Movie Review: Them! (1954)

Them! (1954) directed by Gordon Douglas

This classic 1950s sci-fi film introduced the sub-genre of giant bugs, usually made big by atomic radiation. In this story, a child is found wandering in the desert of New Mexico. She's shellshocked and won't talk to Sergeant Ben Peterson (James Whitmore), who leads the investigation. He and his partner find the RV camper where her parents were, but it's been ripped open from the outside. No valuables have been taken. Making the crime more intriguing, an odd footprint is discovered in the sand. Local forensics cannot identify it, so the cast is sent to Washington, D.C., for analysis. Cue the entry of Doctor Harold Medford (Edmund Gwynn) and his daughter Doctor Patricia Medford (Joan Weldon), both myrmecologists from the Department of Agriculture. They are experts who study ants. Sure enough, they discover an ant colony in the desert. The ants are huge, eight feet long at a minimum. The heroes gas the colony, go in and discover that two queen ants have already left, presumably making more colonies elsewhere. If they aren't found and stopped, it could mean the end of civilization. Well, at least human civilization.

The movie has a lot going for it. The pacing is very good, slowly revealing what's going on (though a glance at the poster gives away the main secret). The actors are all very good in their roles, taking it seriously and not providing any camp. There's a hint of romantic interest from Peterson for the younger Doctor Medford, but she is almost all business. She has some moments to scream, but those are hardly "damsel in distress" moment--any man, woman, or child would scream in the same circumstances. She insists on going into the nest to investigate the queen situation (her dad is too old to do it and the cops don't know what to look for), exhibiting the sort of courage not usually granted to female leads in these films. The creature effects are very good. They are certainly man-made but have plenty of detail and are photographed to give them maximum believability. The ending is another classic bit of 1950s paranoia about what we have wrought with the coming of the nuclear age.

Recommended, highly for sci-fi fans.