Space Adventure

A type of adventure film which usually takes place within the realm of outer space or in an imagined galaxy far, far away. They tend to take conventions from the science fiction genre (ray-guns, alien races, rocketship flight) and combine them with the fast adrenalin-rush pacing and narrative of the action adventure movie. The origins of the space adventure can be traced back to the beginnings of cinema with Georges Melies's A Trip To The Moon. The space adventure hit its stride in the '30s with the serialized adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, gallant space travellers who blazed across the screens of Saturday matinee theatres throughout the nation. The post-war years of the 1950s brought tales of interplanetary space travel and alien battles to a whole new generation of matinee audiences with movies like Rocketship X-M and Destination Moon, while also producing films imbued with political and psychological subtexts such as This Island Earth and Forbidden Planet. The subgenre temporarily went dormant in the 1960s, as the cerebral science fiction of 2001:A Space Odyssey hit the screens, but returned with a vengeance in the '70s as Star Wars, a throwback to the '50s matinee classics, became the highest grossing picture of all time. It spawned many sequels and imitators and whetted the appetite of audiences for such space-oriented fare as Stargate, The Fifth Element, and the revival of the Star Trek franchise in the '80s and '90s.

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