Paul Wright has created a moodscape of loneliness in this seriously intended, strenuously performed movie, a followup to his 2013 debut feature For Those in Peril. As before, Wright is working with lead actor George MacKay, who here plays Dylan, a troubled restaurant worker embarking on inner and outer journeys of wretchedness, desperate to make sense of a passionately remembered past and heading for the cliff-edge. As before, I think Wright has intelligently absorbed the influence of Terrence Malick in the emphasis on non-narrative ideas of mood and moment, foregrounding fleeting images and perceptions. Wright often intersperses the action with a barrage of millisecond-clips from TV and online, migraine rushes of sensory overload showing us how the world is just somehow too much.

To be honest, Mission is flawed. Some of the action is a bit drama-school-improv; the film’s ambient poetic realism can be shapeless; and in screenwriting terms, suddenly and miraculously finding a pistol out of the blue is borderline preposterous – although on this point Wright does find a way of (almost) subverting Chekhov’s rule about what happens to a gun produced in act one. But Mission is a serious film about a serious, relevant subject: the mental health of young men.

Dylan, played by MacKay, is an intense, lonely, vulnerable guy who has found a job working in an upscale hotel restaurant. He’s doing his best, nursing a crush on co-worker Becky (Emma Naomi), but simmering like a pressure cooker with unexpressed pain. He is tormented with memories of a childhood in which he thinks he was happy for the only time in his life, hanging out with his sister Claire (played as an adult by Rosy McEwen). When he was seven years old, he says, he died for four minutes, and realised what existence was all about.

But did that really happen? Or has Dylan just imagined or misremembered it? It’s not explicitly shown in any of the analogue home-video flashbacks of his childhood with Claire. And the fact/fiction borderline is where many of Dylan’s many violent confrontations with strangers appear to take place: shoving a cop, or threatening a guy at a party with knives, things don’t seem to have any consequences. But if they are only happening in his head, then that is where the consequences are accumulating.

Dylan’s crisis moment – and the film’s best moment – arrives when the hotel’s smarmy, creepy CEO James (Emun Elliott) calls in the staff one by one for a performance-assessment interview and Dylan, though clearly uncomfortable, tries his hardest to go along with this workplace pantomime and tell the boss what he thinks he wants to hear. Dylan is however honest and the calamity of this interview actually made me (bleakly) laugh out loud. But the awful truth is that it was the wrong move; MacKay’s performance shows us how Dylan’s inability to go along with the interview is symptomatic of his estrangement from the world. This revelation starts him off on the violent road to nowhere.

In anguish, he tries to reconnect with Claire (McEwen) who is deeply concerned, but also scared and bewildered by his pointless, self-harming fetishisation of the past. She herself has grown up. She has made accommodations with what needs to be done to get along in life. Why can’t Dylan? It’s a mystery. Dylan feels the burden of manhood and the combination of sensitivity and success that is expected of young men. At one point, he yells: “I want a world where the dreamers and the freaks and the good guys win!” Fair point. But Dylan is shouting this at someone whose house he has broken into, while wearing scary goth makeup. His putative victim is entitled to think that Dylan is not one of the good guys. The irony is semi-intentional.

If Dylan is on a mission, it is perhaps not simply to recapture the past, but to force Claire to recapture it alongside him, to confirm that he is right, to provide some company in his loneliness. The film’s interestingly ambiguous and hallucinatory embrace between the siblings leaves unanswered the question of how much his mission can ever succeed.

With their latest rocket experiment ending in flames n’ failure, Dr. Charles Cargraves (Warner Anderson) and his rocket lovin’ bud, General Thayer (Tom Powers) seek some outside cash to achieve their ultimate goal, sending man to the moon!

They soon enlist smooth-talkin’ aeronautics tycoon Jim Barnes (John Archer) to convince his equally loaded peers to invest in the project… and he isn’t afraid to enlist a then-popular animated bird to lend a helping wing (more on this below dear readers!) to that end!

Before long the project is complete, but the local populace are having a bitch-fest about the radiation they believe the project will surely release… even though the rocket, the Luna, uses steam propulsion… so our heroes decide to launch the rocket early, because fuck the public, that’s why!

With Cargraves, Thayer, et. al. (along with wise-assing substitute radio operator Joe Sweeney (Dick Wesson)) acting as crew, the group soon find themselves in space… but after a hard landing on the lunar surface wastes gobs of their fuel, their chances of getting home are in jeopardy… space jeopardy!

Directed by Irving Pichel, and written by a cadre of screenwriters including science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein (Starship Troopers), Destination Moon manages to steer clear of the leaden pace of many 1950’s more scientific-minded space pics, and instead offers a yarn filled with suspense and clever effects.

That’s not to say the pic doesn’t contain plenty of speculative scientific jargon and tech (some of which is on the money, especially with funding for space technology coming from the private sector), because it surely does… but the plight of the protagonists provides plenty of sci-fi spectacle to balance things out… and the story is well structured with each section of the rockets journey, from creation to utilization, engaging and full of tension once the crew gets to space.

As the film was produced by George Pal (1953’s The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine) you can rest assured there are a plethora of early 1950’s special effects wizardry utilized to make us believe in the daring journey to the stars at hand including large matte paintings, clever sets, wire-work and even a smattering of stop-motion!

On the other side of the coin, there are some unintentionally hilarious moments as our heroes look like they are going to absolutely bust a nut in ecstasy every-time G-forces effect the ship… and the appearance of Woody fucking Woodpecker in a sizzle reel to get investors to fund the rocket it’s jarring as all fuck… and it seemingly goes on forever (but in the positive corner this was entirely new animation produced just for the film).

Accompanying Destination Moon on this Film Masters blu-ray are a duo of audio commentaries (one a scholarly analysis of the film courtesy of Film Historian Justin Humphreys, and the other a thirty nine minute fact and anecdote-packed interview recreation with the late fright flick archivist Bob Burns by film Historian Tom Weaver), a new “making of” mini-doc, a restored version of the film’s trailer, and a pressbook gallery.

Also included is a second disc featuring Lesley Selander’s Flight to Mars from 1951…

Things get a bit lower stakes with this one, as we get our ragtag group of philosophizing scientists and such on board a rocket and blasted to space with the first fifteen minutes of this one, so we get none of creation of the technology needed for the mission which proved really entertaining in Destination Moon… it also goes without saying we don’t get any Woody Woodpecker here… we don’t even get a Chilly Willy cartoon…

After tangling briefly with a meteor shower our crew touches down on Mars… roughly… and after trudging through snow under red skies the gang finds man-made structures… and those that built them!

Will our heroes find friends on the Red Planet or are the intentions of the aliens much more sinister?!!

First things first, the martians here truly suck ass… they sport left-over spacesuits from Destination Moon… when they aren’t dressing like they just stumbled out of a Flash Gordon serial… and consist of normal looking middle-aged men and a lady or two.

As you may have surmised, this is much more of a pulpy sci-fi yarn… we do get some postulating and such, but the inclusion of the aliens make this much more “unrealistic” than the former film in this release, and the concentration here is on the alien society more than the journey it took to get there.

The sets are retro-future cool, and are presented via matte paintings and such, but they lack the impact of those in Destination Moon… and the suspense is much reduced here as well.

As before, we get special features to supplement the feature including another commentary track from Humphreys, a look at the more science-heavy sci-fi features of the ‘50s, a mini-doc on the film’s producer, Walter Mirisch (1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers), and a restored version of Flight to Mars’ trailer.

Also included in the package is a full color booklet with a new essay by Author Sloan deForest.

Two voyages into the deep reaches of space presented two different ways, this pairing of Destination Moon and Flight to Mars is an enjoyable dip into the early days of 1950’s space-obsessed sci-fi!

“Dead Souls” is the new movie directed by Alex Cox, which means that for the umpteenth time over the last four decades, the director of “Sid and Nancy” and “Repo Man” has made a movie that almost no one will see or care about. Cox crowdfunded the film with a Kickstarter campaign, and it’s yet another of his arid didactic put-on Westerns. This one stars Cox himself as a mysterious and formidable old man in an undertaker’s suit and parson’s hat who wanders into an Arizona border town in 1890 to gather the names of dead Mexican laborers. “Dead Souls,” which is loosely based on the 1843 Nikolai Gogol novel of the same title, has kicked around at film festivals, and it premiered tonight at the Roxy Cinema, an off-the-beaten-track theater in New York. Is it a good movie? No, not really. But it’s one that inspires me to imagine — as every Alex Cox movie does — the glory of what might have been.  

If I were asked to make a list of all the fantastic movie directors who never lived up to their promise, the No. 1 person on that list would be Alex Cox. This November, it will be 40 years since the release of “Sid and Nancy,” which I still think is one of the greatest movies ever made. It’s the greatest punk movie, the greatest music biopic, and a shattering and unexpectedly moving love story. The critic Terrence Rafferty described it as “‘A Hard Day’s Night’ in hell.” You could also call it “Romeo and Juliet” with knives and smack. It was Gary Oldman’s first film, and though he has never showed it much respect, I’m not kidding when I say that I think it’s still Oldman’s greatest performance — he brilliantly re-creates the sneering, self-mutilating, dumb-fuck surface of who Sid Vicious was, but he also gives him a teasing inner life that’s indelible. Chloe Webb’s performance as Nancy Spungen, the junkie girlfriend who Sid probably murdered (the role of Nancy was originally supposed to go to Courtney Love), is breathtaking in the nakedness of its emotion.

Prior to “Sid and Nancy,” Alex Cox, a Britisher born in Merseyside, had made just one film, “Repo Man” (1984), that exquisite punk comedy of L.A. disaffection. It became an instant cult classic, with lines of dialogue that loomed like koans over the ’80s (“The more you drive, the less intelligent you are,” “Ordinary fucking people. I hate ’em”). But as inspired in its absurdist nihilism as “Repo Man” was, there’s no way that anyone connected with his follow-up film, including the movie’s producer Eric Fellner, could have anticipated the raw humanity that Alex Cox would bring to “Sid and Nancy.”

The thing that always got me about “Sid and Nancy” — and I saw it probably 20 times in the ’80s — is that it was a total punk party, but in its rollicking way it was a work of classicism, made with a force of empathy that was undeniable. It wasn’t just hilarious; it was dead serious. It was true to the damaged wrecks Sid and Nancy were, yet it made them more complicated than you could have believed. The final scene, with Sid dancing with some kids around a boom box in a trash-strewn heaven, never failed to bring me to tears. Forget “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” To me, the year that truly launched the independent-film revolution was 1986, the year of “Blue Velvet” and “Sid and Nancy.” I was dizzy with anticipation at what Alex Cox would do next.

He proceeded — figuratively — to shoot himself in the foot, the thigh, the gut, and the head. He self-destructed. But he did it almost on purpose, by directing movies that were more or less unreleasable. The year after “Sid and Nancy,” Cox went to Spain to make a low-budget satirical spaghetti Western that he wrote in three days called “Straight to Hell.” It starred Joe Strummer and Courtney Love and featured a roster of hip musicians (Shane MacGowan, Elvis Costello, Grace Jones), and it was a scrappy kitsch travesty of a movie that never pretended to be more than a throwaway. I thought, “Okay fine, that was something Alex Cox had to get out of his system.” (Kind of like when Steven Soderbergh, a decade later, cleaned his pipes by making “Schizopolis.”)

But later that same year, Cox released his big-budget studio follow-up, “Walker,” a historical Western about William Walker (played by Ed Harris), the American freebooter of the 1850s who led a mercenary army into the Nicaraguan civil war and wound up installing himself as the nation’s president. Western hubris? You bet, and Cox never let you forget it. The film was a left-wing Sunday-school lesson dressed up as…another tossed-together Cox neo-Western. “Walker” was a slovenly disaster. The film cost $6 million and grossed just $300,000. But it was a special kind of bomb. When “Sid and Nancy” was coming out, I interviewed Cox, talking to him in a Park Avenue hotel room, and while I liked him tremendously (he was funny, sharp, impassioned), I was struck by his unforgiving moralistic fervor, which he had already begun to aim like a howitzer at studio executives. He talked about them like they were the devil. When I saw “Walker” a year later, I put two and two together: The movie was an arch, sloppy, who-gives-a-fuck mess because Cox had made it that way deliberately. It was my feeling that on some level, consciously or unconsciously, his desire to fuck over the studio was so great that it led him to sabotage his own career.

Cox was done as a mainstream filmmaker. He moved to Mexico and settled down there, and after a while you heard that he was still making films. I was eager to see “Highway Patrolman,” his 1991 Spanish-language crime drama that was made down there, and at a certain point it was given a run at Film Forum in New York. The movie was…okay. (Not better than that.) You could tell that Cox was trying. But he’d lost the extraordinary creative juice that powered “Sid and Nancy” and “Repo Man.” And in my estimation, he has never gotten it back. He’s 71 now, and he’s still making sloppy absurdist “punk” japes, as if this was some sort of statement.

Tall, snarky, and hungry, with a wedge of stand-up hair, Cox, in the 1980s, styled himself as a provocateur; I recently saw a scrappy documentary on YouTube about the making of “Sid and Nancy,” and you could see what a hellion he was. But in “Dead Souls,” the fresh punk has become an aging specter. Cox still has that thick head of hair (now slicked back), as well as the prominent mole on his left cheek, but in “Dead Souls” he gives off a parched vibe as stately and wizened as that of William S. Burroughs. His character is named Strindler (we know that because he says it 100 times), and Cox gives him a voice of sinister politeness that evokes the John Huston of “Chinatown.” At first, as Strindler goes about his mission of gathering the names of the dead, we think he might be some sort of Mephistopheles figure, like Robert De Niro in “Angel Heart.” We wait to solve the mystery of what he’s after.

Cox shot the film in Almería, Spain (the picturesque backdrop for hundreds of spaghetti Westerns), as well as parts of Arizona, and there’s an inviting spaciousness to it. Yet the indoor scenes are dingy. Cox, working like a shoestring Peckinpah, sets up Strindler against the crooks who run the border town — the corrupt mayor and sheriff and a wealthy rancher. Strindler doesn’t know how to ride a horse or fire a gun (which is funny), and he climbs into a wagon operated by Borracho (Zander Schloss), the Wavy Gravy derelict who becomes his Sancho Panza. They ride off to visit an assortment of locals, with Strindler gathering names at each place for his book of the dead and paying for them. The drama is semi-playful in a static way.

But to what end? As we learn what Strindler is really up to (it’s no coincidence that his name rhymes with “swindler”), the film, like a one-man-band “There Will Be Blood,” becomes a lesson in cutthroat capitalism. How timely…and how tiresome. (We have the DSA for that, thank you.) The film starts as a mystery, but once that’s solved, the only real mystery is why Alex Cox tied his film career to a stone marked “retro Marxist Western punk pretension” and then threw that stone into the water and plunged down after it, sinking to the bottom.

What do I think he should have done otherwise? I think he should have grown up and recognized that making movies, because it involves so much money, requires compromise, and that all of the supreme filmmakers (except for maybe Orson Welles) understood that. If Cox had taken a different turn, who knows what amazing movies he might have given us? For two films, at least, he was a true artist. After that, you might say he stuck to his guns. Like Sid Vicious, he did it his way. He burned out and faded away. But I like to imagine an alternate universe in which Alex Cox continued to be the great filmmaker he was put on earth to be.