This is a very odd movie. It looks like it is yet another one whose story might have been told compellingly had there been a major screenplay overhaul before shooting started. It comes off as though it was intended to be another 1950's sci-fi epic such as THE WAR OF THE WORLDS with a strong moral message along the lines of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL but flops with it's blunt, heavy-handed treatment of the thematic material, too strong even for 1952.
Many old movies tackled religious material successfully by handling it with some subtlety, grace, and sentimentality (an excellent example of which being THE BELLS OF SAINT MARY'S, released in 1945), but with its incessant Bible-quoting this one come across as so evangelically strident that it looks like it would have been custom-made for the "Christian Sci-Fi Network" had there been any such thing at the time.
Another oddity of this film was its pointed treatment of the Soviet Union in particular, something else you don't see even in Cold War spy flicks of the same era. Usually movies and TV tap-danced with indirect or at least infrequent references to anything definitively identifying the adversary, whose identity was instead made abundantly clear primarily by laying it in between the lines, including having antagonist actors speaking with vaguely Eastern European sounding accents and wearing vaguely Russian-style uniforms. But here you have the only example I have ever seen of using the word "Soviet" itself for this period of movie, and no shot of the Kremlin and Red Square is spared, something that you didn't really see in movies until satires after 1960. (As an excellent example of this point, have a look at the Cold War classic THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE of1962, with Frank Sinatra (and NOT the recent Denzel Washington one).
The bottom line is that this movie fails to deliver on its theme. What might have been a very clever sci-fi concept development instead turns into in effect a hammy propaganda film that might have been sponsored by the John Birch Society. A serious disappointment, considering its potential.
Many old movies tackled religious material successfully by handling it with some subtlety, grace, and sentimentality (an excellent example of which being THE BELLS OF SAINT MARY'S, released in 1945), but with its incessant Bible-quoting this one come across as so evangelically strident that it looks like it would have been custom-made for the "Christian Sci-Fi Network" had there been any such thing at the time.
Another oddity of this film was its pointed treatment of the Soviet Union in particular, something else you don't see even in Cold War spy flicks of the same era. Usually movies and TV tap-danced with indirect or at least infrequent references to anything definitively identifying the adversary, whose identity was instead made abundantly clear primarily by laying it in between the lines, including having antagonist actors speaking with vaguely Eastern European sounding accents and wearing vaguely Russian-style uniforms. But here you have the only example I have ever seen of using the word "Soviet" itself for this period of movie, and no shot of the Kremlin and Red Square is spared, something that you didn't really see in movies until satires after 1960. (As an excellent example of this point, have a look at the Cold War classic THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE of1962, with Frank Sinatra (and NOT the recent Denzel Washington one).
The bottom line is that this movie fails to deliver on its theme. What might have been a very clever sci-fi concept development instead turns into in effect a hammy propaganda film that might have been sponsored by the John Birch Society. A serious disappointment, considering its potential.