65 Years Ago, This Sci-Fi Gem Tried to Solve the Cold War in Space; It Did Not Go Well
In 1960, someone thought the best way to ease Cold War tensions was to strap twelve astronauts from twelve different countries into a spaceship and send them to the Moon.
The result was 12 to the Moon — a clunky but weirdly ambitious micro-budget film that tried to do international diplomacy with invisible space helmets and cats.
The cast includes a Soviet who insists Russia invented science, a German grappling with his father's Nazi past, and a Swede who wastes no time turning the Moon into a dating app. They all take off in a ship that looks suspiciously see-through — possibly because the stars are literally visible behind the walls.
The budget? $150,000. You can tell.
The "space suits" have no visors, just something called "invisible electromagnetic ray screens." The seats are lawn furniture. There's quicksand on the Moon. There's a menagerie on board for no reason, including two cats that end up as bargaining chips with some unseen aliens.
And yet, for all its mess, the film occasionally pulls a fast one. The French guy turns out to be the saboteur, not the Soviet. The nonwhite crew members all survive. The final act involves two men crawling into a volcano to unfreeze Earth after North America gets flash-frozen by offscreen alien judges.
It's 74 minutes of Cold War anxiety, international stereotypes, moral speeches, and sci-fi nonsense — capped off with a cosmic peace offering and one of the weirdest endings you'll ever see.
Sixty-five years later, 12 to the Moon remains a strange little artifact: cheap, clumsy, occasionally tone-deaf — and still kind of fascinating for how earnestly it tries to solve global conflict through space teamwork and a lunar makeout subplot.