Sayonara Jupiter (1984)

directed by Sakyo Komatsu, Koji Hashimoto

Japan

130 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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(A note: This is an older review, and in the time since writing it I've become inexplicably very fond of this movie. Although I'm a bit harsh on it here, my feelings towards it since then have softened considerably. It is not a good movie, but it's one that I kind of love.)

So this was apparently intended to compete with the upcoming sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001 - which itself was no smash hit - and oh boy... it's not great. What Sayonara Jupiter feels like more than anything is Toho writing a love letter to itself, and I don't really have a problem with that because I love Toho too. The characters watch a Godzilla movie at one point, and also one of Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai trilogy (the third film, if I'm not mistaken), which is a personal favorite of mine. Maybe the slightly self-congratulatory tone should have bothered me more, but it didn't. What bothered me instead was that this movie falls victim to the trap of taking itself 110% seriously at all times.

The plot is a mishmash of random New Age nonsense thrown together with little care: Dolphins, Nazca lines, zero-G lovemaking, bad folk music, vague environmental activism in space!, et cetera. The general idea is that because of the growing size of the human population and its expansion into the further Solar System, Jupiter must be turned into a second sun to provide resources for those living too far from the original sun to thrive. Which is, uh, not a super great idea if you think about it for more than two seconds. But before the Jupiter Solarization Project can be completed, a rogue black hole enters the scene, sucking and warping its way towards the Solar System on a collision course with Earth. It is quickly discovered that if the plan to turn Jupiter into a second sun is abandoned and instead Jupiter is just blown to smithereens, the energy will knock the black hole off its course and humanity will be saved. Again, if you know anything whatsoever about physics, this is a bunch of hooey. But we're not here for a physics lecture, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect that from a movie like this. The goofy plot and hand-wavy physics were, again, things that should have bothered me more, but didn't. It's all part and parcel of this movie as a whole.

The science fiction elements of the film are actually fantastic, and for about the first twenty minutes this fooled me into thinking it would be some kind of unfairly maligned hidden gem, because it has all the hallmarks of entertaining, not-too-sophisticated '80s sci-fi. I've never seen a movie more proud of its greebles. Toho has always had tricks up its sleeve for making spaceships look cool, and it pulls them all out for this one. The looming ships coasting through space, the detailed, '80s-era-futuristic interiors of the labs and meeting rooms, all of it screams "cult classic". Turn off the dialogue, cut out the weird hippie singing-and-crying scenes, and this is a passable film. But unfortunately everything else is so much of a mess that it's hard to find that passable film within all the fluff. There's something so off about the tone here - very early on, two characters deactivate the gravity in their room and turn on something called "love gas", and what follows is an achingly lengthy scene of two nude people floating through a green-screened background of the cosmos. It is of its time, and one should try to take it at face value, because that's how it's intended, but that's the problem - it's just too hard to take imagery like that seriously, and this movie is, at every turn, practically begging you to take its weird and outlandish ideas seriously.

(The one thing I did find interesting was the parallel between those two lovebirds at the beginning, floating around care-free and half out of their minds on love gas, and the same two characters at the end, barely clinging to life and each other, covered in blood. That felt like a strong parallel to the film's overall theme of humanity moving from adolescence into harsh adulthood, and maybe if I were to watch this again I could have gotten more out of that, but I'm not watching this again any time soon.)

I don't want to make it out like I'm deriding this movie's general peace-and-harmony message, because as hackneyed as it is about conveying said message, it's still a good thing to hope for. I tend towards sympathy for movies like this that are so caught up in their hippie mindset that they forget to actually be a good movie, because honestly, I vastly prefer that to something that's beautiful but vapid and devoid of politics. There's issues with the very tame, UN-itized future that Sayonara Jupiter presents; it's not a perfect vision of a perfect world - but it's got hope, and it feels wrong to make too much fun of that. There is a lot to make fun of here in general, though.

And this movie also feels every minute of its 130. It kind of has to be that long, that's just the type of movie it is. You couldn't make an 80-minute movie and launch it out there to compete against something set in the 2001-verse. Part of me really does love this because there's so much care put into it, like everything Toho puts out. I can like movies and acknowledge that they're bad. But one must be warned: this is, like, genuinely not a good movie. If you're not a fan of anything this movie involves - practical effects, science fiction, space, dolphins, etc - and aren't willing to turn your brain, if not off, then just down a little, you won't have much fun at all. I should mention for fairness that this probably was intended to be much better than the final product; behind-the-scenes there were a lot of last-minute changes that resulted in storylines being dropped abruptly, which is heavily reflected in... well, all the storylines in this film that are dropped abruptly. It was also in production for some time and there was a lot of waiting for the right technology to become available to make it. In an alternate universe, we probably got a perfect version of this film, but in this universe, this is what we're stuck with, and maybe that isn't so bad.