Reception
The film was met with negative reviews. In his book A Guide to Apocalyptic Cinema, Charles P. Mitchell called the film "bizarre" and gave it two stars. Similarly, in a 1978 issue of the magazine Cue, viewers were warned "don't watch it." In the 1986 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies by Phil Hardy and Denis Gifford, the film is accused of using the science fiction clichés of flying saucers and atomic bombs. Gyan Prakash, in his book Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, called the film "charming." The film was noted for its misleading characterization of astronomers, with one author observing that it advanced the cinematic portrayal of astronomers as scientists in lab coats peering through an enormous telescope.
In his biography of Stanley Kubrick, author John Baxter traces Kubrick's interest in science fiction films, which led to his 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the Japanese kaiju eiga films of the 1950s, including Warning from Space, with its "nameless two-metre-tall black starfish with a single central eye, who walk en pointe like ballet dancers." Baxter notes that despite their "clumsy model sequences, the films were often well-photographed in colour ... and their dismal dialogue was delivered in well-designed and well-lit sets."
Read more about this topic: Warning From Space
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)