hen a massive and odd-looking aircraft crashes into the Mediterranean just off the coast of Sicily, a pair of brave fishermen venture inside and rescue two U.S. Air Force pilots. The ship sinks before they can find any other crewmen, and amid the uproar that accompanies their return to shore it turns out that the local doctor is otherwise engaged. With nobody else to turn to, the townspeople recruit a visiting American medical student, Marisa Leonardo (Taylor), to tend to the injured men.
As Marisa is discovering that the first of her patients cannot be saved and the other—a Col. Robert Calder (Hopper)—is irretrievably rude, a young boy who helped in the pilots' rescue discovers a canister from the wreck washed up on the beach. Opening it, he finds a strange, gelatinous egg. Always keen to turn a quick lira, Pepe sells the egg to Marisa's scientist uncle (Puglia). It hatches right away, revealing a small but feisty reptilian monster, Ymir, who all too quickly grows to the size of a human adult.
Robert and Marisa are reunited when the creature escapes from her uncle's custody. Caught up in the effort to catch Ymir, they find their task complicated by the Air Force's desire to keep the creature alive so its respiratory mechanisms can be studied. The success of future missions to Venus depends on unlocking the mystery to the sulfur-eating Ymir's survival. Fortunately, electrical currents render the monster unconscious—they net it, zap it, transport it to the Rome zoo and begin their research in earnest.
It is only a matter of time, of course, before chance allows Ymir to escape, and by the time this happens he is taller than an elephant. The inevitable result is a thrilling chase through the streets and monuments of Rome, one that pits Calder and the Italian army against the gigantic, bulletproof and justifiably infuriated monster.
The effects outshine the flaws
The special effects of film legend Ray Harryhausen stand out as the primary reason for seeing 20 Million Miles to Earth—and as reasons go, it's a mighty good one. Ymir is beautifully rendered and undeniably tragic—a blameless monster abducted from his home by humans, one who should never have grown to dangerous size (something about Earth's atmosphere causes him to become atypically gigantic). The Italian setting of this movie lends a touch of the exotic to his rampages, especially in the climactic final scenes at the Roman Coliseum.
Ymir moves fluidly and fights hard, often seeming more believably lifelike than more recent CGI creations ... or his co-stars. Like most movie monsters, he never speaks, but as he endures the torments of the panicked humans, his body language is eloquent and heart-rending. The action sequences are showstoppers, too, of course—most particularly Ymir's battle with an elephant at the Rome zoo.
On the downside, 20 Million Miles to Earth has an unusually stilted script, even by the standards of '50s SF films. The opening friction and subsequent flirting between Marisa and Robert—performed with minimal enthusiasm by Joan Taylor and William Hopper—is unconvincing and utterly without chemistry. Dry and relatively humorless, the film doesn't even manage to be campy. The brightest character moments come from young Pepe (cheerfully played by Bart Bradley), who manages to be cute and perky where everyone else is deadly dull.
Harryhausen fans and stop-motion addicts will overlook these flaws, though, because Ymir is a marvelous creation, one whose every move will keep viewers glued to the screen.
