Ufos Zerstören Die Erde

GORATH (1962) begins with a Japanese Space Exploration ship fatally encountering a run-away planet smaller than Earth, but much greater in mass. It is now up to Earth scientists to build rocket boosters at the South Pole in order to move the Earth out of it's orbit. For logic, GORATH is a scientific mess (One scientist watches Gorath suck up the moon "The moon's gone. But it gives us the boost we need!") Huh? However, GORATH is a charming sci-fi film. Akira Kubo (A Japanese actor who resembles Speed Racer) is the astronaut who takes on a suicidal space mission to observe Gorath when his relationship with a young woman is at it's lowest ebb. His return to Earth, as a shell-shocked wreck is quite touching. Tsuburaya's minatures are also at a low here. The space scenes a re quite beautiful and haunting despite that. Basically, GORATH, for all it's screenwriting and cinematograhic faults, has an entertaining charm.

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?

"Gorath" is the last, and by some standards the best, of Ishiro Honda's "space trilogy" of the late 50s/early 60s.

Once again, Honda explores the theme of humankind forced to work together against an extraterrestrial adversary. Only this time we're not facing aliens, but something far more deadly, and utterly implacable: a runaway stellar remnant which for some unexplained reason the authorities name "Gorath". Composed of collapsed matter -- which gives it a mass and gravitational pull far out of proportion to its relatively small size -- even a near-miss (in cosmic terms) would render the Earth uninhabitable.

It can't be blown up, and there's no way to change its orbit. Obviously, there's nothing left to do but build a bunch of enormous hydrogen fusion rocket engines at the South Pole and move our planet out of its way. (If there's one thing you could never fault Honda for, it's a lack of imagination, even if the physics of the thing are completely impossible.)

This is definitely a more somber and slower-paced outing than those two earlier films. Instead of the almost non-stop skirmishing between the Earth forces and dastardly aliens which typified the previous films in the trilogy, the drama lies in humanity's desperate race against time, to save itself with the biggest, most complex feat of engineering ever attempted. So, despite its typically energetic Akira Ifukube score, this one naturally lacks some of the naive charm and relentless drive which distinguished the colorfully juvenile "The Mysterians" and "Battle in Outer Space".

What makes this film a standout in its own right, though, is that it contains what might just be the Tsuburaya team's most impressive miniature work ever. You must see this in letterbox, in the original Japanese version, to fully appreciate its scope and grandeur, specially the extended montage depicting the rocket motors' construction at the South Pole. (I believe Honda must have been heavily influenced here by the "remaking of Everytown" sequence in 1937's "Things to Come", even down to the musical theme Ifukube composed for it.)

Plus there are nicely executed spaceship and space station models and effects, not to mention some fairly imaginative visuals as Gorath careens through the solar system. (The original version comes with a bonus: the totally unnecessary -- to the plot, anyway -- giant prehistoric walrus.) The earthquake and tsunami sequence which takes place as Gorath makes its closest approach to Earth is, in fact, rather eerie to watch in the light of recent events.

Unfortunately, though, the tsunami -- along with a few seconds of recycled footage of a landslide from "The Mysterians" -- are about the only glimpses we're ever given of Gorath's devastating effects. So even with what must have been a substantially bigger budget than either of the two preceding films in the trilogy, the ending feels rushed, and a bit of a letdown.

Regardless of my nit-picking, "Gorath" is still well worth watching, a truly unique movie both for this director, and in its own apocalyptic genre.

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.