Message From Space (1978)

directed by Kinji Fukasaku

Japan

105 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I have to admit that I'm one of the four remaining people on Earth who have never seen a Star Wars movie. I am, however, a tokusatsu devotee, and while I'm not nearly as familiar with Toei as I am with Tsuburaya and Toho (my two beloveds), I appreciated Message From Space first and foremost for the way it looked more than anything else about it, including the fact that it very obviously lifts heavily from Star Wars at almost every turn. This will be a pretty shallow review for that reason. Also, I generally don't have much to say about this. So I'll be talking first about the aesthetics of it, because that was what mostly caught my eye here, and then I'll get into stuff beyond the surface level as best I can.

Toei has churned out an incredibly extensive back catalogue of television series and films over the years (and continues to do so), but they are not as well-known for their miniatures as Toho or Tsupro; this is largely (I think - as I said, I'm not that familiar with their output) because they tend to lean more into sentai series than stuff with kaiju in it. That being said, the miniature work was the best thing about Message From Space, and really just the set design in general was what elevated it beyond what it could have otherwise been. Obviously Star Wars is known for its pioneering effects work too, and I wouldn't say that this movie surpasses it, but the shots from below of the big ominous starship gliding overhead with all of its detail and its jets glowing blue could easily have been taken right out of the original Star Wars films. Some of the special effects are seriously lacking due to technical limitations of the time, but it's the primitive computer effects that are bad, not the practical - I only cringed once, when the main characters were supposed to be floating around in space (in basically civilian clothes? Wearing just gas masks that half-covered their faces?). You can't really blame anybody for this, though, because they really couldn't have done any better at the time. That's just where the technology was at. It's more like something you look back at and laugh about, like dated elementary school portraits.

Where the design of this film really shines is the interior sets of the Galactic Empire stand-in's aforementioned ominous starship. They pulled out all the stops designing the throne room, and it's unfortunate that that single room is basically all we see, but the sheer opulence of it is satisfying enough. You get the sense that these aliens are not just evil but also arrogant, that their passion for aesthetics and visual markers of wealth drives them hand-in-hand with a desire to subjugate and murder; some evildoers in science fiction have their territory marked by dankness and pervasive shadows, but these guys belong to the class of nefarious aliens whose sinister intentions are highlighted in the obscene extravagance of their ship. On the outside, it looks like a hunk of various vacuum cleaner parts glued together, but inside there's a weirdly almost Art Deco feel with a tremendous amount of detail, mostly in gold and red. It's echoed in the costuming, as well: no Stormtrooper ripoffs here, at least not visually. The silver-painted bad guys wear uniforms as colorful and ornate as the inside of their ship, and even the background grunts are kitted out reasonably well.

With all of that, the thing I'm really mad about is that the aliens who are under siege by the bad guys don't get half or even a quarter as much care given to their appearance and environment. While the big scary evil empire flies around looking like a futuristic opera hall ruled by fascists, the good guys are just people in robes with laurel wreaths who seem to primarily live outside. It seriously irked me that all the design nuance was used up for the baddies.

As far as the story goes... about the most I can say about it is that it's dissimilar enough from Star Wars (at least what I know if it) to feel original, but also not very interesting. The brunt of it revolves around a cast of eight disparate characters (one of whom is a very young Hiroyuki Sanada) who were chosen by eight mystical seeds sent out by the desperate victims of the faux-Galactic Empire, and who will apparently cause some miracle to happen once they're all united. So for a lot of the running time, the eight are just trying to stick together and search out other recipients of the seeds. I actually liked this and thought it was interesting because it kind of removes the typical bravado and personal responsibility that an action-packed sci-fi film would typically imbue its heroes with: Instead of daring, lone-wolf rescue missions, the eight characters are explicitly required to do nothing but attempt to present a literal united front, and their own individual ability to fight (which they do, there is a lot of fighting, don't get me wrong) is secondary to their ability to follow directions. It's not like everybody sits around all the time, and the goal is also to defeat the bad guys, not just show up to the party on time, but the motivation comes from outside. I wish there were more sci-fi movies where the premise was that several people receive basically an intergalactic RSVP and have to hustle somewhere together within a certain period of time.

I feel like giving this three stars is being unkind to the aesthetic heights it reaches, but on the whole it's just not that great as an actual movie. If you could freeze-frame shots from this and set them up as an art exhibit (much less hunt down the actual props and put them in an art exhibit), it would probably be better than the movie itself. Everybody puts in a good and believable performance (it is always weird to see Vic Morrow in stuff) and you most likely won't get bored if you're a fan of anything I mentioned in this review, but there's also a reason why this isn't constantly brought up as a viable alternative to Star Wars. Also, this is one of those cases where you watch this and then look up what else the director has done and it absolutely blindsides you.