‘Captain Endo has pulled on the Director’s ear for five years already!’
In the early 1980s, the first interplanetary rocket takes off to explore Saturn, but almost immediately mission orders are changed. A huge planet/meteor thing named Gorath has entered the solar system and is on a collision course with Earth, putting mankind’s very existence under threat.
Deadly serious Science Fiction from Japan’s Toho Studios, probably inspired by George Pal’s interplanetary head-on ‘When Worlds Collide’ (1951). Toho are, of course, far better known for Godzilla and their stable of outlandish giant creatures that stomped Tokyo into tiny pieces throughout the late 1950s and the ensuing decades. This film, though, is far more sober stuff and plays a little like an extended version of that inevitable scene in their usual output when ‘all the scientists get around the big table to sort it out.’
So most of the time we are left in the company of some very serious suits who contemplate nuking the asteroid or perhaps ‘moving the Earth out of the way’! Very sensibly, they decide on the second option and install some jet engines at the South Pole (or something). No doubt, it’s all based on sound, scientific principles. Even if it’s not exactly as gripping as the end of the world should be.
Director lshirô Honda was the ‘go to’ director for many years at Toho, having helmed the original ‘Gojira/Godzilla, King of the Monsters’ (1956) and he does try to instil some human element to the drama. This involves wacky, hotshot space pilot Akira Kubo losing his memory after a close encounter with the pesky rock. Unfortunately, all the characters are really just cyphers, and their interactions are woefully undeveloped. This was also a problem for subsequent Hollywood blockbusters that covered the same ground, with quality declining alarmingly through ‘Meteor’ (1978) and ‘Deep Impact’ (1998) until it reached rock bottom with the atrocious ‘Armageddon’ (1998).
Perhaps sensing that all this talk wasn’t likely to set the box office alight, the producers insisted on the presence of one of the studio’s signature monsters. Honda objected, but eventually capitulated. Enter Maguma, the Giant Walrus. As Gorath approaches and our heroes fire up their engines, he attacks the Antarctic installation, probably because ‘he just wants the temperature to return to normal’. Sadly, he is probably the studio’s cheapest and most unconvincing creation, provoking laughter rather than thrills. In fact, his appearance was so awe-inspiring that he was cut out of the film entirely when it was released in the U.S. It was probably for the best as the short sequence is completely out of place.
The motorcycle display team received their final orders.
The SFX are extremely variable in general. As per usual, vehicles on the ground closely resemble the toys that they are, but the outer space model work is quite another matter. It really is very good for the time it was made and, as a consequence, turned up in several other Science Fiction pictures over the next decade, such as ‘The Doomsday Machine’ (1972) and ‘2+5: Missione Hyrda’ (1965).
The general message of the film is one of mankind uniting in the face of a shared danger and forgetting their petty squabbles. It’s not exactly subtle and is a complete about-face from the thinly veiled anti-American sentiments of ‘Mothra’ (1961) (yes, really!)
But what of old Magma, the giant Walrus? What of his subsequent career? Well, despite signing up for giant creature jamboree ‘Destroy All Monsters’ (1968), he was cut from the roster at the last minute, and never appeared in a Toho film again. I gather he retired from public life and returned to his North Pole home, where he lives in quiet seclusion. Yes, folks, the Walrus population of Antarctica has never been anything but zero, a small fact that seems to have escaped the filmmakers’ notice. Perhaps he was on vacation.
Not one of the studio’s better efforts then, but credit to the guy earning his living by crawling around the set in a badly fitting giant walrus costume. Who was he? Haruo Nakaijima, the stuntman who played Godzilla for almost 20 years.
Mark David Welsh 