Up until the final ten minutes or so, I was a bit more mixed on this science fiction effort by Ishiro Honda. It's silly but doesn't realize it. It's got that singular obsession with dull scientists that Honda has included with every monster movie he's made so far. It's both underexplained and overexplained at the same time. But, with ten minutes to go, a character is reintroduced in a narratively interesting way, and it pushed my appreciation up just a bit more. This, reportedly the personal favorite of Honda himself from his own work, is a small gem from a shaky and uneven filmography.
In a small village at the base of Mount Fuji, astrophysicist Ryoichi (Akihiko Hirata) insists on doing his research despite no seeming reason for it at that particular place, causing confusion in his friend Joji (Kenji Sahara), his sister Etsuko (Yumi Shirakawa), and his fiancée Hiroko (Momoko Kochi). Before we get time to settle on these questions, though, presented during a local and colorful festival, the forest surrounding the village is consumed in flames. A few days later, an earthquake eats up the entire town and, supposedly, Ryoichi himself who stayed behind to further investigate. Out of this hole comes a giant dome, populated by the eponymous Mysterians, an extraterrestrial race that come from a planet Ryoichi had theorized was once in between Mars and Jupiter. The translation around celestial phenomena seems to be not great, but I think it's supposed to have once been the Asteroid belt. The subtitles say that it was original a star, which would make no sense, so I think it's really just a translation issue and not that Honda and his screenwriter, Takeshi Kimura, think that asteroids come from stars.
Anyway, the Mysterians come with a message that they only want three square kilometers of land for their own, and Japan is having none of it. They immediately set out to attack. One of the issues I have with the film is how we are expected to assume that the Japanese efforts are just. I think it may just be a "defense of the homeland" sort of thing, but there isn't even that kind of explanation given. No one says, "Not Japan! Go to China and displace those dogs," or anything. It's just, the Mysterians show up, and it's time to fight them. And fight them the Japanese forces do, helped not at all by the fact that the Mysterians' first appearance is a giant robot that comes crashing out of a mountain and causing havoc (put in to take advantage of that whole Godzilla craze for giant things stomping on stuff that Honda started with Godzilla).
The regular joy of these Honda monster/science fiction films is the special effects, and it's obvious that Honda had a good budget to play with here. The miniature work is very good, and there's a lot of it. Special flying ships. Lasers. Rolling antennae that shoot big beams of tech that are definitely not nuclear powered (it's an assumption going in at this point that Honda makes non-nuclear, at best, movies, if not outright anti-nuclear, necessitating often ridiculous leaps in new technology for characters to use). But, aside from some brief negotiations, television broadcasts from Ryoichi saying that the Mysterians are truly peaceful and humanity should do what it can to appease them, and some high-level discussions in the military and civilian government (including some international discussions with the UN) about what to do, the focus of the back half of the film really is those special effects.
The talk is mostly just excuses to use new-looking technology to try and explode things, and I do get a kick out of it. It honestly wasn't enough to save the film overall for me since pretty much the entirety of the human-side of the storytelling was dull, but I was having a decent enough time. And then, Ryoichi's friends sneak into the Mysterian base, and we get a reintroduction of a character who finally provides the rationale for the Japanese people to uniformly oppose the presence of the Mysterians, and it was a nice narrative effort to provide some small levels of complexity and even what one might consider a plot twist into things. Well, let's just say that I appreciated that a lot more than the inventor of the oxygen destroyer killing himself at the end of Godzilla as an effort to appease the guilty Japanese conscience.
So, it's colorful fun that almost doesn't have enough to come together as a whole but pulls it off in the end. It's not anywhere close to Honda's best film (I have to assume that Honda was talking about his science-fiction output when he called The Mysterians his favorite, purposefully separating them from his melodramas and war films because those are regularly far superior). However, in terms of his science-fiction work, it's a bit more thoughtfully crafted and comes together decently well. Also, I always get a chuckle at seeing Takashi Shimura in a film like this. It's so beneath him, but he was a contract player at Toho and was game for anything the producers assigned him.
In a small village at the base of Mount Fuji, astrophysicist Ryoichi (Akihiko Hirata) insists on doing his research despite no seeming reason for it at that particular place, causing confusion in his friend Joji (Kenji Sahara), his sister Etsuko (Yumi Shirakawa), and his fiancée Hiroko (Momoko Kochi). Before we get time to settle on these questions, though, presented during a local and colorful festival, the forest surrounding the village is consumed in flames. A few days later, an earthquake eats up the entire town and, supposedly, Ryoichi himself who stayed behind to further investigate. Out of this hole comes a giant dome, populated by the eponymous Mysterians, an extraterrestrial race that come from a planet Ryoichi had theorized was once in between Mars and Jupiter. The translation around celestial phenomena seems to be not great, but I think it's supposed to have once been the Asteroid belt. The subtitles say that it was original a star, which would make no sense, so I think it's really just a translation issue and not that Honda and his screenwriter, Takeshi Kimura, think that asteroids come from stars.
Anyway, the Mysterians come with a message that they only want three square kilometers of land for their own, and Japan is having none of it. They immediately set out to attack. One of the issues I have with the film is how we are expected to assume that the Japanese efforts are just. I think it may just be a "defense of the homeland" sort of thing, but there isn't even that kind of explanation given. No one says, "Not Japan! Go to China and displace those dogs," or anything. It's just, the Mysterians show up, and it's time to fight them. And fight them the Japanese forces do, helped not at all by the fact that the Mysterians' first appearance is a giant robot that comes crashing out of a mountain and causing havoc (put in to take advantage of that whole Godzilla craze for giant things stomping on stuff that Honda started with Godzilla).
The regular joy of these Honda monster/science fiction films is the special effects, and it's obvious that Honda had a good budget to play with here. The miniature work is very good, and there's a lot of it. Special flying ships. Lasers. Rolling antennae that shoot big beams of tech that are definitely not nuclear powered (it's an assumption going in at this point that Honda makes non-nuclear, at best, movies, if not outright anti-nuclear, necessitating often ridiculous leaps in new technology for characters to use). But, aside from some brief negotiations, television broadcasts from Ryoichi saying that the Mysterians are truly peaceful and humanity should do what it can to appease them, and some high-level discussions in the military and civilian government (including some international discussions with the UN) about what to do, the focus of the back half of the film really is those special effects.
The talk is mostly just excuses to use new-looking technology to try and explode things, and I do get a kick out of it. It honestly wasn't enough to save the film overall for me since pretty much the entirety of the human-side of the storytelling was dull, but I was having a decent enough time. And then, Ryoichi's friends sneak into the Mysterian base, and we get a reintroduction of a character who finally provides the rationale for the Japanese people to uniformly oppose the presence of the Mysterians, and it was a nice narrative effort to provide some small levels of complexity and even what one might consider a plot twist into things. Well, let's just say that I appreciated that a lot more than the inventor of the oxygen destroyer killing himself at the end of Godzilla as an effort to appease the guilty Japanese conscience.
So, it's colorful fun that almost doesn't have enough to come together as a whole but pulls it off in the end. It's not anywhere close to Honda's best film (I have to assume that Honda was talking about his science-fiction output when he called The Mysterians his favorite, purposefully separating them from his melodramas and war films because those are regularly far superior). However, in terms of his science-fiction work, it's a bit more thoughtfully crafted and comes together decently well. Also, I always get a chuckle at seeing Takashi Shimura in a film like this. It's so beneath him, but he was a contract player at Toho and was game for anything the producers assigned him.
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