When you picture a film about giant ants–and when, furthermore, you know humans will react to those giant ants with a seemingly endless procession of Wilhelm screams–you imagine schlock. When you learn the title has an exclamation point, you imagine top-tier schlock. (Taco Break option: what movie titles would be most improved by adding an exclamation point?)

Gordon Douglas’s 1954 classic Them! isn’t averse to the trashy pleasures of monsters, peril, and disaster movie-style dogged and surprisingly efficient cooperation between governmental forces, and it will scratch your giant ant itch with an industrial-sized feeler. But it’s also a thoughtful, suspenseful science fiction movie that, especially in its early stages, does a terrific job generating unease. It has beautiful black-and-white cinematography, and it makes fantastic use of its stretches of isolated desert: it’s easy to imagine “their” eerie, wavery chittering carrying across the vast empty spaces. While it believes that humanity can, with some luck, rally together to get a problem under control, it’s cynical enough to know what that will actually look like: one of the best moments involves the protagonists interviewing a sympathetic bystander whose reports of the ants got him locked up as a mental patient. Ah, they know he’s not delusional. They will, as he begs them, get him out of here, and maybe he’ll even join the main cast.

… Except, in their quest to contain the information and avert mass panic, they actually tell the doctor to keep him locked up. The doctor was wavering, not sure that the man was delusional after all and on the verge of releasing him–until our heroes stepped in. He would have been better off not helping them at all.

There’s shockingly little commentary on it, too, which helps make it feel like a timeless snapshot of power and necessity, something that would almost fit in with Grant Nebel’s examination of “Christopher Nolan’s Liars.” There’s the bitter sting of that moment but nothing to soothe it–unless, of course, you believe, as the characters believe, that this measure is necessary. Even then, you can still be discomfited by the end of the film, which raises the specter of what might happen when no amount of ruthless, effective, intelligent intervention is enough. What happens when the number and severity of crises dwarf the people capable of responding to them? And, of course, the giant ants are a long-gestating consequence of early atomic bomb tests; like the bomb, they’re a scientific and military matter until, abruptly, they’re not, until the damage they cause is too great and too potentially random to ignore.

This is a good, solid film, one you’ll probably enjoy even if you don’t have any fondness for watching giant ant models get jerkily moved around. (The best scenes are mostly ant-free anyway.) What you have to ask yourself is if you like dread, the desert, and problem-solving–if the answer is yes, you’ll have a good time with Them! If you like all that and soldiers repeatedly shrieking the Wilhelm scream as they’re wiped out by giant, clunky ants, then you may have found your new favorite movie.

Them! is streaming on the Criterion Channel.