Seven years before the first man-made satellite, eleven years before the first manned space flight, and nineteen years before the actual moon landing, _Destination Moon_ distanced itself from the campy, comic space adventures of Buck Rogers and his likes, and tried to show a more realistic version of space travel on screen. Consulting with actual scientists and rocket engineers paid off. Watching this more than seventy years later, long after humanity's reason for not travelling space have changed from the pre-space-craze problems of "how" to the post-space-age question of "why", it still feels surprisingly believable, even though, as a non-expert, I can't judge much of its accuracy. I'm sure a lot of what's in this film has been refuted, especially in terms of the surface of the moon, seeing as we've actually been there now. But I like the film's attention to detail and its desire to get things right, even if it meant that audiences would have to do without fiery and thunderous explosions in space's vacuum, hostile alien races which turn out to look surprisingly like humans with some colour painted on, and a sexist love story among astronauts (or, better yet, a lone human astronaut teaching alien females about the secrets of love). This is really why _Destination Moon_ is still nice to watch today, while pretty much all science-fiction pre-Star-Trek is borderline unwatchable.

Its focus on science and realism is, however, also the cause of what I felt was the biggest problem with the picture: it's a bit too on the nose, too willing to break the fourth wall to educate the cinema audience while pretending that it's actually educating clueless industrialists (although the integrated Woody Woodpecker cartoon was awesome; I even read that NASA ended up using an edited version of it), or Dick Wesson's comic relief character, who is a bit too obviously and condescendingly standing in for Everyday Joe cinemagoer. Most of the attempts at humour could also have been done away with, since it largely relies on that same unfunny character. He only has a few likeable moments, such as when he offers to [spoiler]twiddle the knobs for fun, still sure the rocket won't work; or when, in his self-sacrificing moment, he asks the others to "cut it out, take off, I wanna see it!"[/spoiler]

Not a lot happens in the story, either, but that turns out not to be a problem. _Destination Moon_ didn't want to show the "most thrilling encounters in outer space" or the "most terrifying threats of tomorrow" or whichever other nonsense the trailers of space flicks spouted in the day. It wanted to tell people that travelling to the moon was a real possibility, how it could be done, and how it might look, sound, and feel. The astronauts reacting to the g forces, or their space walks, are still cool and exciting to watch even nowadays, when knowledge about the physics of rockets and outer space are more well-known.

In my personal opinion, most science-fiction and space movies of the pre-70s aren't worth watching anymore today. _Destination Moon_ is an exception, even if it has its fair amount of camp and cheese.