George Pal's When Worlds Collide is a 1951 best special effects Oscar winner, and was also nominated for best cinematography.  The two depression-era novels on which it was based, by Wylie and Balmer, When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide, are so popular they remain in print to this day.  Despite the fact that they are filled with racist hatred for anything Asian, and are overrun with cockeyed religous symbolism, the books were standard fare in school libraries of the '60s.  Devout producer Pal retained the Christ metaphor of the books that made the stellar apocalypse into a thinly disguised Second Coming.  Two heavenly bodies, the planet Bronson Alpha (or Bellus in the film) and its smaller satellite Bronson Beta (Zyra) will intersect Earth's orbit in only eight months.  Bellus, representing the Old Testament Jehovah, will smash the Earth to pulp, killing every living soul.  No simple flood this time folks ... but Earth has a second chance, of sorts.  A few weeks before Bellus, its moon Zyra, representing Jesus Christ, will pass close by our planet, causing massive earthquakes, tidal waves and other assorted havoc.  Only the Chosen Few technocrats who believe in science and are daring enough to build Space Arks to fly to Zyra will be saved.

Seen today, When Worlds Collide is a charming hoot, but still a far better movie than the idiotic Armageddon.  It begins and ends with the ponderous opening and closing of a Bible.  Bellus, schmellus, we know who's really wiping out the Earth!  The inside of the Space Ark is arrayed like a church, with the faithful in the pews and the pilots (churchmen?) up in the pulpit.  The chosen passengers really seem to be some kind of Elect, for their peers left behind immediately riot like hooligans to steal seats on the only ride off the planet.

  Just what's being taken along on this joy ride is amusing as well. Domestic farm animals are brought on board literally two by two, Noah-style, as if a single pair of animals could restore a species. That applies to the paired-off sixteen or so couples who win the lottery to take the trip and presumably make babies for the future of mankind. Nowadays, it would seem obvious that if you could only take forty people, the best hope for mankind would be to make most of the human passengers female scientists, doctors and engineers - all extemely young and all fit to bear children. The male component of the passenger list might only be test tubes of sperm for later artificial insemination. Why waste cargo weight on a bunch of redundant drones, when you need all the breeder females you can get? Are we saving mankind here, or is there a sexual fantasy lurking behind all the bible talk? This kind of thinking would really make the Dr. Strangeloves and General Turgidsons of our present system lose some sleep!

The dramatic and moral logic of When Worlds is just as thoughtlessly presented as its science.  Essential Ark personnel risk their lives, pointlessly taking supplies to flood survivors who are doomed anyway.  During the lottery for the 40 seats on the Ark, none of the young engineers and scientists offers the least objection when the head of the project arbitrarily reserves space for his daughter, her boyfriend, a kid rescued from a rooftop, and a stray dog!  The project leader also bends the rules to allow yet another lottery loser to take cuts in the line for the Ark, to stay with her boyfriend.  No wonder the losers are rioting!

The multimillionaire investor who bankrolls the Ark (John Hoyt) is refused his agreed-upon ticket to ride because he's a cynical malcontent.  How his riches made the Ark possible is a mystery, when a big point is made that, with the world ending, money no longer has any value.  A cripple restricted to a wheelchair, he prefigures Doctor Strangelove when the coming of doomsday unaccountably restores his ability to walk. Since the genial, gentle George Pal was serious about his Sunday school bible theme, this is clearly meant to be an apocalyptic miracle. You've got ten minutes to live, Mr. Moneybags, so go have yourself a stroll.

The impressive special effects wow'ed 'em in 1951, and can still spark imagination and wonder. The Space Ark is a beautiful silver rocket that looks great against the dramatic painted skies. The miniatures are reasonably well-photographed, and besides some poorly-scaled fire and smoke, most of the effects shots are breathtaking in Technicolor. The onrushing Bellus looming in the night sky is appropriately frightening. The destruction of the first passing of the rogue planets is somewhat limited in scope, to a fairly successful matte of water pouring into Manhattan, followed by several glimpses of just-passable paintings of ocean liners floating next to the Chrysler building, etc. The rest of the footage is made up of every volcano, flood, and earthquake stock shot in Technicolor that the producer could get his hands on, including bits from For Whom the Bell Tolls and Crash Dive!

Paramount's DVD of When Worlds Collide is reasonable but a little disappointing. As with War of the Worlds, the deluxe laserdisc of a few years back (with its isolated music track!) is still the better show. The image on this DVD is on the harsh side, with annoying fringing appearing against lines of strong contrast (green on my monitor,which I have to admit is getting less reliable for judging this sort of thing). A point of comparison is the crash landing on Zyra - on the laser, the wires used to pull the model of the Ark can be clearly seen after the ship comes to a standstill - but on the less distince DVD, they're invisible.

When Worlds Collide was a Technicolor movie, and it's obvious that going back to the three strips was not done; so what we're looking at is probably a file negative combined from the three strips a long time ago to make Eastmancolor prints, perhaps for the reissue back in 1975. The green fringing might be from color misregistration, but the expert I saw the disc with also suspected an overuse of image enhancement. The film-to-tape people cleaned up the changeover cues and removed dirt from the film, but also may have used digital enhancement too strongly - the frequent shots of newspaper headlines all have annoying contrast colors outlining what should be plain black letters on white. These will be less of a bother on smaller monitors, but on a big set, it looks like the television rabbit ears need tweaking.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
When Worlds Collide rates:
Movie: Good
Video: Fair
Sound: Good
Supplements: Trailer
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: October 5, 2001