A Trip to the Moon

A Trip to the Moon, otherwise known as “Le voyage dans la lune”, was at one point in time the most famous movie in the world.¹ It has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, but does not crack IMDb’s Top 250. I now have a perfect example for the utility and flaws of the tomatometer. Still, if you divorce this movie from its historical context it is only okay. The version I watched (on Netflix) was in color and had a soundtrack from Air.² At first I found it blasphemous to have a color version, but apparently the director himself, the great Georges Méliès, colored it himself. While I was familiar with his name, his historical significance was so great that the movie Hugo deals with his rise, fall, and his lasting impact on others.

I highly recommend reading the review down in footnote 2 and then watching the

¹ I do not know what supplanted it. Birth of a Nation? Nosferatu? Battleship Potemkin? The Jazz Singer? Even with The Wizard of Oz, there might have been moments when Gone with the Wind was more famous than it. ↩
² I learned this from an excellent review by Meghan O’Keefe. Most of the tidbits I offer are ones I gleaned from her article. ↩