The First Men in the Moon, also promoted as H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon, is a 2010 television drama written by Mark Gatiss, directed by Damon Thomas, that stars Gatiss as Cavor and Rory Kinnear as Bedford, with Alex Riddell, Peter Forbes, Katherine Jakeways, Lee Ingleby and Julia Deakin.

[4] In July 1969, 90-year-old Julius Bedford (Rory Kinnear) tells young Jim (Alex Riddell) the story of two men who made the first journey to the Moon in 1909.

Bedford encouraged Cavor to think of the profits his invention might bring, and they worked together to build a cast iron sphere that would fly them both to the Moon.

His hopes of returning to the Moon to rescue Cavor are dashed when a passer-by, Chessocks (Lee Ingleby), climbs aboard and accidentally takes off into space with the hatch open.

The Selenites conclude from hearing about the warlike nature of humankind that the species is a threat to the Moon, and they determine to use Cavorite to make a pre-emptive strike with spacecraft similar to the one that brought Cavor and Bedford from Earth.

In desperation, Cavor communicates his intentions in Morse code to Bedford via wireless, and later releases all the Cavorite produced by the Selenites.

The Guardian's Tim Dowling found Gatiss' adaptation to have "brilliant" elements, such as setting the film as the 60-year-old "kinematographic" recording and recollections of an old man (Bedford), told in 1969.

He enjoyed the film's "sly" references to modernity, such as airline flight safety announcements, and its "Pooterish approximation of Neil Armstrong's famous words: 'What is this for us, but a tiny footfall.'"

Dowling found that once on the Moon, "the drama hits a soggy spot", the Selenite inhabitants "are a little unconvincing," and when the duo are separated, "the narrative runs out of steam," but wrote that "it's worth staying on," and summed up the film as an "engaging slice of time travel.