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.

Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974)

directed by Toshio Masuda

Japan

114 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I wasn't happy about having no other option than to watch this in such poor quality that I could barely make out any of the actors' faces, but apparently Toho pulled this and doesn't want to acknowledge it due to its depiction of mutated humans. I'm not sure what about mutated humans is so bad to warrant banning a film entirely, but that's how it goes.

So this is a movie that came out at a time when environmental concerns were becoming more mainstream, and it was also clearly made by somebody who felt passionate about the looming possibility of full-scale societal destruction due to a number of mounting factors. And I mean really, really passionate about that. It is a little bit weird that the prophecies of Nostradamus are the vehicle used for conveying this environmentalism message, instead of, like, science, but hey whatever. There's science here, don't get me wrong, but it always falls back on "oh man, Nostradamus warned us about this" like it really believes in what he was writing.

The film also takes certain stances that... I'm not really going to criticize, because like I said, this is very of its time and also of its place; it's specific to Japan and it doesn't make sense to map my American feelings about the government onto it. However, it seems to have this weird idea that the people and the government need to work in tandem, and that a significant portion of the blame for global catastrophe could or should be shouldered by regular citizens, which is pleasantly optimistic (at least the first half is) but untrue of any government and any citizenry. It's a weird concept to imagine people and government bolstering each other and each benefiting from the other, because government is inherently unequal. As long as people are elected to the top, there will be people who have financial, personal, or moral investment in keeping other people at the bottom. And the easiest way to do that is to let their houses rot around them and their families be poisoned by toxic air and water.

There's also this sense of naïveté that I see in a lot of mid-to-late-20th century environmentalism where the underlying theme, after all possible solutions are trotted out and the danger of ignoring them is proven, is "oh, but also we have time, we'll turn back before it's too late". It's easy to judge this when you look back from the hell year 2022, and maybe in 1974 it did genuinely look like a brighter future was inevitable once we came to our senses, but... the fact that people ever believed we would come to our senses seems absurd and misguided at best. I really do see this a ton in media from the 70s; people really thought that eventually we would wake up, that it was a given that with a little work we'd someday help all the people to see how our treatment of the planet was wrong and that we need to change, and a change would then be implemented that would set us back on track. Obviously that has never happened and probably will never happen unless we abolish capitalism, classism, and wipe our brains of the fixation with money and power that we've had for centuries.

Weird as it is, though, this is also a Toho film, with their signature practical effects excellence. So there's a ton in here that would feel more at home in a Godzilla movie than whatever the hell this is. It's a dead serious film and I really do respect what it has to say, even if it doesn't necessarily hold up in certain areas, but I also respect the giant slugs and vastly more silly-looking giant bats. I do not respect its depiction of deranged, cannibalistic natives; as I've brought up before, Toho films have a problem with that. It reaches for some low-hanging fruit at times especially with its constant barrage of images of real-life human suffering and its repeated mantra of "how terrible would that be if it happened to US?". Plus there's an attempt to jam in more human drama just so the whole thing isn't one never-ending downslide into death and destruction, and boy, is it boring.

I don't know if I could actually recommend this to anyone unless you have very specific taste, but it's a curiosity that I wish were more widely available. I've heard secondhand that it's the kind of thing that people of a certain age had the joy of accidentally catching on late-night television and were scarred for life from it, forever stuck with bizarre memories of this bizarre movie and unable to satisfy them due to the movie all but vanishing. Once it devolves into showing nothing but massive frenzies of looting and rioting it gets extremely boring for a stretch, but in the end it does wrap back around into something genuinely heartfelt and real. There is a core of urgency to this even if it's hokey and dated.