When I started watching my recently purchased Blu Ray for this film, I realized I had never seen it before. The lack of giant monsters and slow pacing probably kept it off American syndicated television. I know it didn’t play much or at all on broadcast TV when I was a youngster and ravenously consuming any horror or science fiction film that I came across.
Produced by Daiei, the film was clearly hoping to wrangle some of the huge box office proceeds gleaned by Toho with their kaiju movies. Sadly, however, Warning from Space reminds me a bit of the American horror films produced by other studios in the 1930s in the wake of Universal’s success with its classic monster films. Those studios (Columbia, Paramount, Warner Bros, etc.) wanted to partake of Universal’s profits. However, they were often fatally a bit sniffy about making anything as low class as a horror film, much less a monster movie.
While RKO under Val Lewton forged their own identity with the producer’s series of cerebral, adult-oriented and subtle horror films, most studios tried to half ass what Universal was doing and thus reaped half-assed profits. Fox’s Undying Monster, a werewolf movie with literally about 20 seconds of actual monster at the very end of the picture, is emblematic of this sort of thing.
Any time you finally catch up with a film you’ve long heard of but never seen, you naturally hope it’s a hidden gem. Sadly, Warning from Space is not that. Its obscurity turns out to entirely warranted. It’s more of historical value than great in itself. It’s the first Japanese color sci-fi film—Toho entered the fray with Rodan the following year—and made at a time when any color movie was still a novelty there. It’s also first Japanese film about aliens appearing on Earth. In terms of its own merits, though, it’s…fine. I’m glad I’ve seen it, but mostly to check it off the list.
Warning from Space would have worked better as an hour-long TV show than a movie. Perhaps because it seemed stretched past its natural length, the film is haphazardly constructed. The first third is strongest, as we meet the ensemble cast—there’s no main character here—and then the mysterious aliens start appearing and disappearing before immediately panicked witnesses. Seen in full, the starfish-with-one-big-eye design of the suits is pretty goofy. Their early appearances, when they are obscured by water or shadows, are satisfyingly eerie.
This segment marks the film at its most effective, which makes the American title a tad annoying. The Japanese title, Spacemen Appear in Tokyo, leaves the visitors’ motives in question. Thus the reveal that they’ve come to Earth to warn mankind of an imminent collision with an oncoming rogue planet is pleasingly unexpected.
Calling the film Warning from Space, though, immediately suggests the aliens are benign. As you’d expect, this undercuts the mystery and suspense of the film’s finest sequences. (Also, I didn’t watch the dubbed American version of the film, but apparently it was reedited to get the aliens onscreen immediately, presumably so as not to bore the kiddie matinee audiences. This was pretty typical of American versions of the time, and Toho is still smarting about what American producers did to the early Godzilla movies.)
Once the visitors’ motive has been revealed, we shift to the second act. The aliens’ attempts to contact the film’s various scientists have proven unsuccessful, what with every human instantly freaking out as soon as the spacemen are glimpsed. So one of the aliens assumes the shape of a human, in this case a celebrity female nightclub dancer. (!) Because of course you would. This also allows for some quick dance numbers. Remember back in the day when they thought every movie would be improved with a song and dance or two?
The transmogrified alien’s efforts to meet the various scientists is now more successful, although still dragged out a bit. ‘She’ interacts with the scientists over several days, as they wonder about this mysterious woman who looks just like a famous celebrity while occasionally manifests odd powers. I guess the alien is letting the whole weirdness sink in so that the ultimate reveal will be less shocking. I mean, that’s my interpretation, although it’s not really addressed. In one amusing scene, the alien leaps inhumanly high during a tennis match. The effect is reminiscent of the flubber-aided football players in The Absent Minded Professor.
With the reveal of its true identity, we move to act three, or like eight or nine acts. The alien reveals that the Earth will be destroyed in a few months by the oncoming planet. (A plot Toho themselves used in the far more spectacular Gorath.) They also establish that they aliens millennia ago put aside atomic energy as dangerous, and that they choose to appear to Japanese scientists because that nation is the only one to have actually experienced the horrors of the atom bomb.
That’s a neat piece of business and all, but it’s radically undercut by the fact that the film isn’t about the horrors of the atom bomb. Indeed, the alien’s suggestion is that all the nations on Earth must fire all their nuclear arsenals on an intercept course against the threatening planet and hope this destroys it, or at least causes it to be diverted. On the one hand, this is a nice fairy tale idea to get rid of all the earth’s atom bombs—Superman hadn’t gotten around to it yet—but since the bombs are actually necessary to save the very Earth from destruction…well, again, it kind of muddies the anti-nuke theme.
So the scientists put the suggestion to the, ahem, “World Council,” although lacking proof—the planet isn’t visible yet, and weirdly nobody suggests having the alien appear before the Council—the shortsighted nations refuse to just fire all their weapons into space. By the way, the movie was made in 1956. Did we really have the capability to fire missiles deep into space? I guess we’re just supposed to go with it.
Now we bog down a bit as the film introduces further tangents. One of the scientists has, at least on paper, invented Solaronite, or anyway something equally dangerous. The alien angrily tears up his notes and attempts to impress upon him the radical danger of this element, which would lead to basically atom bombs a thousand times more powerful. Of course, once you’ve introduced Chechov’s Solaronite, you’ve got to use it. More on that in a bit.
So the planet finally nears Earth enough that it becomes visible. However, at this point time is short, especially since the velocity of the planet keeps jumping higher for some reason. (?) So the World Council eventually decides to try the atom bomb thing—I mean, duh. It doesn’t work, though. So the aliens show up, and in a rather rushed finale, basically say “Look, just give us the formula for the damn Solaronite.” However, the guy who invented it has been kidnapped by gangsters or spies or whatever who want to sell the superweapon. He gets found in time and the aliens, using their advanced technology, make a super bomb that successfully destroys the rogue planet.
However, it’s just a bit too close when it explodes, and thus we get some very brief disaster movie stuff. I mean, the scenes are nice and all, but they clearly didn’t have the budget for much of it. To anyone who’d seen When Worlds Collide or War of the Worlds this section of the movie must have come off as a bit skimpy.
Even so, the Earth is saved, the formula is destroyed (they ignore the fact that that scientist is just going to get kidnapped again), and there’s a montage of cute animals emerging from their lairs—really—and then the aliens leave and that’s the end of the movie. As you may have gleaned, Warning from Space offers a busy 86 minutes, but the various plot threads really don’t tie together all that well.
Is Warning from Space worth a watch? Sure. It’s a bit silly and wildly disjointed, but it’s also fairly well mounted and is an entirely professional production. I don’t know that I really needed to have bought the Blu Ray, but it’s not the biggest waste of money in my collection. I can’t say I see myself revisiting this one often, though. Even so, it’s a long way from giant monsters destroying cities and fighting the military. It certainly doesn’t seem to have been a huge money maker for Daiei, and its reputation over the decades has generally been tepid.
Daiei remains best known for eventually hitting the Toho nail on the head by creating Godzilla’s chief cinematic rival, Gamera. They also contributed the three films in the generally fun Daimajin series. However, their genre roots go back to the company’s founding in 1949. One of the first two films they produced that year was The Invisible Man Returns (recently available on Blu Ray with Invisible Man vs the Human Fly).
The next year saw their most famous and prestigious release, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. (The guy who wrote Warning from Space also co-wrote nearly all of Kurosawa’s very best films.) However, for the next several years after that they basically stuck with supernatural fare, including several ghost cat movies. Indeed, ghost cat pictures would be sort of a staple genre for the studio for years, and I’d love it if someone put out a set of those.
Daiei also struck gold in the 1960s when they made a zillion super fun Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman films. The studio continued to make films until the early 2000s, including the extremely well-received ‘90s Gamera reboot trilogy.
The Arrow Blu Ray offers an hour long and nicely informative Stuart Galbraith commentary, a still gallery featuring some amusingly crazy and wildly misleading promo art (in some the aliens are shown giant-sized, which they definitely are not in the film), trailers and the aforementioned re-edited American dub print, which skipped theaters and played directly on television.
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