The War in Space (1977)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

91 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I really dropped the ball by not posting this review on May the 4th, but for some reason I was certain I'd already posted it. Anyway, here it is now, for your delectation.

I'm going to come right out and say that this is not my favorite Jun Fukuda film, nor my favorite sci-fi film from Toho in general, but that isn't a recommendation to avoid it, because even if it's a little lacking plotwise, it's still got some of the best practical effects around. I'm not going to talk much about the things I disliked here; instead I'm going to focus on the good things (of which there are many), because really there's not that much that's bad about this film so much as there is stuff that it just doesn't have, like for example any interesting characters.

The first act sees The War in Space at its most Jun Fukuda-y, by which I mean there's some spying and crime going on, and multiple people are either shot or at risk of getting shot. It's a little eerie for a while because the aliens can imitate humans, so we don't know what's going on or what the aliens' grand plan is, just that there's people who are not people and they could be anywhere. Most people know Fukuda from his Godzilla films, but I've seen more of his crime movies than most people would probably care to watch (though he is brilliant as a toku director, don't get me wrong) and as such I've slowly come to associate him more with the crime genre. You can definitely tell, if you're familiar with his work in that area, which parts of this film are most strongly under his influence. It stuck out to me that this movie on the whole is almost startlingly beige; Fukuda has worked in black-and-white, but I know him mostly as someone who tends towards a sort of vibrant, hyper, very colorful aesthetic, so to see The War in Space be so monotone and boring was a bit of a departure from usual.

Like I said, there is not much plot. All of Earth's major cities suddenly come under attack by unknown alien forces, large armadas of tiny little orbular ships raining laser fire down on all our landmarks. A last-minute transmission from a space station gives firsthand info, right before they're destroyed, that the enemy is some kind of "Roman ship". More on that later. The source of the invaders is eventually determined to be Venus, and only one thing is strong enough to make the journey there and fight the enemies - the Gōten, but it's not quite finished, and the race to get it up and ready as more and more of Earth's cities become ruins is thrilling. Except for some dragging in the middle, this is not a boring movie, despite whatever else it may be. The Gōten is launched in the nick of time, and for the remainder of the movie (a little over half) we will never go back to Earth; everything either takes place on the ship itself or on Venus.

I am a die-hard fan of the Gōten. I will not get into all of the reasons why at the moment, but since its earlier appearance in Atragon (also one of my favorite movies, which I get wildly enthusiastic when talking about and will refrain from expanding upon here) it became one of the most striking ships in tokusatsu as well as a personal favorite of me and many others. There is just something about its appearance that so perfectly encapsulates the future-thinking of Showa-era science fiction: This ship that takes pieces from existing vessels but combines them into something that is sea-, air-, space-, and ground-ready, an impossible dream of technology that is, even in the context of the technologically advanced future that spawned it, looked upon as a crowning achievement. There's something so iconic about that giant drill at its head. When it's used to tunnel through the ground I always feel childishly excited. I'm not a weapons dude, I've only recently started studying specific machinery in tokusatsu, but the Gōten is as beloved to me as some living characters are.

It's difficult to describe the breadth of the practical effects in this film in just a couple of paragraphs, and anyway it would probably be boring if I did. But just imagine that every mid-century fantasy about what Venus might be like is put to film here. Toho was already doing incredible things on soundstages and miniature sets in the 60s, and this represents what I feel is the height of their imagination made physical. Everything looks very convincing: Scenes where miniature ships traverse the miniature landscape of Venus actually look like the ship is navigating miles of terrain, when in reality it was feet or inches. Same goes for the sets when humans are walking around Venus, although despite all the other wacky stuff in this film I do find it difficult to believe that such dinky, flimsy spacesuits are enough to protect anyone from getting instantly crushed and boiled to death. This is like watching movies where people imagine what it would be like to walk around on the moon, before we actually did go to the moon, except we're probably not going to be landing people on Venus any time soon.

This is kind of a weird movie in that parts of it feel very cobbled-together. It doesn't feel like it has a cohesive aesthetic. It feels like the idea of going to Venus was the root of it all and then other stuff was added in, not necessarily with a specific look in mind, but just because aliens and whatnot were needed for the setting. But this cobbled-together feeling leads to some of my favorite non-recurring aliens in the Toho universe. This is an incredibly niche thing, but I love when aliens appropriate a Roman aesthetic (see also: Romulans), which is what the guys in The War in Space do, or at least presumably they do; we don't see much of them beyond their ruler and a couple of mooks in a mostly empty palace. I find something really weirdly compelling about the idea of a civilization replicating the height of Roman society in parallel, millions or billions of miles away on another planet. I love the idea that Rome developed twice, that Rome is a common element in the universe, or even something that galactic civilizations might default to as a base template. It's just funny to me and also interesting. Another thing I love is the image of a ship flying through space that is an actual, physical ship, like a wooden sailing ship, and we get to see one of those face off against the Gōten, so that makes me pretty pleased. The scant bits of the Galactic Empire that we do see hint at a complex aesthetic tradition that I was dying to know more about. (Commander Hell is also played by Goro Mutsumi, who recently passed away and who I always love to see in stuff.)

Overall, this is mostly an ideas movie, I think. It follows a pretty standard "invaders attacking > invaders are routed out > invaders are destroyed" progression. The Gõten is treated as a superweapon that should not be used again (or at least the planet-killer bomb on its drill-tip is), which gives the plot a little more weight, but this doesn't come into play until the very end. It's not the best movie, but it contains some as-usual stunning practical effects, and I do heartily recommend it to fans of older science fiction.