It Came from Outer Space might be the best movie that bores me. It was so influential that modern audiences have seen the same story many times. Now, I am a total sucker for classic science fiction (and classics in general). If, at any time, an unlucky guest puts in Frankenstein (1931) or King Kong (1933), they have to say goodbye to me for the duration of the movie. But these movies are different from It Came from Outer Space, mainly in that they are totally wild. This movie is actually pretty tame. What's so good about it is its solid, original story. It was, in a way, the first of its kind, and it inspired an entire era of the classic sci-fi flicks we so love. This heavy influence makes it difficult for the modern viewer to enjoy, though it is always easy to appreciate.

The film begins when amateur astronomer John Putnam and his girlfriend Ellen Fields see a meteor-ish object crash to earth. When they find the crater, John goes down to investigate, and he discovers a giant spacecraft that is definitely not from Earth. And wait . . . is that something moving inside? Before he can show anyone else, the crater partially caves in, burying the spacecraft and releasing suspicion onto John's story. Even Ellen is hesitant to believe he really saw what he thinks he saw. While John tries to convince others of what is going on, the aliens go out morphing into exact replicas of some of the humans. Unlike the podpeople in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), these xenomporphs do not actually harm their original copies, but they do kidnap some. They do so for bargaining power to get some materials so they can leave Earth, as their crash-landing actually was an accidental crash-landing. John, who becomes a sympathizer with their attempt to escape, despite their kidnapping his girlfriend, now has to hold off the paranoid police, who eventually realize that the aliens are real, and who are now trying to destroy them.

The main strategy of this film, and the main reason it lacks its impact on today's viewer, is to suggest the possibility of aliens or, more metaphorically, to get us to realize that we don't understand everything about the world. At one point when John is trying to convince a friend of what he saw, he uses the example of how we were once convinced that the Earth was flat. Therefore, is it not possible that there is other life out there (or any equally alien metaphysical truth, perhaps), even though we haven't encountered it yet? This movie expanded curiosity and probably unearthed (or at least identified) a few anxieties in a generation that was just beginning to strongly consider the possibility and ramifications of alien life. The concept brought to life on the screen was astounding to its original audiences; today it is, ironically, familiar to the degree of tedium.

Though much of this film's greatness comes from its originality, its originality is not in its material. Two years earlier, for instance, there was a similarly important alien movie to come out -- The Day the Earth Stood Still. Where It Came from Outer Space stood out is in the way it approaches the material. Whereas The Day the Earth Stood Still was inward-looking, examining or own human race and our idiotic violence, It Came from Outer Space is outward-looking, pointing mostly to the stars. In fact, one way in which the film seems to insist upon its difference from The Day the Earth Stood Still specifically is in the fact that these aliens did not mean to land on our planet at all. They didn't come to teach or warn us about anything. They actually explain that we would find them so hideous that they do not want to be seen at all, and now that they are here, all they want to do is leave. If there is any introspection in this movie, it is the result of its outward wonderings. The movie forces us to think beyond ourselves and our knowledges. If and when we do encounter something alien, how will we respond? How do we respond to the new in everyday life?

Speaking of the ugly things, the aliens' screen time is also significant. The movie was actually originally written with no visible alien at all, but Universal decided to go back and add it in to broaden the film's appeal. What they came up with is a human-size one-eyed brain-octopus with a sweaty wig. Pretty horrific, huh? The species is seen only a couple of times, and these shots are all muddled by fog and last but a few seconds each. There are, on the other hand, many point-of-view shots from inside (acutally inside) the eye of aliens. These were likely used to encourage sympathy or, at the least, empathy for the hideous creatures.

On one hand, it is a shame that we don't get a clear look at them because they are, if a little hokey-looking, very fun to see. More importantly, though, their sparse presence forces us to focus on what is more important: the human characters and their reaction to this alien presence. As we all know, so many films nowadays concentrate too much on special effects and too little on story. The writers here knew that a good story is more rewarding than a neat-looking monster. I would say that it's always best to have both, as in some of the other movies I have mentioned in this review, but in this case it may have been counterproductive. The effectiveness of It Came from Outer Space lied completely in the fact that this life form is alien, is new, to everything we know about the world. To give it much more screen time than it had would have been to bring it from the alien to the familiar, thus offsetting the very basis of the story.

This movie cannot be fully appreciated by a modern-day audience. It is, however, essential viewing for sci-fi lovers, as it became the prototype for many films to come. Watch this and learn where the alien genre as we know it came from. We have watched so many expansions, elaborations, re-imaginings, and rip-offs of this alien movie. It can be refreshing to see the subgenre in its basic form if you're in the mood for some sci-fi cinema history.