One of the Oldest Sci-Fi Films Ever Remains a Grand Adventure

Let it never be said that sequelitis is a modern problem. Just two years after Georges Méliès had a hit on his hands with A Trip to the Moon, the French director sent another group of whimsical adventurers to the sun in 1904’s The Impossible Voyage.

Admittedly, such repetition was less of a problem when the film was released 120 years ago today, as movies that left theaters tended to vanish into the mists of time rather than into the depths of Netflix. A Trip to the Moon, now famous for its endlessly referenced and parodied image of a spaceship lodged in the moon’s eye, fell into obscurity in the decades after its debut, and it wasn’t until 1993 that a colored print was rediscovered.

The Impossible Voyage lacks a single iconic image, but it’s full of a peppy inventiveness that remains charming all these years later. In it, a society of upper-crust explorers dubbed the Institute of Incoherent Geography plots an ambitious adventure involving a variety of whimsical vehicles. They first head to the Swiss Alps, where they ramp off a mountain and sail into the heart of the Sun. Once that little trip is out of the way, they plummet back to Earth and enjoy some underwater sightseeing before they resurface to celebrate their triumphs.

It's a rather slapstick affair, with mishaps unfolding at every stage. The Sun, which on its exterior looks like an Edwardian version of Super Mario Bros. 3’s angry incarnation, is, of course, a rather toasty destination, so our heroes cart along a railcar full of ice. But when everyone who huddles inside ends up freezing solid, it’s up to the eccentric inventor of these contraptions — named Crazyloff in press materials — to thaw them out by starting a fire. Luckily, that’s pretty easy to do on the sun.

There’s an undercurrent of social commentary here, as our hapless heroes tend to flounder around and inconvenience the working class by crashing through cabins and drenching innocent fishermen. It’s a comedic adventure above all, but Méliès is certainly skewering the insular scientific and social communities of his age, and seeing bumbling well-to-do types wreak havoc in their stumbling attempts to master the universe is a relevant reminder that sci-fi has always contained commentary, no matter how angry nerds get about the latest Star Wars developments.

Mostly, though, it’s simply fun to see how the director and his artists concocted a cross-section of a steam-powered spaceship and portrayed a troublesome octopus. The 1900s were a decade of rapid innovation — the zeppelin, the radio, the airplane, the Model T — and there’s a clear fascination with all the ways modern people can or might soon be able to move themselves around the world at a recently impossible pace.

At 20 minutes long (about 30% longer than A Trip to the Moon), The Impossible Voyage does feel like it suffers from an early case of sequel bloat, and watched alone, without the live music that would’ve accompanied it in its day, it can feel primitive (although a variety of modern scores are available). Wrap your head around the spirit of its age, though, and it’s a treat.

Steam puffs, fire crackles, machines churn away. Lush sets move and change, while all sorts of subtle trick shots are used to stretch the filmmaking technology of its day — and its then-remarkable budget of 37,000 francs — to its limits. Méliès, who worked as a magician before taking up directing, had a reputation for technical wizardry, and The Impossible Voyage puts his skills on full display.

While The Impossible Voyage was well-received, Méliès’ fortunes began to decline in the years that followed. Hamstrung by bad business decisions, Thomas Edison’s legally dubious attempt to monopolize the motion picture business, and the outbreak of conflict across Europe, Méliès ended up running a toy and candy shop to make ends meet. While he later received his laurels, he made his last movie in 1912, and more than half of his filmography is lost. It’s a fate worth keeping in mind; today’s industry may have completely transformed since then, but today’s big-budget blockbusters are still destined to become tomorrow’s historical curios.

Today, Méliès may be best known as a character in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, but his work remains an important stepping stone between the fantastical, big-budget theater of the late 1800s and the sci-fi genre we all know and love today. The Impossible Voyage is as charming an introduction to his work as any and is well worth 20 minutes of your time.

Science fiction, as both a genre and an industry, is fixated on the future. What will happen to us as a species, and what franchise will get another sequel to tell us all about it? But movies like The Impossible Voyage remain important because they are a reminder that everyone who is dead and gone had dreams of the future too. Theirs may not have come to pass, but the wonder they can invoke still remains.