"Humans must not repeat the mistakes of The Mysterians"

Info

Also known as: Earth Defense Force (original Japanese); Barbarians Invade the Earth (Argentina and Brazil); Space Beasts (Austria).
Director: Honda Ishiro. Screenplay: Kimura Takeshi, based on Shigeru Kayama’s adaptation of a story by Okami Jojiro. Director of Special Effects: Tsuburaya Eiji. Composer: Ifukube Akira.
Runtime: 89 minutes (original), 85 minutes (U.S. cut)
Release Date: December 28, 1957

What’s It About?
Abnormal forest fires and landslides rock the Japanese countryside, soon revealed to be the work of a giant burrowing robot that shoots energy blasts from its eyes. The robot, Moguera, is eventually destroyed, but prominent astrophysicist Ryoichi (Hirata Akihiko) disappears during its rampage. He reappears in the company of the Mysterians, an alien species he had been writing a theoretical paper on. The Mysterians are refugees from their home planet Mysteroid, which they destroyed thousands of years ago in an atomic war. Now they just want a small plot of land on Earth, which seems reasonable enough, but they also want some Earth women to marry to replenish their radiation-damaged genes! (They have a thing for eugenics, it seems.) Offended by the aliens’ incel-like demands, the nations of the world unite to wage war on them.

Monster Appearances: Moguera (also spelled Mogera) x2

Childhood Memories
This is another one I found out about online in 2003 or 2004, on a good-old-fashioned GeoCities-type website with Times New Roman font, in a mostly-complete list of all of Toho’s classic kaiju films. I didn’t know that monsters like Manda (from Atragon) or Varan (from the film of the same name) had had their own movies, or that Baragon and Gorosaurus were from films that had Frankenstein and King Kong in them! And there were some I didn’t recognize at all…what were these creatures from Yog: Monster from Space? I don’t know if I immediately recognized the Moguera on the lurid poster for The Mysterians as the original version of the giant mech that would later appear in my beloved Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994), or what my reaction was when I made the connection.

I don’t remember when Boopy rented the tape for me from Video Vault, but my visual memory is of picking it from the shelves on the old location. Back at Boopy’s apartment, I enjoy watching the film, which I know enough about at that point to recognize that I’m watching the American version. The key is at the climax; the second Moguera’s brief appearance is edited out of the shorter American cut. I’m disappointed not to see it, though I eventually get to do so when I am gifted the unedited Tokyo Shock DVD of The Mysterians when it comes out a couple of years later.

Analysis
The Mysterians presents another two milestones for Toho’s science fiction films. The first is yet another technical advancement: a year after their tokusatsu films made the leap to color, The Mysterians was the first such production to be filmed in TohoScope, which was Toho’s answer to Hollywood’s CineScope. Until the late fifties, the vast majority of feature films had been produced in the box-like “Academy Ratio” or 4:3 (approximately 1.33:1). With twentieth century television being broadcast in that ratio, film studios increasingly adopted widescreen formats for big budget productions as a way to provide greater (and indeed, wider) spectacle than television sets could provide. In Japan, the transition was even more extreme; from the late fifties until approximately the mid-to-late seventies, almost every theater release of any genre was filmed in the 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio (independent arthouse films had more leeway). The widened image, at over twice its former horizontal real estate, would define the look and feel of Toho’s special effects films for the rest of their classic era.

The other major milestone, and arguably the even more impactful one, is that The Mysterians was Toho’s first of many films to feature an alien threat. Extraterrestrial menaces would become a perennial staple of Toho’s science fiction efforts, be they in the form of alien invaders, space monsters, rogue interstellar objects, or varying combinations of the three.

The Mysterians debuts the space invader subgenre in style. Moguera, the giant robot, is yet another fantastic creation by special effects director Tsuburaya Eiji’s team. The quirky, mole-inspired design, beeping sound effects, and animated laser bursts exude a wonderful retro-sci-fi charm - on this viewing of the film, I particularly took to the rotating antenna on its head, which lends the mech a wonderful sense of life. Moguera’s early emergence and rampage is the highlight of the film, but there are other aesthetic pleasures on offer. The Mysterians themselves are a triumph of fifties sci-fi kitsch, clad in swanky robes, color-coded uniforms, and face-concealing helmets that leave only the nose and cheeks visible. The spiffy subterranean dome which houses their base glows an appealing hot pink whenever it’s active, and the interior is a marvelous modernistic sci-fi playground of metallic silver, transparent plastics, and neon red-and-blue electrodes.

Reflecting the difficulties of many early widescreen filmmakers, director Honda Ishiro and cinematographer Koizumi Hajime (in one of the first of many collaborations with Honda, a fruitful director-cinematographer pairing in the vein of Ingmar Bergman and Sven Nykvist or Steven Spielberg and Janus Kamiński) struggle at times in staging human scenes in the wide frame. Tsuburaya, however, makes fantastic use of the new aspect ratio, incorporating greater horizontal movement into the special effects footage. The miniature effects are once again in fine form, including a surprisingly convincing shot of a miniature soldier “jumping” out of a model tank as the ground swallows the vehicle up. That moment is preceded by a pretty lousy compositing shot, the only real weakness in the effects; in terms of retro sci-fi spectacle, The Mysterians is otherwise hard to fault.

Another strength the film boasts is its cast, which functions as a kind of gathering of most of the previous kaiju films' main casts. You have Hirata Akihiko and Kochi Momoko, reunited from Gojira, once again playing a troubled scientist and his fiance - though this time, the characters’ dynamic is inverted, as it is Hirata’s Ryochi who seems disinterested in Kochi’s Hiroko. You have Shirakawa Yumi as Ryochi’s sister Etsuko and Kenji Sahara as his friend and colleague Joji, both leads returning from Rodan, though Sahara had previously had a background role in Gojira as well. Also back is Shimura Takashi, famed for his collaborations with Kurosawa on films such as Rashomon, Ikiru, and Seven Samurai, whose role as wise elder scientist Dr. Adachi is a clear reference to his Dr. Yamane character from the first two Godzillas. And there is one other significant return from the Godzilla films, an actor who had also worked with Kurosawa. Tsuchiya Yoshio had played a functional part in Godzilla Raids Again, but he’d also been featured in a key role Seven Samurai, which meant that he certainly had the path open to him to pursue safe, traditional leading roles as a rising star. Tsuchiya had broader ambitions, however, because his favorite roles to play as an actor were aliens or humans possessed by them. In accordance with his fabulous taste, he gunned for the role of the Mysterian Leader here in spite of the fact that his face would be concealed by the costume’s helmet; he personally developed the Leader's bizarre, electronically modulated voice pattern and elaborate hand movements, in a style he called "space acting". Honda Ishiro himself praised Tsuchiya’s commitment to the part.

In terms of its visuals and its cast, The Mysterians has much to enjoy about it; It’s in the story and writing departments that the film stumbles. Things start to go wrong, in both the narrative and thematic senses, when the Mysterians reveal their presence after Moguera’s defeat. They invite a quintet of scientists to the negotiating table, including Joji and Dr. Adachi. Having proven their power, the Mysterians tell the humans they are pacifists, and ask only for a plot of land and five Earth women to marry, including Etsuko and Hiroko. The Mysterians claim they have selected the most genetically desirable subjects for their rude and objectifying request, but it seems more like the aliens’ aesthetic and sexual taste just so happens to line up with the presumed heterosexual male viewer’s, just like in so much science fiction. How convenient!

The Mysterians’s most obvious precursor, Daiei’s Warning in Space, joined the handful of fifties science fiction movies that subverted the dominant trend of malicious alien invaders. Given this, it is a disappointment that Toho’s first film to tackle the subject so readily commits to the xenophobic attitudes typical of the subgenre. The Mysterians’ claim to come in peace is presented as disingenuous from the start, drastically undermined by sic-cing a giant robot to devastate the countryside and claim countless civilian lives before they even announce their presence. The sexual menace they pose to, in their own judgement, genetically desirable Japanese women is beyond tasteless, and their demand to be given women to marry renders them deeply unsympathetic from the beginning. When humanity understandably resists this demand, the Mysterians wind up seizing much more land and kidnapping far more women than they’d initially asked for, demonstrating that their intentions were always expansionist. It’s the old “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” sentiment on display, all the more ugly given the Mysterians’ status as refugees seeking asylum.

And what of the female leads, treated as property by the Mysterians, but also as props by the film? Both female leads’ roles consist of fretting about Ryochi, being threatened with forced marriage, being kidnapped by aliens, and finally rescued at the end. The earlier kaiju films had their chauvinistic aspects, sure, but they also included elements such as the sympathetic depiction of Kochi’s Emiko rejecting her marriage arrangements to follow her heart, and had Emiko’s choices play a major part in the narrative. Whereas The Mysterians beats out Half Human in portraying the most stereotypical gender roles in the kaiju films yet, indistinguishable from dozens if not hundreds of crappy sci-fi b-movies from Hollywood. (“Women are always fainting in these old movies,” laugh later kaiju special effects masters Kawakita Koichi and Higuchi Shinji in their DVD commentary for the film, when not one but both female leads silently pass out during their kidnappings by the aliens.) Not to mention, the plot point of the Mysterians’ desire for the female leads reveals just how poorly thought out the script was: we’re expected to believe that Ryochi, who has allied himself with the Mysterians in deference to their advanced science and has supplied the aliens with the names of his loved ones and colleagues, would willingly submit his sister and fiance to forced marriage with the aliens. It’s howlingly absurd stuff, given that Ryochi is ultimately intended to be nobly misguided rather than malevolent.

In addition to the xenophobic and chauvinistic threads in the film, there’s an additional element of tastelessness here that’s specific to Japan. Under their masks, the Mysterians are deformed. On its own, this isn’t uniquely terrible: deformity is used to signify monstrosity in far too many works throughout the history of art, including some of Toho’s own works. The wrinkle here is that the Mysterians are deformed specifically due to their use of and exposure to nuclear weapons. In Japan, there is a specific term for those who survived the atomic bombs: hibakusha. As with the burakumin, the hibakusha and their descendents face discrimination in Japanese society owing to a fear of contamination and other-ness, as though surviving a nuclear blast wasn’t traumatic enough. The cinephile and film scholar in me is very glad that The Mysterians never received the same sort of self-censorship by Toho that Half Human did, but I’m honestly surprised it didn’t face the same push-back from rights groups. The image of radiation survivors threatening humanity and kidnapping “pure” Japanese women to force into marriage, all under the pretense of asking for support, is the kind of incendiary material that seems like it would have lead to the same level of complaints; Toho would later bury their film Prophecies of Nostradamus for its, frankly, less offensive portrayal of monstrously mutated humans, while Tsuburaya Eiji’s production company would withdraw an episode of their show Ultraseven for featuring a radioactive alien invader rather unwisely referred to as a hibakusha.

What’s surprising about some of the reactionary plot elements is their origin. The script credit for The Mysterians is somewhat convoluted: popular science fiction author and former Japanese Air Force pilot Okami Jojiro submitted a story treatment that was then adapted into another treatment by Shigeru Kayama, the author who’d provided the storylines for the two Godzilla films and Half Human. Finally, that treatment was turned into a full screenplay by Kimura Takeshi, who’d previously collaborated with Murata Takeo on the script for Rodan. We’ve previously covered Shigeru Kayama’s humanist and anti-nuclear views, but it was his revised outline that added the plot point of the Mysterians’ demand for Earth women. In interviews, Honda said that the plot point was added simply to inject more human intrigue into the long battles between the military and the invaders. And despite their status as a menacing “other," the Mysterians are explicitly intended as a mirror of humanity, a reminder of the tragedy that could befall the human race if advanced science is weaponized. Ryochi, once he sees the error of his ways and turns on the Mysterians, spells out the theme in dialogue at the end: “The Mysterians’ tragedy must be conveyed to the world. The misuse of developed science leads only to misery. Humans must not repeat the mistakes of The Mysterians.” It’s an attitude that’s completely in line with Kayama’s and the Toho crew’s previous anti-nuclear, anti-war work.

Another intended theme of The Mysterians is its call for international cooperation. An internationalist bent to Honda’s work had been implicit in the humanist attitude of Gojira and the kaiju films’ general anti-nuke messaging, but The Mysterians is the first Godzilla-related feature to properly showcase internationalism as an important aspect of the films. Honda himself expressed his internationalist aspirations in an interview, saying that “I would like to wipe away the notion of East versus West and convey a simple, universal aspiration for peace, the coming together of all humankind as one to create a peaceful society.” This was certainly an aspiration that would have resonated with screenwriter Kimura Takeshi. Kimura was by far the most openly radical-left member of the classic Toho tokusatsu crew. He was a card-carrying member of the Japanese Communist Party until he left, on unfriendly terms, because of his frustration with the Party’s lack of an internationalist approach to Marxism. Honda did not identify as Communist, but Kimura’s collectivist, socially-minded views made him a good fit for creating scripts that reflected the director’s egalitarian attitudes.

So for the first time in Honda’s kaiju films, his internationalist line of thought manifests in political action as a coalition of nation states forms to face the Mysterians together. These nations don’t just comprise Japan’s allies such as America; the Soviet Union is included as well, the two Cold War rivals putting aside their differences for the good of the world. As quoted in Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, Honda remarked that “in every single international conference or meeting scene, I have everyone from all countries there, such as Russia, every time. And they all put their heads together with the scientists. This sort of thing is my theme, the basis of my work.” Honda’s films split the difference between exploring the consequences of science used irresponsibly and illustrating how it can be used for the good of the world; here, for the first time, the kaiju films explore the latter avenue in practice, with different nations cooperating to use science to defend the world rather than destroy it. The theme was especially resonant in 1957; just a year earlier, Japan had achieved its decade-long goal of joining the United Nations, part and parcel of the country’s twin desires to make amends for having been an aggressor in World War II and to lend its voice as the one nation to have actually experienced nuclear warfare. The international coalition here strongly resembles the United Nations, with the cooperation on display reflecting a post-war optimism that nations could resolve shared challenges peacefully together.

But in practice, the depiction of internationalism here never resolves deeper than cooperation between political elites. This isn’t solely due to the real-life problems with the United Nations, past and present, that rather undercut any idealistic attitudes toward it as an institution. The problem is that the exploration of the theme never goes deeper than scenes of different government officials giving lectures or discussing strategy, which are the exact kind of emotionless expository meeting scenes that the giant monster genre is so often made fun of for. Ordinary people don’t get a look in here. The audience has to make do with either the stiff officials discussing strategy, or corny stereotypes: damsels who need to be kept safe or rescued, Sahara Kenji’s gruff hero (who somehow manages a one-man rescue mission into the Mysterians’ dome), and Ryochi’s predictable change of heart and obligatory self-sacrifice as he puts humanity above scientific interest. In other words, The Mysterians is a drama with no genuine drama, only an anti-nuclear theme pasted clumsily onto it and delivered in perfunctory fashion.

Without the strong moral grounding of a human element that had anchored the likes of Gojira and Rodan, The Mysterians falls back on reactionary and, in its treatment of women, patriarchal genre standards. The aliens basically represent the same sort of dehumanized foreign other as alien invaders from other science fiction: fueled by their menacing high-minded ideology, pillaging the land, and menacing all the women. This rather undermines the theme of international cooperation, despite how sincerely it was meant. And because of its thematic failures, The Mysterians feels like it exists as mere spectacle without a soul.

One of the reasons I and many others love the Godzilla series and related films is because of their moral heart (on top of the giant monster action and city-smashing, of course). But between Half Human’s troubling stereotypes and now The Mysterians, we can safely conclude that just because Toho’s kaiju films generally showcase a progressive attitude does not mean that they will always do so. Like fellow socially conscious science fiction long-runners Doctor Who and Star Trek, the kaiju movies are generally thoughtful when it comes to social and political issues, and at least default to well-meaning even if they stumble. But a conscientious fan of any of the three series will also know that there are plenty of times they get it wrong, where they express reactionary attitudes of the culture they were produced in The Mysterians is one of those times the kaiju films get it wrong, though I don’t believe at all that any of the major creative staff intended to create a right-wing film. The question is simply if, and how, their treatment of the subject matter would evolve for the better in the future.
 
Which leaves me with one more matter to attend to. Like the Mysterians’ demand for women to marry, Moguera was a later addition to the film’s story, being entirely absent from Okami Jojiro’s original proposal. This may explain the odd fact that Mogeura is never once mentioned in any of the exchanges between the Mysterians and humanity despite the giant robot’s centrality to showcasing their power; there’s a brief line from the Mysterian leader (played by Tsuchiya Yoshio, who gunned for the role despite its requirement that his face be hidden, and was praised by Honda for his commitment to it) about how the aliens have “already demonstrated their power,” but that could just as easily refer to the emergence of their hidden dome from under a lake. The later addition certainly might account for the howling logical gap of why the Mysterians would send the mecha on a rampage before claiming they come in peace (if the film intends their statement to be sincere), and why the second model only appears briefly at the climax in spite of the machine being among the Mysterians’ most powerful weapons. We only see the second Moguera burrowing through the ground toward the end of the final battle, surfacing under a Markalite cannon (the prototype heat weapon that the humans use to defeat the invaders) only to be crushed by the large weapon as it collapses.

So here’s my official theory: the Mysterians had nothing whatsoever to do with either of the Mogueras. They were just there, and the Mysterians coincidentally happened to invade while they were around. The narrative mystery of how they came to be, and why they were active at the time, remains to be solved.

Return to the master We Call It Godzilla index here.