It’s a cliché to say that communism had an influence on American b-movies of the 1950s, but it’s a very true cliché. Every flying saucer, every ray gun, every man in a silver jumpsuit exudes the Red Menace. Genre movies reflect the fears and anxieties of their time, and it’s safe to say that most invaders from space were the children of Sputnik and McCarthy.
Kurt Neumann’s Kronos is as b as movies come. The cheesy effects, the average-to-bad acting and dialogue, the blatant theft from other popular movies, they’re all here. But, like Detour or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it combines these things to create an interesting relic of a time when your boss, your friends, your own family might be the eyes and ears of the Red Menace.
The plot is full of coincidental leaps that would give Superman vertigo. An alien lifeform possesses Dr. Elliot, the lab supervisor at an observatory where Dr. Les Gaskell just happened to discover a new asteroid. We, of course, know that it’s not an asteroid at all; it’s the very flying saucer that carried our lab-supervisor-possessing friend. And it’s headed straight for Earth!
When a nuclear strike on the asteroid has no effect (except making Dr. Elliot collapse in pain and go catatonic), the real fear begins to set in. Where will the asteroid strike? Which city will be destroyed by this alien missile? Physics and geometry must have been pretty primitive in those days, since instead of figuring out the asteroid’s trajectory, humanity waits breathlessly to see where it will fall. It passes over New York with a flash. It passes over the Midwest with a flash. It passes over Los Angeles with a flash.
Finally it splashes down in the Pacific off the coast of Mexico. America has averted a crisis of apocalyptic proportions. OR HAS IT? When Les thinks about what’s just happened, the asteroid being unaffected by the most powerful weapons they’ve got, only its trajectory being changed, not blown back into space but instead heading downward, he realizes that what he discovered was no ordinary asteroid, but something created, perhaps, by an alien intelligence.
Les and his team, including his girlfriend, head down to Mexico to investigate. And by “investigate,” I mean “stand on the coast looking at the water and then rip off the famous beach scene from From Here to Eternity.” Of course, as Les and his lover lay on the beach making googly eyes at each other, the flying saucer rises from the deep and rests on the horizon. Science is 10% inspiration and 90% beach blanket bingo.
The next morning, when Les and his team wake up, the flying saucer is gone and has been replaced by our antagonist: a 100-foot-tall stack of boxes:
The giant stack of boxes is an alien robot sent here from another planet to look for the energy the lifeforms there devour hungrily. Dr. Elliot, awakened from his coma, tells his psychiatrist this, having learned it from the alien that lives within him. The alien civilization has eaten all the energy on its own planet, so now it searches the galaxy for other sources of power to consume. The giant robot (called Kronos by Les) is a scout sent to find as much energy as possible. If it is successful, more will be sent and Earth will be sucked dry.
As with all b-movies, this leaves a few questions unasked and unanswered. If the aliens can absorb the power of a hydrogen bomb, why can’t they absorb the power of a star? If they have the power to travel across the universe, why can’t they use it to survive? These aliens don’t seem to be the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Like any good b-movie, its greatest detriments are also among its greatest strengths. Half the fun of Kronos is just how ridiculously cheesy it is. When Kronos starts to walk, the movie reaches Kraft-Mac-and-Cheese levels of cheesiness. The effect is obviously done using hand-drawn animation (the very finest of the Schoolhouse Rock school of animation), and the sounds it makes is about as threatening as a dog with a chew toy in its mouth. Humanity is obviously screwed.
Despite the silliness of Kronos itself, Kronos does a lot of things right. Instead of human beings in silver jumpsuits like you see in This Island Earth or Star Trek, the alien beings in Kronos are more realistically completely different from anything on Earth. They are actually alien instead of merely aliens. The alien we see looks something like electric mercury: a glowing, fluid, kinetic river or metallic ooze.
And of course, the communist allegory makes for pretty interesting viewing in retrospect. Before Kronos makes its appearance, Les stands on the beach, disappointed that he’s found nothing, and says,“I can’t get over the awful feeling that this is the calm, and the storm is going to break out at any minute.”
COLD WAR ALERT COLD WAR ALERT COLD WAR ALERT
There are also a few notes of environmentalism and conservation here. Referring to the alien home world, Dr. Elliot warns “What has happened there could easily happen here, if we continue to use resources at our present rate.” Not exactly Bill McKibben, but for 1957, this statement seems to be ahead of its time.
Dr. Elliot is the most interesting character Kronos gives us. He’s an unwilling traitor, someone who let his guard down for just a brief moment and may have doomed the world, a walking “Loose Lips Sink Ships” poster. He battles with the alien within him, but loses in the end. He uses his position to locate nuclear plants near Kronos’s location while advising military leaders to use the hydrogen bomb against it, which will make it even more powerful.
In the end, of course, Les comes up with an ingenious plan in a slew of mostly nonsensically strung-together scientific buzzwords. Like so many virginal acting school graduates with dreams on the verge of being crushed, Kronos is lured by the bright lights of Los Angeles. Granted, very few of these soon-to-be In-N-Out cashiers and exotic dancers are trying to find a stockpile of nuclear weapons on the outskirts of the city, but we can’t all be Angelina Jolie, can we?
As Kronos stalks squeakily toward L.A., a jet flies over head and parachutes a capsule down over its head, which explodes a few hundred feet above its antenna. According to Kronos, the secret to defeating an invincible robot is “fireworks.” I finally understand the true meaning of the 4th of July.
Like any Cold War allegory, the end feels jingoistic compared to the rest of the movie. While the monster was once indestructible, their newfound vigilance will be enough to defeat any enemy. As they watch the robot monster explode, Les’s girlfriend turns to him and asks, “Les, do you think they’ll send anymore down here?”
“If they do, we’ll be ready for them,” he replies.
