Five Million Years to Earth

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Watched the Hammer SF movie Five Million Years to Earth (1967) last night. Surprisingly, for me, I had never seen the movie, save for the last five minutes or so. The vision of the “demonic” Martian (that’s a strange juxtaposition of two words, no?) at the film’s climax interested me since I first saw it a dozen or so years ago. TCM aired the movie a few days back, so I DVR’d it for Halloween Eve (pardon the redundancy) viewing.

Per Bob Osborne at TCM, the movie is “thinking man’s science fiction.” I agree, in that it’s more like the SF novels I read than yer average sci-fi flick. There’s speculation, a new theory of the evolution of man, a Big Unknown, inter-character conflict, conflict with the Man, and a series of ever-increasing-in-creepiness creepiness. I liked it; it held my attention.

They’re digging this subway station somewhere in England when the workers come across a skull. No, wait, more like a dozen skulls. Oh, and somehow it’s discovered that they’re five million years old, far older than any other previous proto-humanoid bone. So Science commandeers the dig and soon a pipe-like thing is partially unearthed.

This calls in the military. Specifically, the bomb squad, on the assumption that it’s an unexploded V2 rocket. This brings into conflict our hero, Professor Quatermass, with Colonel Breen. The Professor makes a series of deductions based on the eerie happenings, coming to the conclusion that the pipe-like thing is a spaceship from Mars, trapped on Earth when something went wrong during a mission to seed earth with their mutated hominids. Ergo, we evolved with more than a little tinkering from the cold-blooded insect Lords of Mars. Breen is of the staunch opinion the whole thing’s a propaganda fake from Nazi Germany 25 years prior.

The whole conflict between the two made me think of an imagined argument between Jim Marrs and Philip J. Klass, for those of you in the know.

Anyway, the ship begins to effect the local British populace psychicly, or telekineticly, somehow, making them behave like the vicious grasshopper Martians. Finally, it manifests itself as a giant glowing pure-energy visage of a Martian, replete with symbolic demonic horns. Something happens, a scientist sacrifices his life for the Greater Good, and all is well, but things will never be the same.



While not the greatest hundred minutes of life spent, I liked it. I did, I did. While some of the ideas were hokey and went a wee bit too far, it doesn’t insult your intelligence. Credit to the actors, I suppose. So, I’d watch it again, maybe pick it up if I saw it at the bargain bin in a local DVD shop. A-minus.