A Trip to the Moon

Rated 8.2/10 on IMDb. Rotten Tomatoes: 100%. Ranked among the 100 Greatest Films of the 20th Century by The Village Voice. The film that invented science fiction cinema. In 1902, French stage magician and pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès wrote, directed, produced, and starred in this landmark 14-minute adventure — the first film to take audiences to another world. Inspired by Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, a group of astronomers led by Professor Barbenfouillis travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the lunar surface, encounter a subterranean race of Selenites (lunar inhabitants), and return to Earth with a captive. The moment the capsule strikes the Man in the Moon directly in the eye remains one of the most iconic and most reproduced images in the entire history of cinema. Using stop-motion, superimposition, and hand-painted color, Méliès created effects that astonished audiences worldwide — and established narrative filmmaking, science fiction, and the blockbuster spectacle as we still know them today. An original hand-colored print was discovered in 1993 and fully restored in 2011, with a new score composed by AIR (Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin). Public domain. Free with ads.