Gorath

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.

Despite what you'd think being a Toho movie, Gorath isn't a giant beastie in fact dependent on which version you watch there may not be a beastie at all.

Gorath tells the standard story of a meteor heading towards Earth that will destroy the planet and the efforts of its people to prevent catastrophe. The aforementioned beastie only exists in the original Japanese version and was entirely edited out the American version for some reason. Probably best as it brought nothing to the movie and the giant seal monster did look a tad goofy.

The core theme of the movie is a world united, a message that we need more than ever at time of writing.

It follows a very commonly used plot and doesn't bring anything new to the table at all. With all the usual 60's sci-fi tropes it's well below par for a Toho film.

The Good:

That Toho charm

The Bad:

Doesn't look that great even for its time

Really quite boring stuff

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

It was global law that all sci-fi movies needed to have that same sound effect, you know the one!

I understand that Toho had a small talent pool and hired the same people, but why are the most talented ones usually the smaller roles?

This film is one of my favorites from Toho's "Golden Age" and one of the three "space operas" directed by Ishiro Honda. A giant asteroid with a huge magnetic field is growing by absorbing everything in its path...a path which puts it on a course to Earth. How will man survive? Easy---through the conviction and determination of Japanese will-power and ingenuity, the Earth is pushed out of orbit after giant engines are built at the South Pole. But is it enough to get the Earth out of the path of Gorath?

One scene that most Americans have never seen is the appearance of MAGMA, a giant prehistoric walrus which was awakened by the heat generated at the South Pole by the massive engines. After some initial destruction, the monster is killed by beams fired from a VTOL vehicle (which would see a new life in the TV series, "Ultraman" as the "Jet Beetle.")

Kumi Mizuno shines as one of the female leads with a great bathtub scene when Akira Kubo comes knocking on her door.

This was the first Japanese film that I saw that didn't rely on a giant monster to make it an interesting story (there is a giant monster, but it is mainly used as filler). Essentially, the message of this film is about how the people of Earth should learn to cooperate, especially when faced with extinction. We do not need an extreme threat like an onrushing planetoid to learn to cooperate due to the fact that we have such threats as global warming, pollution, crime and hunger that are already eating away at us. Also, I hope one day that an uncut version of this film is released in this country. The message of this film has all but been hacked to pieces by the American distributors of this classic piece of Japanese science fiction.

This Japanese take on the kind of story first pioneered by "When Worlds Collide" and done less effectively in later years in "Meteor", "Armageddon" etc. has been called Toho's greatest sci-fi movie ever by some. It's certainly a fairly intelligent effort overall, done with top of the line (for its time) FX. I was glad to see it in its original Japanese format, widescreen with subtitles (and with the rather pointless scene involving giant walrus Magma) and found it quite entertaining overall, certainly the equal of "When Worlds Collide" and light years ahead of the American takes on the story that followed. My only quibble was why Gorath was referred to as a "star", when it is clearly too small to be so categorized, and should have been referred to as a runaway planet (was Toho afraid of getting sued for ripping off "When Worlds Collide" if they categorized it as a planet?).

Fans of the wonderful 1960 disaster movie "The Last Voyage" will recognize George Furness, who played Third Officer Osborne in that film, as the UN Secretary-General. Furness was a lawyer living in Japan who had enough acting talent to not only play westerners in Japanese movies, but to get good roles in American movies shot in Japan like "The Last Voyage" too.