Battle in Outer Space (1959)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

90 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

I watched this several years ago when I was first getting into tokusatsu, but remembered it as really boring and never felt inclined to watch it again until I had the privilege of screening The Mysterians to a group of real actual people in meatspace. That got me wondering if this was as forgettable as I was thinking. As is usually the case, it's definitely not - plot-wise, maybe, but this is such a practical effects tour de force that if I were rating it based on that alone, it would get an easy five stars.

This is a semi-sequel to The Mysterians which is connected to the previous film through two recurring characters, Etsuko Shiraishi and Dr. Adachi, both played by different actors this time (Kyoko Anzai and Koreya Senda, respectively). None of the events of The Mysterians are recounted or flashed-back to, and whether or not this film even takes place in the same timeline is ambiguous at best, so... don't worry about it, it's a spiritual sequel. The most important thread linking the two is the basic concept that Honda was toying with, where all nations of the world come together to fight an external threat as one. He broached this subject in The Mysterians, but explores it more fully here, although in different ways. I have heard that Honda considered The Mysterians to be his favorite of his tokusatsu films - this from a director who was usually hard on himself. I do think The Mysterians is the superior film, but Battle in Outer Space definitely fleshes out the international-cooperation concept more robustly, so I wonder why Honda preferred one over the other.

The storyline follows the same basic path as The Mysterians but makes a few changes, most notably that the aliens - this time called the Natarl - are far more distant and honestly a lot scarier than the Mysterians ever were. You don't see a Natarl's face at any point, but their influence is massive: they have the ability to remotely possess and control humans, ordering them to do their bidding and abducting them with their UFOs at will. There's this incredibly creepy scene where the Earth astronauts arrive on the moon and one of them gets mobbed and almost killed by what we're lead to believe are Natarls themselves - I have a headcanon that these guys were actually something like Shocker footsoldiers and not the real aliens, but there's something about that scene that's just so eerie. The Natarls' proportions look off, their heads are too big, they move awkwardly, and there are too many of them. There's a real uncanny valley effect here that overrides some of the inherent goofiness of their costumes.

Because this is an Ishirō Honda film, we of course have one guy who sacrifices himself heroically for the good of the rest of the space crew. This character is played by the inimitable Yoshio Tsuchiya, whose best roles by far are his villains, but he does a commendable job in this situation as well. Another great scene is when Tsuchiya's character, Iwamura, is possessed by the Natarl while driving to Ginza. By the time he arrives there he no longer has a will of his own. The musical score becomes frenetic and disorienting, the neon lights flash across the screen, and we see a dazed Iwamura in the middle of the city, a passenger now in his own body.

Unfortunately, the recycled plot fails to fill out the film's runtime. But what it lacks in plot, it more than makes up for in practical effects. The Mysterians was Toho's big tokusatsu extravaganza, but the effects in this film easily rival it - if not surpass it altogether. Again, although there's many similarities between the two, changes are made here: whereas The Mysterians was almost entirely Earth-bound, Battle in Outer Space is a distinctly space-age film. All of its real standout sequences occur in the SPIP spaceships and on the moon (the lava fields of Mt. Mihara here standing in for the rocky lunar surface). Absolutely gorgeous 1950s conceptions of what the future would look like abound. At about 70 minutes in the plot essentially grinds to a halt and the remaining runtime is filled with expertly-filmed aerial dogfights, but I didn't even care that nothing was actually happening in terms of story because the effects were so fun to look at.

I still think The Mysterians is better, but it's a "two cakes" situation: fussing over the comparative quality of each film takes a backseat, for me, to celebrating the fact that we got two of a very good thing.