Excursion to the Moon

Pathe and Gaumont were the big players in motion pictures by this point and this remake of Melies' classic VOYAGE A LA LUNE is an attempt to put the stake through his heart -- his productions were on the decline by the next year and would cease within another five years. So, in looking at this movie, we can compare it directly to the earlier version and see its comparative strengths and failures.

Its strengths are obvious: greater production values, including a nicely done frame-within-a-frame bit. But its weaknesses are less obvious and more on aesthetic lines: the slapstick is cruder, the motions less balletic, despite using the young ladies of the Pathe corps to dance a little dance before the moon king and, in general, there seems to be less of a sense of fun: even the classic shot of the shell hitting the man in the moon in the eye is replaced by one in which it goes into his mouth. This is neither a key piece in cinema's evolution nor a better film in its own right.