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the audience applauded

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I saw this as part of a Saturday morning show in about 1959. For us kids it was simply a sci-fi adventure and a poor effort at that compared with Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars which we would enjoy an hour or so later. The first part, up to the take-off, was wordy and boring. However, once in motion things got better. I don't recall anyone having any issues about the ship being deflected to Mars; despite the x-million mile difference in the journey. We really got hooked when everything turned pink as they got there (special effects were a rare treat and very much appreciated).With surprisingly little protective clothing the astronauts investigate the cartoony ruins of a once-mighty civilisation (Forbidden Planet it ain't!).Any 'message' regarding the awful consequences of atomic war went straight past us 10 year-olds without stopping as the film entered more familiar territory. The frightened cave-girl screams, summoning a horde of spear-carrying regressed troglodytes, and our team legs it back to the rocket. Biggest surprise was when XM crashed killing everyone on board.Not even time for a reflective comment on how we're not as clever as we think we are! Incidentally, I obtained a DVD a few years ago and it appeared to be tinted green! Then I realised the scart wasn't properly plugged in! Got the message this time. But it isn't well done.

This is simply one of the best science fiction movies ever filmed. Excellent direction, intelligent script, and superb performances from an outstanding cast make for a masterpiece in the genre. While obviously low budget, the producers make the best of what they have to work with and they do so brilliantly. From start to finish, imaginative sequences are presented with stunning effectiveness. The location shooting in Death Valley mimics perfectly what the Martian landscape would be envisioned as in 1950. This film serves as a cautionary tale as well, with the fate of the civilization on Mars being tied to a nuclear apocalypse. The cast is uniformly excellent and the existential closing scene with the two leads is one of the most shocking and effective ever filmed. The dialog is realistic and profound and certainly unforgettable. It is a sequence, like many in this picture, which will both disturb and uplift. Rocket Ship XM is an underrated motion picture, far ahead of its time, made with passion and imagination. Even with somewhat primitive special effects, this remains on an intellectual par with some of the more thoughtful science fiction ever produced in Hollywood.

Despite this picture being produced quickly and cheaply in order to capitalize on the publicity generated by George Pal's big budget 'Destination Moon,' this movie is better than a lot of scifi flicks produced today costing tens of millions of times more and having our 21st century futuristic technology for special effects.It's interesting to note that the film was directed by the German-born Kurt Neumann and features the beautiful Teutonic actress Osa Massen in the female lead. The original version of this film, screened by American audiences 5 years after the surrender of Germany, contains footage of the WW2 German V-2 missile, used in lieu of FX miniature shots of the titular rocketship. The V-2 footage is not from WW2, however. The V-2 film comes from the American rocket program, which in 1950 was still using captured V-2's for testing and development, due to the fact that even 5 years after WW2, the USA still did not have anything that could touch it. These facts are interesting because Germany was hugely important to space exploration movement of the 20th century. It was a clique of German rocket experts in the 1920's who first proposed plausible trips to the moon for humans, and who served as advisors for German director Fritz Lang for the silent 'Frau Im Mond,' the first attempt at a serious cinematic depiction of space travel. The space enthusiasts were co-opted in the 1930's by the Hitler regime, eventually designing the A4, which rained indiscriminate technological death upon England in a manner similar to way US drones rain indiscriminate technological death upon the villages of Pakistan and other Muslim nations.The German rocket experts were all captured by the US and Russians as Germany finally fell to the Allies in 1945, and they were forced to share their expertise with their captors. One German rocket expert, Werner Von Braun, did well for himself in the USA, designing the mighty Saturn V, which eventually took the first humans to the moon.In this film, the lustful American pilot Lloyd Bridges, dressed in military fatigues, spends a lot of screen time trying to put the make on the serious German rocket scientist Osa Massen. It's kind of a metaphor for the USA, ostensibly seducing but perhaps also coercing the German rocket program for it's own uses.There are some long, dull sections of this film in the beginning and middle where Neumann should have compressed things...probably he had orders to make this film over 1 hour so that it might pass for an 'A' picture (in those days, 'B' pictures were frequently just at the one hour length). And there are numerous scientific boners, like a zero gravity environment where a jacket floats but humans don't.At the same time, there are a number of visuals, such as the meteor scene, where you can appreciate the ingenuity of the filmmakers, who created these images with almost no money and almost no time, and none of our futuristic technology. The acting is, overall, pretty good, and there are some very nice uses of language in certain parts of the script. The scenes filmed at the launch center and inside the rocket, are spartan and atmospheric in a way that makes the film seem more realistic than it actually is. (The later Lippert feature, Flight to Mars, which used the same rocket sets, is inferior to this film.) As is often the case, black and white film stock gives this feature an unintended documentary quality, toning down the unrealistic elements. The Martian sequences, filmed at Death Valley, contain some artistic visuals and there is a nice use of the theremin sound, the earliest example I know in scifi films.Many others have noted that this is the first scifi film to discuss the possibility of earth being destroyed by atomic war. It should also be noted that this film touches upon all the other major themes of science fiction films of the 1950's: human space flight, alien races, the planet Mars, and atomic mutants.Despite the primitive FX and numerous scientific boners, Neumann and his writers achieved a tone that is adult and dramatic, all the while avoiding the embarrassing emotional excesses of George Pal's later, big budget Mars film, 'Conquest of Space.' Also, the ending of this film is very different than most scifi films of this period, containing a nice bit of poetic dialogue. This film should be on the curricula of any 1950's scifi film buff.

I'm seeing a pattern here. If you see a movie on Mystery Science Theater 3000, chances are if you go to IMDb.com there will be hordes of lovers of the film, yet it was picked to be on that TV show because it was sooo bad. I'm sorry but I read a lot about Rocketship X-M as being some landmark sci fi film that stressed realism. Well if that is the case I could write for several paragraphs about how even with 1950's knowledge this movie is utterly flawed. Gravity might be the first obvious observation, or as MST3K did as a skit "selective gravity", also what about when they are plunging to their death and they are just standing there looking out of the window, um would'nt the ship being upside down effect that scene? I would like to think that they started with good intentions and that it ran over budget or something but I think this movie was just plain cheese as in the from under type. Just compare this to "When Worlds Collide" which was released in 1951 to see the true place where this movie ranks, there's no comparison. The movie gets a 2 or maybe 3 on its own, its not even funny to watch on its own. It gets about a 5 or 6 as a MST3K episode as there is no action or much to make fun of, just bad, bad, bad, oh did I mention, it's bad.