I’ve mentioned before that I have that 1,500 “must see movie” poster that I’m trying to fill in, and while many of the movies are fairly recent, there are a couple that aren’t, and some that seem really odd. One of those oddities was the movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars. How did something that sounded like a forgettable B-movie get on there in the first place?
Possibly because it’s also in the Criterion Collection, but I didn’t know that until after I found the movie running on one of my streaming service subscriptions.
For what it is worth, I have read Daniel Defoe’s original novel, and it’s something, I’ll say that much. Defoe was writing at a time when novels were new, so various conventions we take for granted these days, like chapter breaks, hadn’t been invented yet. The thing I noted about Robinson Crusoe is it follows a pattern once Crusoe ends up on that island alone: Robinson Crusoe realizes he had a problem, Robinson Crusoe worries about the problem, Robinson Crusoe thinks about the problem, Robinson Crusoe solves the problem, and then Robinson Crusoe has a new problem. And then eventually he finds the man he names Friday and they have some more adventures. The book actually ends with Crusoe and Friday having adventures dodging wolves in the snowy mountains of Spain.
That said, that is not the plot of this movie. In fact, Defoe’s novel is an established work of fiction in the film, so I suspect it’s more going along with the idea that a man is shipwrecked alone by himself, he fends for himself and survives, eventually finding a native he names Friday that becomes his servant/companion or something along those lines. That more or less matches up here as the movie opens with two human astronauts and a monkey named Mona high above the red planet when an emergency causes them to drain the last of their fuel and they are forced to eject to the surface. The first of these two men we see is Col. Dan McReady as played by Adam West, the only actor in the movie I recognized.
That said, West’s McReady dies off fairly quickly, and the “Robinson Crusoe” of the movie is his associate, Commander Kit Draper. Draper lands on the surface, finds McReady’s body and eventually a living Mona, and from there, he finds shelter, water, and a plant substance that acts as food. He’s running out of air, but maybe if he didn’t keep popping his face shield all the time he wouldn’t be gasping for breath quite so often.
Apparently, the movie came out before scientists had determined Mars didn’t have breathable air. The Martian this is not.
Eventually, aliens show up to blast areas on the surface, and Draper finds his Friday, a human-looking alien (Victor Lundin) that he teaches English to, and those aliens keep showing up to blast the surface as they seem to be attracted to the wrist bands Friday wears, marking him as an escaped slave. From there, Draper, Friday, and Mona need to survive long enough to maybe get a distress call somewhere for someone to come pick them up.
In many ways, this is a fairly standard big-for-its-time budget sci-fi flick. The alien ships show up in a flash, blast stuff, and fly away. They don’t move much, but they’re actually fairly impressive to look at. If anything, aside from the obvious background painting and not-great-looking rescue rocket landing at the end of the movie, the effects are rather good for the time, That last shot was the only time I thought it look particularly fake.
As for the rest, it doesn’t lean too much into the Robinson Crusoe idea until Friday gets his name, even having Friday make a hat for Draper that looks like the one Crusoe wears in old artwork for the novel. The movie doesn’t quite focus on problem-solving nearly as much as the novel does–but what could?–but instead goes for more broad-based issues like air, food, and water, and once Friday shows up with his “oxygen pills,” even air becomes a somewhat moot problem. There’s some focus prior to Friday’s arrival on Draper’s loneliness, but it doesn’t get as much attention as other movies may have given it. If anything, this was a well-done, if standard, 50s or 60s sci-fi film, and my biggest disappointment was that Adam West was barely in it since he was the first face I saw, but this did come out before he went to Gotham City, so it probably isn’t that surprising. All in all, a good example of the genre for fans of this sort of movie.
Grade: B
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