World Without End

World Without End (also known as Flight to the Future) is a 1956 American science fiction film directed by Edward Bernds and starring Hugh Marlowe and Nancy Gates. It was made in CinemaScope and Technicolor by Allied Artists and produced by Richard Heermance. World Without End features an early screen role for Australian-born Rod Taylor. The film was distributed on a double feature with the Lon Chaney Jr. film Indestructible Man. Plot In March 1957, commander Dr. Eldon Galbraithe, engineer Henry Jaffe, radioman Herbert Ellis and scientist John Borden, are returning to Earth from the first spaceflight, a reconnaissance trip around Mars. Suddenly, their spaceship is somehow accelerated to incredible velocities, and they are knocked unconscious. Their ship crash lands on a snow-covered mountain. When they venture out, they discover that they have become victims of time dilation and are now in the future. They theorize, from seeing time-worn gravestones and after their ship's instruments register heightened residual radiation, that a devastating atomic war had broken out in 2188, and that they are at least 200 years past that date. (They later learn that the year is 2508). Jaffe is particularly hard hit, as he realizes that his wife and children have long since died. After surviving an ambush by giant, mutant spiders, they are attacked by one of the two remnants of human society. The "mutates" (as the astronauts label them) are violent, primitive surface dwellers. They have mutated due to generations of exposure to heightened radioactivity. (However, the background radiation has decreased to tolerable levels, and the men later learn that normal humans are often born to the mutates. These, however, are enslaved.)