Directed by: Georges Méliès
Starring: Georges Méliès, Victor André, Bleuette Bernon
You know what’s goddamn amazing? The fact that I can, on a whim, decide to watch a short film made more than A HUNDRED YEARS AGO absolutely any time I want. Obviously the copyright has expired, and you can find this amazing film on archive.org.
A group of astronomers and scientists build a giant bullet to shoot themselves to the moon in, and then they go there. On the moon, they find a strange species of insect men (called Selenites, of course) which explode when hit by umbrellas. They push the astronomers in their bullet ship off of the moon, and it falls back into the ocean.
This is the world’s first science fiction movie. Think about that. The first. IN THE WORLD. And you know what? It looks great, even today. The effects may be cheesy, but they’re still convincing enough to make it look good. I have seen special effects in movies made modernly that look worse than A Trip to the Moon. Can you imagine living a hundred years ago and seeing this shit? You would’ve probably tried to burn it at the stake for being a witch or bury it underground to let it ripen. To put it in perspective, this movie was made ten years before Henry Ford came up with the assembly line for motor cars. You need to go watch this thing, it’s only 14 minutes out of your day, and I guarantee it’ll give you a perspective on film and maybe even life that you may not have thought about recently.
Oh, and to whatever asshole it was who put in all the “goofs” about technical inaccuracies like “the Earth doesn’t seem to rise if you’re actually on the moon” on the IMDb page:
Films in Boxes 
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