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Review by E.C. McMullen Jr. |
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SPACEMEN APPEAR IN TOKYO
- 1956 |
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After an unusually long list of opening credits, the movie opens on another rainy day in Japan (rains a lot there).
As people disembark froma train, Hideno, a reporter (Koh Sugita: THE INVISIBLE MAN VS. THE HUMAN FLY) with a glad-handing salesman approach, offers to share his umbrella with Doctor Kamura (Bontarô Miake: NOTEBOOKS OF HEIJI ZENIGATA: SPIDER ON THE SKIN, THE INVISIBLE MAN VS. THE HUMAN FLY, THE HOLE) as they go to their usual place, The Cafe Cosmos for a warming cup of hot sake.
UFOs are being spotted over Tokyo and the doctor is a famous astronomer at Tokyo's prestigious Johuku Observatory. The reporter wants a quote and won't take no for an answer until the cafe owner tells him to stop pestering her customers.
Meanwhile, Doctor Kamura's daughter, Taeko (Neiko Nagai) is having dinner with her "Aunt and Uncle", the Matsudas. Uncle Eisuke (Isao Yamagata: THE TELEPHONE RINGS IN THE EVENING, SEVEN MASKS OF REVENGE, THE SWAMP, GHOST SHIP [1 & 2]) is a renown physicist in his own right but as Taeko correctly suspects, the dinner is a subterfuge by her aunt (Kiyoko Hirai) to push Taeko into marrying her boyfriend, whom she has spent too much time dating.
Meanwhile at the observatory, astronomer Dr. Toru Itsobe (Keizô Kawasaki: THE TELEPHONE RINGS IN THE EVENING) has staked out an area of the sky. As he watches, a firey orange dot comes into view and drops several fireballs.
One of them whistles overhead above the town where Dr. Kamura is enjoying his sake and the power fluctuates, interrupting the radio broadcast. Kamura takes this as a sign to stop drinking. Itsobe takes this as a sign to leave the observatory and get Kamura.
Meanwhile whatever that thing is in the sky, it's still shooting fireballs toward earth.
Itsobe thinks it's a satellite from another country.
Someone outside shouts, "It's a flying saucer!" and as Kamura and Itsobe run to the patio they both see the same fireballs that Toru saw in the telescope.
With so many witnesses and now photographs of a firey object falling into Tokyo Bay, the newspapers proclaim "UFOs!" and wants the science community to agree with them. But it's 1956 Japan, not 21st century Western Media. The Japanese scientists are more concerned with the Scientific method and their integrity than they are with getting their face in the press.
Meanwhile the observatory is on the phone with other observatories world-wide, looking for confirmation of the fireballs in other countries.
Meanwhile, two fishermen are frightened away by a star-shaped creature with a giant eye in its center.
Soon people all around the bay are seeing such "Monsters" rising from the water and they are scared witless. Large round eyes are a cultural horror in Japanese culture and the single eye on these creatures is huge.
Rockets carrying cameras are launched but the photos are inconclusive. Toru's father, The Elder Itsobe (Shôzô Nanbu: THE INVISIBLE MAN APPEARS, KAIBYO GOJUSAN-TSUGI, THE INVISIBLE MAN VS THE HUMAN FLY, THE VIRGIN WITNESS, TENAMONYA YURI DOCHU, YOKAI MONSTERS: 100 MONSTERS, THE HAUNTED CASTLE, THE OIWA PHANTOM), also a scientist, is studying the photo enlargements trying to gleen more information, but there's just not enough to go on.
Meanwhile, one of the Star Monsters enters Dr. Kamura's home, frightening Taeko.
At this point, you may be noticing a lot of meanwhiles!
Everything up to now is linear "one thing directly leads to another", and while the movie takes its time it doesn't take a moment's pause. We're getting to that Warning by golly, but director Kôji Shima was used to directing serious period piece morality plays and dramas. All of his lead actors were cut from the same cloth. No SciFi monster movie actors in this SciFi monster movie. We have something important to say, here!
Working off a story by Gentaro Nakajima and a script by Hideo Oguni, Kôji was out to set the table first. Aliens from other planets dressed like Eye-bellied stars? Sure, but Shima wanted the audience to BELIEVE! And when he was done with WARNING FROM SPACE? He went right back to his period piece dramas and so did his writers.
So then -
With so many people frightened by the star monsters, the UFOs are flying out of the water and returning to their spaceship. There, the star-shaped creatures, who call themselves Pairans and which don't remotely resemble a living thing, confer among themselves. In their own, subtitled language that sounds like a sheet of metal being wiggled, they discover that they're frighteningly ugly to earth people.
They have an important, dire warning for the earthlings that they must communicate. Transmutation seems to be the only way. But to change form is a sacrifice. Once done, they can't change back.
Deciding that a famous singer in Tokyo is pleasing to human eyes, one of the Pairans is transmuted to look like her.
Gender has nothing to do with it. The Pairan isn't a woman, its flesh is transmuted to appear like one of us.
Meanwhile it appears that the UFOs, for reasons unknown, have all left. This leaves the scientists breathing a sigh of relief as they admit they not only considered a UFO, but with such advanced technology, humanity could have been annihilated if that was in the cards.
Soon life gets back to normal and everyone is happy. Except that would be a frustrating 35 minutes of movie.
What happens next is, the dead body of famous singer and dancer, Hikari Aozora, is discovered by a vacatinoning Toru and Taeko and is pulled from a lake in Nikko.
Which is all the more odd since Aozora is dancing the Samba in Tokyo on stage right now. When journalists inform her that her dead body was pulled out of a lake, she faints.
Cracks appear in this movie when -
Off camera: Apropos of nothing, the dead body is now alive and being taken back to Tokyo by the astronomers. The strange woman seems to have amnesia so they call her Gingko-san. Instead of sending her to a hospital the astronomers believe they should take care of her in their home, maybe take her out for a game of Tennis.
It's here they discover that Gingko-san has inhuman physical abilities.
What they don't know is -
When "Gingko-san" is alone, she talks to other Pairans who apparently have also decided to transmute. They move about by fading in and out of visibility, kinda like a less dramatic Star Trek matter transmitter.
Now we see an adorable group of kids singing about how wonderful their town and their lives are. This is the school where Taeko works. They are also the Too-Adorable-To-Die heartstring pullers when everything goes sideways.
Eventually we discover what the WARNING is all about. A rogue planet is heading toward earth and will destroy it. Because the planet of Pairan is on our same orbital plane, only invisible to us because its exactly opposite of us and so always hidden by the sun, they are concerned that what destroys earth will also destroy Pairan.
The only thing that can save both of our planets is if the earth fires all of its atomic weapons at the approaching rogue planet. But its got to be all of them!
Does that seem like it would work?
!!!THE SCIENCE MOMENT!!!:
WARNING FROM SPACE wants to take itself seriously, but even for its time, much of the science was wonky.
Here's a small example:
Continued at THE SCIENCE MOMENT/WarningFromSpace.
To Western eyes more than half a century removed from events, WARNING FROM SPACE comes across as a genuine effort to tell a Science Fiction story while making social commentary. The young people look forward to a wonderful future while the middle-aged and old are weary and flattened by their experience of losing World War II. Joy is difficult for them and laughter is forced. Except for the stereotypical Japanese reporters, who are always played as dopey and rude, everyone else comes across realistic with believable motivations and feelings.
WARNING FROM SPACE was taken seriously enough by its studios that they coughed up the bucks to make it Japan's first color movie, which gave Toho the confidence to make their Kaiju series in color as well, starting with RODAN later that year.
Also for a Japanese movie, WARNING FROM SPACE has a relatively upbeat ending, all Japanese narrative things considered. It's certainly on the better side of the 1950s Atom Age movies.
The Cracks turn to crumbles-
The biggest misstep in the tale is a side street involving a mysterious laughing bad guy, who kidnaps one of the scientists and wants "The secret formula". We the audience don't know of a Secret Formula. The kidnapped scientist doesn't know of any Scret Formula. This subplot goes nowhere with its absurdity, only gets worse as its pursued, and is inexplicably abandoned in the last third of the movie as if it never happened.
That nonsense, meant to create dramatic tension for why a scientist, vital to the mission, is missing, damages the movie quite a bit. If it weren't for that, WARNING FROM SPACE might be seen as the cinematic equal of the 1951 scifi classic, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Its aliens are certainly less fascist than Klaatu.
Be sure to get the latest subtitled movie, as old DVDs have hideously misrepresented English dubbing, mismanaged editing, and some are even in black and white, altogether creating a disastrously awkward different movie!
WARNING FROM SPACE is ripe for remake.
Three Shriek Girls.
This review copyright 2021 E.C.McMullen Jr.
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