Them!
Thursday, December 28, 2006

With nothing on television I’ve gone back to watching old classic films that I haven’t yet had the pleasure to see. Last week I watched The Woman in the Window; this week it was Them!. I had always thought of 50s scifi as the ultimate cheese. You know, bad special effects and next to no storyline. While Them! certainly has elements of that (and I’d venture to guess it was the inspiration for much of the genre), it holds up rather well nonetheless.

First of all, the special effects really aren’t that bad. Since these are just ants, they were able to make a reasonable representation. Although they do look a bit like big stuffed animals, they aren’t so bad that I’m unable to suspend disbelief (such as in It Came from Beneath the Sea).

The story is simple enough. Radioactive ants are discovered in the deserts of Arizona. Local officials rush to try and destroy them, with the help of a scientist. The film falls quite short in terms of realism here. For example, the “scientist” never says what his specialty is. He’s introduced as a scientist, and immediately knows everything about ants. Even though they ants had yet to be discovered when he was brought in. They only knew that something strange had happened. Likewise, the male lead is first a sheriff of this small Arizona town, but continues pursuing the ants, even going as far as to lead the army in Los Angeles. Of course, we’re talking about a movie with giant radioactive ants, so it’s difficult to complain about realism too much.

There’s also a moment at the very end of the film, and you can see it coming, where the scientist sort of looks off into the distance and gives a speech about how man has entered the atomic age and that we don’t know where that leads. A lot of 50s science fiction focused on fears of the cold war, specifically about the threat of nuclear war. You see this in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for example.

Nevertheless, the film never loses interest. I got the feeling throughout that the ants were going to escape, that things weren’t going to end well. The story was set up as to make the audience believe that ants spread at such a rapid rate that with ants of this size, it would be virtually impossible to stop them. This is still a 50s film, however, so the chances of things really ending badly were slim. Nevertheless, I got the rush. And that’s why I ultimately enjoyed the film.

Posted byMateo at 8:24 PM

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