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.

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.