Inferno nella stratosfera

I saw this film in 1960 playing with "The Time Machine" as a double feature. Though not as rich in story line as "The Mysterians" this film really takes off when the two Speep earthships go to the moon to battle a base set up by the planet Matal who also fly "Mysterian" style flying saucers. On the moon the action really starts with marvelous raygun battles between the enemy and earth forces. The earth forces possess a marvelous heat ray cannon as well as smaller but potent raygun rifles. Later in the film, the earth forces battle invading flying saucers and a mother ship with X-15 styled fighter craft equipped with heat ray guns. The finale with the mother ship's ray gun destroying Toyko is done quite well.

For the time this film was made, the special effects are quite good. Considering my nickname is ray-gun 3, this is a ten star IMDb vote scale film in that department. I think the best scene in the film is on the moon where one of the crew stays behind with his ray rifle destroying flying saucers so the earth force can get away in their Speep spaceship. This scene is one of the best piece of special effects I have scene in this type of movie. A thought to remember is the film was made 17 to 18 years before "Star Wars". An outstanding accomplishment by Toho studios.

Some really neat miniatures, beautiful matte paintings, and a very cool lunar set, are the highlights of this movie. It's fun entertainment for the first half, but becomes especially enjoyable midway through once our heroes land on the Moon.

As other reviewers have noted, this movie seems to have influenced Star Wars, in particular a couple of shots during the climactic battle in space, which seem as though Lucas might have lifted them from a print of this film and dropped them right into A New Hope.

Ishiro Honda is the Steven Spielberg of Japan in that he created a huge body of work...big, exciting, fantasy movies of such number, quality and iconic value that he stands head and shoulders above his peers.

This film is among Honda's lesser known works, and is a rarity in that there is absolutely no Kaiju in this film, not even a robot Kaiju such as seen in the better-known 'The Mysterians'. And, in terms of the fantastic cinema of Japan, this is one of the more serious science fiction creations of the period, although containing many inaccuracies that would be glaring to anyone with the slightest familiarity to the work of George Pal.

This film features creative and interesting FX that vastly outshine most of what the US was producing at this time, and might even have the most complex miniature sets and sequences of anything produced by Toho during the classic period. There are large scale space ship dogfight sequences that anticipate Star Wars, which was done 17 years later.

The plot, while not profound, is sufficiently interesting and entertaining and the actors are good enough to make this an enjoyable escapist film. Thematically, this is classic Invasion Literature, with few new wrinkles thrown in...definitely straightforward, Honda doesn't give us anything ambiguous or subversive to chew over.

Any fan of old-school scifi and Kaiju films is liable to enjoy this one very much, it's just an impressive spectacle.

I saw "Uchu daisenso" or as it was titled when I saw it, Battle in Outer Space" when I was a kid- a long time ago. Now of course the inevitable comparison to modern space operas will reduce the impact of this simple picture, but taken in the context in which I first viewed it, this was a really cool movie. For starters, it was in glorious color, a rarity in sci-fi in the late 50's I can tell you. I saw a lot of horror and sci-fi movies when I was kid and color was rare. And like most Japanese sci-fi imports of the time this was the whole world united against the invading alien hordes. Yeah a little like Independence Day but In "Uchu daisenso" the United Earth already existed. It didn't take an invasion from outer space to unite the planet. Good (relatively speaking!) effects, a noble if simple plot, combined with beautiful Eastmancolor and this was the perfect drive-in movie.

Aliens are causing havok on Earth. So a bunch of astronauts are sent to the moon to war with these little funny midget aliens. Just a big battle from beginning to end, with the aliens sucking up Tokyo at the end (man is that cool). It is basically like a Japanese Independence Day except not nearly as intense or violent