A Trip to the Moon (1902)

There are films that are old, and then there is A Trip to the Moon. Released in 1902 by the French production company Star Film, this fifteen-minute short predates almost every convention we now take for granted in cinema. It arrived at a moment when the moving image itself was still a novelty, a curiosity passed around fairgrounds and music halls rather than a serious artistic medium. That it attempted something as ambitious as an imagined voyage through space, complete with a plot, characters and constructed sets, makes it one of the most remarkable objects in the entire history of film. You can draw a more or less straight line from this film to every science fiction picture that followed it, from the pulpy Saturday serials of the 1930s through to the big-budget spectacles filling multiplexes today. For context, The Great Train Robbery, another film from the same era, arrived a year later and is often cited alongside this one as proof of just how quickly early filmmakers pushed at the boundaries of what the medium could do.

The man responsible was Georges Méliès, a Parisian stage magician who had been experimenting with the camera since the mid-1890s. His background in theatrical illusion shaped everything about the way he worked. Where other early directors were content to point a camera at the world and record what happened, Méliès was constructing worlds from scratch, painting backdrops, building props, and exploiting accidental discoveries (a stuck camera mechanism that made objects appear and disappear) to produce effects nobody had attempted before. A Trip to the Moon drew loosely on Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon, blending their ideas into something distinctly his own. The film was shot at his specially built glass-roofed studio in Montreuil, outside Paris, and some prints were hand-coloured frame by frame, a painstaking process that makes the surviving colour version feel almost hallucinatory. Méliès also stars in the film himself, playing Professor Barbenfouillis, the excitable leader of the expedition, alongside a cast that included Bleuette Bernon, Jehanne d'Alcy, François Lallement and Henri Delannoy.

As a piece of filmmaking, it sits in a genuinely strange position: polished but unremarkable by the standards of almost any other era, yet extraordinary when you hold it against what cinema was capable of in 1902. It is frequently placed on lists of essential viewing less for its craft than for its historical weight, a distinction that cuts both ways. Audiences coming to it fresh, perhaps after reading about its influence on later science fiction or after seeing it referenced in other work, often find themselves unsure whether they are watching art or artefact. That tension is part of what makes it worth discussing properly, which is exactly what we do here. If you enjoy thinking about where cinema has been and how it shaped what came after, it pairs interestingly with another French film in the archive and, in a very different register, with my look at another history film that raises its own questions about spectacle and authenticity.

A Trip to the Moon (1902) yes, 1902, barely a decade after the Lumière brothers first projected moving images, is less a film and more a fever dream captured on celluloid. Georges Méliès, magician-turned-filmmaker, somehow conjured a 14-minute odyssey of spaceships launched from cannons, lunar-faced moons, and bat-wielding astronomers battling umbrella-wielding Selenites. The special effects (hand-painted frames, double exposures, theatrical trapdoors) are nothing short of miraculous for their time. Watching it now, you can practically feel the audience of 1902 gasping as that rocket embeds itself in the Moon. Pure magic. But let's not romanticize it too much. The acting is pure pantomime with wild gestures, frozen tableaux, the theatricality of a primary school nativity play dialed to eleven. The pacing lurches, the narrative is barely there, and the whole thing feels like a series of vaudeville sketches strung together with moon dust and whimsy. It's batshit crazy in the best and worst ways: visionary yet primitive, enchanting yet exhausting. It's not a good film by any modern metric. But as a time capsule of imagination unshackled by technical limits it's essential. And there's something quietly poetic about its place in history: made roughly 60 years before Apollo 11 touched down, and now, another 60 years after that landing, we watch Méliès' cardboard moon and smile at how far we've come, and how beautifully human it is to dream before we know how to fly.

I find myself coming back to that closing thought about dreaming before you know how to fly, because it is the most honest way to hold this film. It does not really work as cinema in any conventional sense, and I would not pretend otherwise. But there is something quietly moving about sitting with it and recognising the ambition behind the cardboard and the painted glass. Méliès had no template for this, no genre to borrow from, no body of work to reassure him that any of it was worth attempting. He just made it anyway, absurdities and all. For me, that is the real reason to seek it out: not to admire the technique, but to feel the nerve of it. Sometimes the dream matters more than the execution, even when the execution involves bat-wielding astronomers and a moon that clearly has feelings about being hit in the eye with a rocket.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 1902  | Watched: 2026-03-12

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for A Trip to the Moon (1902) on YouTube

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · YouTube TV · HBO Max
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon US

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from France: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
More from the 1900s: The Great Train Robbery (1903)
More history: Apocalypto (2006) · Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury (2013) · Harakiri (1962) · Night and Fog (1956)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)