MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*
Having just recapitulated the plot of this film in my review of the original TV serial QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, I won't repeat more than the essentials here, to wit:
Londoners (including resolute scientist Bernard Quatermass) uncover a buried spaceship, replete with the corpses of once intelligent locust-men, possibly of Martian origin. Martians' activities in primitive times bred mutant cavemen with psychic powers, who intermarried with other cavemen after Martians' demise. Spaceship somehow triggers a massive panic in Londoners, causing them to go berserk while poltergeist energies run rampant, and a gigantic devil-like image of a "horned" Martian appears in the sky. Quatermass and his allies disrupt the psychic image of the Martian and destroy the mechanism, saving London.
Obviously the Hammer remake has the great advantage of a feature film budget, so the FX not possible for the nearly-no-budget TV show get much better execution here. Director Roy Ward Baker is also able to use a lot more inventive camerawork to play up the actions and reactions of the performers. Still, Baker can't disguise the fact that for the movie's first hour MILLON is a very talky "detective story" devoted to ferreting the nature of the dead aliens and their interference with human evolution.
Nigel Kneale adapted his own TV script for this film, and for the most part he hits the same points as the original production. Quatermass (this time ably portrayed by Andrew Keir) still opposes the military's attempts to cover up the controversy, though the TV show placed more emphasis upon the importance of humankind not taking its warring ways to the stars. (Indeed, the TV version of Quatermass even gives a concluding lecture to that effect, which lecture does not appear here.) The TV show plays up the subliminal effects of the spaceship's presence upon Londoners near its burial site over the course of centuries, and though the basic idea is still in the movie, the script elides mention of European myth-motifs like "The Wild Hunt." MILLION offers almost none of the quirky interviews seen in the TV serial, in which Britons were invited to see fictional versions of themselves on the telly.
Some aspects are stronger, though. I don't recall the TV show emphasizing that the Martian locusts knew that their civilization was doomed, even before the last of them died in a ship-crash on ancient Earth. Nor do I recall Kneale's first script using the term "colony by proxy," which phrase makes clearer that the aliens sought to perpetuate their culture through their manipulation of primitive humans. Kneale never quite makes clear in either script the utility of the Martians giving some humans psychic talents, if having a quasi-Martian culture on Earth was the sole consideration. The author's endgame is much clearer: humankind had to have their inheritance from the insect-people bred into them as a kind of "racial memory," as the film calls it, in order for humans to respond as required to the spaceship's influence. Kneale makes this racial memory into a blanket explanation of humanity's universal beliefs in devils and spirits, and for the space of a 90-minute movie, the notion is at least credible. Certainly the climax, in which one of Quatermass's colleagues dispels the devilish energy-image by penetrating it with a metal crane, still holds up today, even if the movie as a whole comes nowhere close to the great classics of the period like FORBIDDEN PLANET and INVADERS FROM MARS.
Most of the film's other performers function largely as support for Keir, but Barbara Shelley stands out as a scientific investigator who becomes "possessed" by the alien energies. Though Shelley had made a name for herself in a half-dozen previous Hammer films, this was the actress' last job for the studio.
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