Past visions of the future are always enticing, and George Pal’s SF classic Destination Moon, which just celebrated its 50th anniversary, is no exception. By 1950, it wasn’t long before the first rocket ship blasted into outer space, so this movie fascinates both in how close to the predictive mark the filmmakers were and, at the same time, how far off.

But Destination Moon is no homage; it is credited with being the first movie to take a new tack into space. The film was meant to show how to actually get people to the moon and back -- using real physics and real engineering. The problem was to teach the audience about unfamiliar technical concepts without looking like a high school science class movie.

Therefore, early on in the movie, we find a film-within-a-film. Like Hamlet’s play-within-a-play that made Claudius run for the door, this segment was meant to tease the audience into seeing something it might not otherwise grasp.

In the film-within-a-film sequence a group of skeptical bigwigs gathers in a screening room to be shown what turns out to be a Woody Woodpecker cartoon. But the cartoon has a point: it explains the technical basics of a lunar mission.

The rough outline of the technology is familiar to everyone now, now that we’ve lived through it. A vehicle can reach space if it is attached to a sufficiently powerful rocket; once in space, that rocket does not depend on the atmosphere for its motion -- the moon has its own gravity, which eventually will cause the rocket to fall towards it. The rocket can land on the moon with a reverse thrust, and on its return to Earth can descend with a parachute.

Okay; it seems obvious now. But in 1950 we were at that strange cultural moment when an idea was teetering on a knife-edge between the fantastic and the possible. Sometimes all it takes to tilt the idea toward the possible is to be shown what the future looks like. This was the purpose of Destination Moon.

It can’t have been easy for the writers to expand what was basically a physics and engineering tutorial into an engaging movie. The glacially-paced performances by unknown actors don’t help. At times, there are hints that the writers were trying to stretch the running time any way they could: One of the countdowns starts at 20 instead of the customary 10. The other one starts at 30. (Even the preview’s countdown starts at 17.)

This is definitely not an action film. Nonetheless, it is uncanny how many events depicted were eventually echoed by real events. Over and over, life imitated art when it came time to really go to the moon.

Destination Moon starts with a pyrotechnically spectacular failure, and it’s impossible to see the burning rocket without thinking of its counterparts in the real-life chronicles of Mercury and Apollo. But the cinematic space program continues, due to the determination of rooms full of white males with cigarettes and furrowed brows.

"The race is on," one says with impeccable Cold War logic. "And we’d better win it. Because there is absolutely no way to stop an attack from outer space." The scene switches to one of a room full of engineers with hundreds of T-squares and dozens of ashtrays.

Their moon rocket gets built soon enough, with cigar-like contours and Cadillac fins. The crew members enter it wearing coveralls and wing-tips and position themselves on their couches. After a long countdown and brief facial distortions to represent the gravitational forces of launch, they arrive in space -- and become space-sick. Life imitated art again.

Of course, the movie makes plenty of predictive errors too. For one thing, the filmmakers completely missed the incredible scale of the space program and vast amount of training needed.

"You forget there’s no air outside," one crew member reminds another just before an EVA. But somehow it’s not the goofs we notice, it’s the prophesies. And that may be because the entire mythology of the first moon mission was always there.

Not that the events of the Apollo program didn’t historically happen because they did in this film. But in a strange way, they had to happen. They were somehow part of a collective mythos that Destination Moon and later, real events, tapped into. We did what we had to to make the myth come true, and in retrospect we mostly remember the elements that fit the myth.

In both Destination Moon and in real life there was a near-disaster, averted through the ingenuity of the ground crew and the astronauts. Interestingly, that event wasn’t included in the myth until 1995, when Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 made it part of it. Now the scene in Destination Moon is as eerily portentous as the other elements of the movie.

Or take the fact that Neil Armstrong has said that he felt they’d arrived at the moon at the moment the Eagle landed. Nonsense! Everyone knows the moment of arrival didn’t come until later, when he stepped onto the lunar surface. That’s why it was symbolically necessary for the patriotic ceremonies to take place then, not upon landing.

It was always symbolically necessary for the government to congratulate the spacemen when they arrived. In Destination Moon, the requisite call from Washington comes at about the same point that Nixon phoned in real life. Pre-echoing life, a spaceman says, "in the name of the United States of America I take possession of this planet on behalf of, and for the benefit of, all mankind." They then go to work setting up boxy scientific instruments on the lunar surface.

Unlike most of the space movies that came in the wake of Destination Moon, there were no monsters when this film's astronauts arrived. No one was there.

Gazing at a matte painting by Chesley Bonestell representing the lunar landscape, one spaceman comments on the moon’s great "desolation" -- yet another pre-echo.

The film even foretells what was probably both the most unexpected and most important result of the Apollo missions: the heart-stopping images of not the moon, but the Earth. The photographs of the home planet that came back from space have, of course, been a symbol for generations of environmentalists.

Here’s the report from the awe-struck lunar explorers in Destination Moon: "Tell them how we looked up and saw the earth — vulnerable, exposed forever... in the lunar sky."