You can probably guess from the title of this article that I don’t think Saturn 3 is a great movie though what I find most interesting is that you can see the potential for greatness all over it.

As I mention in the video, the original director, John Barry, left the production after only two weeks and while I can’t definitively say what he shot and what he didn’t I choose to believe the more interesting sequences were done by him.

This is supported somewhat by the fact that Stanley Donen was not only not known for science fiction movies, but it was a genre that he supposedly didn’t particularly understand and the scenes I’m referring to are the most speculative, most science fiction-orientated, in the movie.

And those scenes are the opening, the launch scene and the decontamination scene.

To be honest the rest of the movie isn’t terrible, though it pales to the aforementioned scenes.

What you don’t get from reviews are acknowledgement of the production staff (props, costumes, model effects, etc) but people like Stuart Craig (Production Design), Norman Dorne (Art Designer), Alan Cassie (Set Decoration) and Anthony Mendelson (Costume Design) deserve huge props because it’s an amazing looking movie and if John Barry hadn’t left the production it might have been something amazing.

As things stand, Saturn 3 is a very flawed production but it’s worth seeing nonetheless.