I never knew that Ishiro Honda made a prequel to Moonfall. Okay, this is slightly less stupid, but it's still pretty stupid. Also, I much prefer miniature effects to CGI, so this has some charm to it in overdelivering special effects. This isn't near the top of Honda's science-fiction oeuvre, but it does provide a nice platform for Eiji Tsuburaya to showcase his skills on some kind of weird ideas.
A star, named Gorath, has been noted as heading towards our solar system, and the crew of the Japanese led spaceship, the JX-1 Hawk, change course from their mission to first study Saturn and collect data on the mysterious object. They discover that it's 6,000 times as dense as Earth but a quarter of the size, and that it's headed straight for Earth as they plunge to their deaths to collect the data and transmit it back. On Earth, scientists both nationally and internationally through the UN discuss the situation. The only real ideas to note here is the continued self-impression of the Japanese people as leaders of the free world, being the most advanced in terms of science since their rockets are further along than the rest of the world's, and they take on a key leadership role in the UN. So, despite being ravaged into the Stone Age in WWII because of their military adventurism gone wrong, Japan is still the smartest, best, and most successful country on the planet. Sure.
Anyway, the key scientist (and honestly the only character worth mentioning since they're almost all just thin caricatures) is Dr. Tazawa (Ryo Ikebe) who comes up with the plan to use nuclear power (Honda's anti-nuclearism seems to have begun to soften with Mothra, and that continues here) to build...giant rockets on the South Pole to move the Earth out of Gorath's path. I mean...that's stupid. That's real stupid. That's an idea that Roland Emmerich would say, "That's too far." And yet, the innocent nature of its presentation, helped in no small part by the miniature work, helps save it from being completely ludicrous. It edges into camp just enough so that it's not a total disaster.
There's business about getting another ship up to collect more data (for reasons), and the little bit of a love story between Tatsuma (Akira Kubo) and Tomoko (Yumi Shirakawa), daughter to prominent paleontologist Kensuke (Takashi Shimura) who is friends with Tazawa. It's thin, deals with Tomoko's old love for one of the first ship's crewmembers, and feels like a weird little distraction in the whole thing. It's a half-hearted attempt to inject human drama in what is ultimately a procedural film about professionals doing a professional job to overcome a problem.
It's just that everything about the professional job and the problem is ridiculous while everyone takes it very seriously. I mean, that just limits my enjoyment of the whole thing, but, again, so much is carried out by those charming miniatures from Tsuburaya. There are the rockets, the super-dense star (that seems to have been some kind of inspiration for the antagonist in The Fifth Element), the South Pole base (which is rather large, to be honest), and even a bit of Tokyo when destruction needs to happen. It's a lot, and there's quick movement from one thing to the next, keeping it from being boring.
There was one moment where I almost just lost what little interest I had in the film, and that's when the monster on the poster appeared. The rockets have fired, and it somehow wakes up a dinosaur who does some damage. "Is this what this movie is going to become? Another Godzilla?" Well, it was dead moments later, and the film refocused. It's a weird moment, at best some kind of wink between nuclear power and monsters that created the previous kaiju, but then we're back to the good ridiculous nonsense: Japan leading the world in an engineering effort to shift the planet's orbit with absolutely no negative side effects whatsoever.
At least the special effects through all of this are charming and kind of wonderful.
So, it looks expensive. There's a decent amount of English dialogue including the final declaration of victory, indicating that this was made with an American audience in mind. It's charming to look at but never engaging while also never rising above its innate silliness. It's not good, is what I'm saying, but it's not a complete waste of time. I've seen far, far worse mindless entertainments. I'll take this over Moonfall any day.
