If you need your sci-fi fast and loud, skip this. But if you want to see the moment humanity fell in love with the idea of going to the moon—before we knew how to do it—this is essential.

His solution? Stop shooting at each other and start shooting at the moon.

A dry martini and a skeptical look at your physics textbook. Join me next week for Journey #4, where we go from the Moon to the Black Hole of Event Horizon . Pack heavier pants.

What struck me most during this journey was the silence. When the cannon fires, it’s loud. But once they leave the atmosphere, the film goes quiet. The hiss of oxygen. The hum of the hull. In 1958, they imagined space as a library, not an ocean.

Based on the Jules Verne novel (with a hefty dose of Cold War flair), this film doesn’t feel like science fiction. It feels like a proposal .