Based on a true story that never happened.
Don Siegel's cult masterpiece, interpreted as an allegory of both McCarthyism and Communism, is undoubtedly one of the screen's most disturbing evocations of paranoia. It stars Kevin McCarthy as Dr. Miles Binnell, a physician whose traumatized arrival in the emergency room of a San Francisco hospital leads the staff to believe he's lost his mind. In a series of flashbacks, he unwinds a bizarre account of his last few days. After his return from a trip to rural Santa Mira, his nurse, Sally (Jean Willes), explains that his office has been flooded with patients who have made appointments yet never appeared. Former girlfriend Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) tells him that she's unable to rid herself of the belief that the man claiming to be her uncle is an impostor. A hysterical young boy refuses to return home, claiming that his mother is not his mother. Miles's concern over this pattern of incidents, temporarily allayed by some jargon from the town psychiatrist, is newly aroused when he gets a phone call from friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan), who begs him to come over and take a look at the strange mannequinlike figure that's suddenly appeared on his pool table. This exceptionally well written and directed fable, the ultimate comment on the subtly coercive conformity of the 1950s, may be Siegel's best film, and it is undoubtedly one of the most exciting science fiction films ever made.
This exciting Sci-Fi/Horror movie takes a different approach to alien invasions. An alien organism made it's way though space to our planet, and then evolved into a horrible monster in a surprisingly short period of time. In Astrobiology, the idea that microbes in space bring life to planets like Earth is called panspermia. This is one explanation as to how life originally came to be on our planet. There are many ways in which organic material could end up on Earth. Among those are the following:
- Space Rocks - Some asteroids, called Carbonaceous Chondrites, contain materials which are associated with life. Our planet has been bombarded by these space rocks for billions of years, so there is the possibility that our life originated in this manner.
- Comets - Like with space rocks, there is organic material found in the tails of comets. Some microbes might survive a collision with our planet and later develop into life.
- ALIENS!!!1 - While some may dismiss this as pure fiction, there is a chance that alien technology might have brought life to our planet. We take special care in sterilizing our spacecraft to make sure that we don't contaminate other worlds with our bacteria.
Here are some images showing asteroids bringing life to an object in space.
The Pod People evolved into their final form in a matter of days. This was done to add to the horror element of the story. In real life, evolution takes millions of years to occur. Even for a small change, one would have to wait for hundreds of thousands of years to see a noticeable difference. A person watching the movie probably wouldn�t like to wait a hundred-million years to see the alien bacteria make its move.