Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

ShangLuda Admirable film.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Kinley This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Richard Chatten Despite the title, for most of it's running time 'Riders to the Stars' is less science fiction than a sober Cold War air force drama in colour detailing the recruitment and training of a team of white American males chosen by computer for the virtual suicide mission of going into space in order to capture a meteorite.There's an absurd romantic title song and a perfunctory romance between Martha Hyer and William Lundigan to sugar the pill, and as Dr. Jane Flynn Hyer delivers a token speech about the wonder of space travel. But the film makes no bones about the military rather than scientific imperative behind all this trouble and expense; and that Uncle Sam has to establish a foothold in space before the usual unspecified Unfriendly Foreign Power gets there first ("a space platform operated by a dictatorship would make slaves of all free people").First-time director Richard Carlson was left free to concentrate on the talk by placing the visual side of the film in the more than capable hands of veteran Hollywood cameraman Stanley Cortez, who heightens the already baleful mood with plenty of Gothic lighting. When the film finally takes off into space, colour is extremely effectively used in the rather improbably spacious cabins of the three ships that go up; which goes some way towards compensating for the unimpressive model rockets which in no way resemble the V-2s seen in the previous stock footage.

Robert J. Maxwell It's rather an interesting story about sending up three manned rocket ships to capture meteors for scientific purposes. The first half I found a little turgid. Out of a dozen men, three are found qualified to pilot the ships and, as in "The Right Stuff", are put through some grueling tests. The astronauts are Robert Karnes, William Lundigan, and Richard Carlson. The ground crew aristos include Herbert Marshall and Martha Hyer.The plot isn't entirely unpredictable. We hardly get to know anything about Robert Karnes. (Someone calls him a human robot.) So we know pretty much right away that he's going to be dead meat in this enterprise. Then there is Richard Carlson. There's more doubt about him. He was a leading man in many of these science fiction films and was never killed off. On the other hand, during training he receives a "dear John" letter from his flighty girl friend, Dawn Addams, a stunning commercial model. Often, such a letter portends a dramatic end, a one-way ticket to Elysian Fields. William Lundigan, though, we know will pull through. He's not only the son of Director Herbert Marshall but he falls for Martha Hyer and vice versa. He's also cheerful, kind, brave, thrifty, and obedient and probably helps old ladies across the street.That's all in the first half of the movie. The pace picks up in the last half, when the three men finally find themselves way, way upstairs in pursuit of suitable meteors. The model work is rudimentary, reminiscent of the Buck Rogers serials of the 1930s, so it's avoided as much as possible. The tension of the flights doesn't last very long but it's effectively conveyed.None of the performances are remarkable in any way. Most of the actors, those whom we recognize, are their usual reliable selves. That includes Martha Hyer. It wouldn't matter that she looked like the Texas Beauty Queen that she was -- her features arranged in a conventionally beautiful and thoroughly uninteresting manner. It's that she can't act either.Not that the dialog helps her, or anyone else for that matter. People stand a few feet from one another and speak in what linguists call a telegraphic register or style. Hyer turns to a radio man and says crisply, "Increase gravity to ten G's," or, "Shut rockets down," or, "Slow descent!" Pronouns and articles and modifiers and imprecations are dropped for no particular reason, as if the messages were being billed by the word.Up to a point, it all works okay. It's never boring, and it's never challenging. It even has a 1950s theme song with lyrics. And what lyrics! "Riders to the stars. That's what we are, every time we kiss." A routine entry in the genre.

skoyles I was only nine or ten years old when my Mother, a science fiction fan, took me to see "Riders To The Stars", although I may well have begged to see this "space movie", probably expecting something like "Space Patrol" of "Flash Gordon". I may have seen it once since but I remember it vividly: the front of the V-2-style rocket ships opening to capture a meteor, the tension of the dangerous mission, and being haunted for many years by the ******************SPOILER WARNING************************************* gruesome end of Richard Carlson's character. By today's standards this is surely a cheap, schlocky rocket ship "procedural"; to a young boy in 1955 it was magical, a window into the exciting future just around the corner. My Mother expected to be on a space ship to the moon by 1966; somehow things did not work out quite a readers of Popular Mechanics and other futurist publications told us. In many ways "Riders To The Stars" is unusual: a fictionalized exploration of meteor catching. As far as I know, up until this movie the only role played by meteors was as storms threatening space ships or crashing into planets, not as celestial objects to be captured and returned to earth for study. I wonder how many youngsters were attracted to an interest in science by this motion picture?Addendum: Thanks to Turner Classic Movies I have recently seen "Riders to the Stars" again. The grisly death was not of Carlson's character after all; how odd one's memory is! However, it remains a grim picture both in the mind and on the screen. Noticeable now is the use of gliding to return to earth - just as the Space Shuttle today if with unlikely tiny wings. The distinctive voice of Herbert Marshall, radio's "The Man Called X", and his playing Lundigan's father, makes for an odd balance. Nartha Hyer is certainly attractive in her coveralls! Apart from the real cyclotron, the special effects are only a little better than "Flash Gordon" two decades before. All the seemingly negative comments notwithstanding, this is a fine "nuts-and-bolts sci-fi" motion picture and the hero did bring her back a star.

earl chenoweth The movie was one of my favorites when I was gowing up. I was lucky enough to read the paperback book when it came out, & I was very excited when I heard there would be a movie. It is a classic in its way, showing the selection process for what is virtually an impossible task( Space travel depends on onbtaining a material found only in meteorites, so we must travel in space to get it so we can then travel in space...) There is the usual love-interest, but the most interesting character in the book/movie is played by Richard Carlson, as a logical detached scientist, who is lost in a kind of "Rapture of the Deep" in reaction to the reality of, and the sheer beauty of the stars. If you can find this movie --get it!!