-book, everyone knows Flash Gordon, let's do more of what already works. The film is slow at points and doesn't explore some more interesting possibilities, such as whether the antagonists were actually villains, purely evil. The concept is present in the film, but may have been cut in editing. Overall, though it's not an amazing film, it's definitely enjoyable enough, worth a watch.