With Daiei, I always seem to be discovering more pre-Gamera contributions to the tokusatsu genre—they had been testing out monster effects for a quite a while before unleashing their own major series (like Daimajin and Yokai Monsters.) Now I think I’ve found their earliest foray, earlier than even The Whale God—originally released in 1956, Warning From Space (Japanese title Spacemen Appear in Tokyo) premiered barely a year after Godzilla, and aside from capitalizing on the new trend of people in monster costumes, it also feels very much part of the general trends of American Science Fiction films in the mid-fifties, which is to say that it has almost exactly the same plot as several of them. But if some of the parts aren’t entirely original, this ramshackle little film’s general aura is much odder and more interesting—and its unassuming weirdness apparently had a surprising impact, as one biography named it directly as one of the films that inspired Stanley Kubrick to eventually try his hand at Sci-Fi. Who knows how true that really is, but who wouldn’t want to imagine a master filmmaker sitting around studying this tale of rogue planets and dancing starfish?
They throw the dancing starfish, the extraterrestrial Pairans, at you right away, establishing the movie with surreal image of these pantomime, one-eyed creatures wagging their arms back-and-forth and discussing their mysterious goals in a sterile abstract art chamber (in fact, the design of the aliens was provided by avant-garde artist Tarō Okamoto, and it shows.) There is no realism to their fabric bodies and limited movement, but it’s a fakeness so uncanny it comes back around and pulls you into its weird world—what is the point of questioning it? You might as well get on board with whatever this movie is peddling.
The Pairans’ activity above Earth attracts the attention of scientists all over Japan (they even specifically say they are putting most of their effort into visiting Japan), and Flying Saucer Fever grips the country, even as some skeptics dismiss the whole thing as mass hysteria. Unlike in real life, those naysayers are wrong, and while a group of scientists decide to launch a rocket with a camera to take closer pictures of the mysterious objects in orbit, the aliens decide that their next course of action is to pop up ominously in random locations—a river, the ceiling of a jazz club, one of the scientists’ house—and freak people out with their giant glowing eye. This catches the attention of even more scientists, who study the strange sparkly substance they leave behind, but before they can figure out where the aliens stashed their spaceship (it’s in Tokyo Bay, storage space for all monster-related things), they fly away and everyone laughs the whole thing off. Deciding that their approach hasn’t been working, the leader of the aliens volunteers to be “transmogrified” into a human to better facilitate direct contact (because humans see these giant fabric starfish as “monsters”, which probably wasn’t helped by them just popping out of nowhere and staring at them), and brings along a photo to use as a model—while the other aliens point out the danger of only having a 2D image to use in the process, the volunteer goes through with it anyway. The scene of the alien starfish being slowly reshaped in phases into a human woman is yet another wonderfully bizarre piece of imagery.
The alien-in-human-disguise’s plan is maybe a bit over-complicated, and maybe wasn’t planned out entirely—the person she based her form on is a famous dancer (the one in the jazz club scene we saw earlier), which means that she is either mistaken for that celebrity (in one scene, she is mob by a crowd of screaming fans), or she has to awkwardly live as a famous person’s doppelganger (when the dancer is informed by a reporter that she has an exact double, she faints, which seems like an overreaction.) She lets herself be discovered by pretending to be unconscious in the middle of a lake so that the son and daughter of the two main scientists can save her and then sort of integrate her into their lives—nothing at all suspicious about anything so far! While partaking in normal activities, like playing tennis, she can’t help but jump ten feet in the air and teleport from place to place in plain view of everyone, leading them to wonder just what’s up with her. Finally, she gets her opportunity to talk to Dr. Matsuda, an older gentleman who had been fairly dismissive of the whole flying saucer business while he worked on his hobby of calculating a form of energy that is even more powerful than the A-Bomb, a formula that the alien sees and attempts to destroy, telling Matsuda that she understands it and knows how dangerous it is. The idea of a lone scientist creating something even more destructive than nuclear weapons is straight out of Godzilla, but unlike the guilt-ridden Dr. Serizawa, Dr. Matsuda doesn’t seem too bothered about the whole thing, because I guess it’s just some fun side project and he hasn’t really taken all the implications into consideration.
At some point, the alien decides to just cut to the chase and appears before the gathered scientists, telling them that the home planet of the Pairans is the Earth’s twin planet (the idea of a Counter-Earth, orbiting on the other side of the solar system, is one of the more classical old Science Fiction tropes), and that they have come to bring a warning…from space!…that a rogue planet is hurtling towards them, and that they have a limited time to do something about it. Seeing a woman teleport right in front of them makes the scientists a bit more willing to believe this, but they end up having to observe the cosmos for fifteen more days before the planet, which they dub Planet ‘R’, comes into full, alarming view. The aliens’ solution to the problem is for the Earth to aim all their nuclear missiles at Planet ‘R’ and blow it out of the way, something the aliens can’t do because their “advanced” civilization has long abhorred weapons of war. The scientists bring this proposal to the “World Congress”, and are initially laughed out of the room—until everyone starts seeing Planet ‘R’ (we even see a dog and a cat look up into the sky and react.) As has frequently been the case in these Japanese sci-fi movies, their country (the only victim of nuclear weapons) is the one that figures out the path forward, intelligently guiding all the nuclear powers of the Cold War to put their WMDs towards ultimately peaceful ends. We are told second-hand of a World Congress emergency meeting (a lot of things in this movie are only told to the audience rather than shown) and after a bunch of dithering evidently occurs, they finally agree to deploy the plan. That sounds pretty accurate to real geopolitics, except for the part where they eventually do the sensible thing.
So, this story is a bit of The Day The Earth Stood Still (with aliens tut-tutting us for our war-like ways) and a little bit of When Worlds Collide, except with dancing starfish aliens—who, unfortunately, do not appear throughout most of the middle of the movie, where it suddenly turns into a cosmic disaster film, with images of people huddling in underground bunkers, massive flooding, and dying animals. While the Pairans are not entirely realistic, the rest of the special effects are perfectly acceptable for their time (the effects director is Toru Matoba, who worked on Whale God and on many episodes of Ultra Q, Ultraman and Ultraseven), and being shot in colour, they make the nicely atmospheric choice of bathing much of the film in rust red as Planet ‘R’ dominates the Earth’s sky, ramping up the apocalyptic feeling of these scenes. Those scenes are alternated with ones focusing on our a main group in their basement hiding place, where a group of schoolchildren cheer loudly at the announcement of every nuclear-armed country in the world unloading their stockpiles on the invasive planet—only for the scientists to watch helplessly as the missiles blow up on the surface of Planet ‘R’ to no effect. The situation grows increasingly dire, which makes it even more darkly comical that the one scientist’s schoolteacher’s daughter thinks the best solution to everything is to get a bunch of kids singing.
The aliens come back (apparently after their leader did the human transformation thing, the rest of them decided they were cool with doing it themselves) and inform everyone their only hope is to fire a missile containing the energy that Dr. Matsuda calculated, but oops, he was kidnapped by some sinister international arms dealers who are trying to get the formula for themselves, and then was left tied to a chair when the Planet ‘R’ situation started getting really hairy (we are never told what happens to the bad guys, they just stop showing up eventually.) At least he gets to witness one of the better effects, where the top floor of the building he’s trapped in begins cracking apart. Thankfully, the aliens had given him a ring they could use to find him instantly, thus ending that problem with no real issues (there’s less than ten minutes left, anyway), and they construct the missile and fire it at Planet ‘R’. With that, we realize why the alien leader was so concerned about the formula earlier—it single-handedly blows up the entire planet! Holy moley! What will happen with Dr. Matsuda now that he not only knows that his formula works, but that it can blow up a planet? Never mind the fact that detonating an astral body that close to Earth would decimate it with the debris. Don’t worry, though, the sky is blue again and the bunnies and tanukis are shown coming out of their holes—I can only imagine the western kids watching that scene ended up asking “what’s that weird badger?”
As you can probably tell, many things about this movie are cliche, or at the very least are seen elsewhere in the world of fifties Science Fiction—but never in this combination, or with this kind of presentation. For all the ways this movie seems to ramble and kill time (they not only have that transformation sequence, but later show the whole thing again in reverse), the actual flow of the scenes magnify their individual strangeness, with moments that range from campy (the stuff with the Pairans themselves) to weirdly effective, so it’s not so easy to dismiss it as just another B-movie. It also remains unique that such an early movie in tokusatsu history would not only feature creatures this weird, but portray them as benign—there’s a naive, peacenik charm to the plot that shines through it, capturing some of what would become the recurring themes in Japanese monster movies. The fact that it does this while sometimes feeling barely held together…maybe that’s what Stanley Kubrick found so fascinating?
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