Invasion of Astro-Monster

Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)
Also known as: Monster Zero or Godzilla vs Monster Zero, early American titles given to the film.

It's an unspecified year in the 1960s. Planet X has been discovered just beyond Jupiter – literally right behind it – even though it's apparently too dark to see. It gave itself away by sending out non-human radio signals. It may also have been affecting Earth's magnetic field. (An on-screen caption says it was detected in the year “196X” and the events of the film take place shortly after that. This allows the film to be parallel-contemporary or near-future, whichever you’d prefer.) Two astronauts – one Japanese, Fuji and one American, Glenn – have been sent to investigate the mysterious object. They’re travelling in the P-1 rocket, which represents the World Space Agency but bears Japanese livery. Glenn has the amazing ability to speak Japanese while mouthing English words. (In other words, Toho chose to dub over the actor instead of subtitling him as they did with the US actors in previous films.)

Fuji and Glenn have been sent with a ray gun and a flag to plant on the surface – actually three flags on a pole, the UN flag, Japanese flag and US flag above each other in that order. This seems to suggest they’re laying claim to Planet X, even though they already know it's inhabited because of the radio signals.

The inhabitants of Planet X introduce themselves as “Xiliens”. (Or possibly “Xirians”, but “Xiliens” is the version that’s stuck in Anglo subtitled and dubbed versions, maybe because it continues to echo the word “aliens”.) They wear costumes that include grey bodystockings, black tunics with an orange badge on the chest, huge black collars, fully enclosing black caps with an antenna sticking out the top, black gloves, black boots with pointy curly toes and slim wraparound dark glasses. Their voices sound like they're being relayed through a PA system. The ones we see up front are all male – we discover later that all the female aliens look the same and work as a kind of underclass. It also turns out they’ve rejected emotions and let computers make all their decisions for them. Their ray guns – when used on their own kind, at any rate – produce a photo-negative visual effect and make their victim disappear entirely.

They show the astronauts their problem, Monster Zero, which the astronauts recognise as King Ghidorah. To deal with Ghidorah, the aliens ask for the loan of Monster 01 and Monster 02, which they immediately also name as Godzilla and Rodan. (This begs the question of whether they’ve rated all the Toho daikaiju, and on what basis.) They already know exactly where the monsters can be located. In exchange for taking away the two monsters, they offer a cure for cancer. As it turns out, these diplomatic overtures are a prelude to Planet X establishing a base of operations on Earth – they’re in urgent need of water, and Earth has plenty to spare. A delegation flies back to Earth with Fuji and Glenn to start formal negotiations.

The authorities are keen to accept this offer. It seems that the World Space Agency is actually standing in for the government, as part of a council also including military leaders and one guy in a priest's hat (some kind of religious advisor, for some reason?).

In fact, the people of Planet X have already established a foothold on Earth, under the guise of a toy company. Through this front they've bought up the patent for the Lady Guard, a loud rape alarm invented by Torii Tetsuo, who happens to be the boyfriend of Fuji’s sister. Their intention seems to be to suppress the invention rather than exploit it. They've hidden three flying saucers under the lake in which Godzilla is resting. One of the Xiliens, the female Namikawa, has also been canoodling with Glenn, but this turns out to be on her own initiative, against the commander's orders, and not a devious ploy after all.

They use nuclear technology unknown to humanity to bubble up Godzilla and Rodan in spherical force fields and fly them off to Planet X, taking with them Fuji, Glenn and the astronauts’ boss Dr Sakurai. The kaiju appear to have been innocently sleeping when they were abducted, but they soon wake up when they arrive on Planet X and are confronted by Ghidorah. The duo attack Ghidorah with rocks, then Godzilla takes a spectacular flying jump at Ghidorah. Ghidorah is scared away and Godzilla does a sort of celebratory dance. (This is sometimes called Godzilla’s "Highland fling" by fans, but was apparently a reference to a then-popular manga series.)

Fuji and Glenn wander off inside the alien base on Planet X. They discover that the top floor contains some kind of a temple surrounded by skeletal ashen trees and crystalline outcrops of gold. This is the point at which they discover the truth about the female Xiliens all being played by the same actor. They’re captured, but as the Xiliens are still playing the gracious hosts at this point they give the astronauts a tape containing details of the promised cure for cancer and send them home. The humans have no qualms about abandoning Godzilla and Rodan, who've caused humanity so much trouble in the past.

The tape, of course, only contains the Xiliens' ultimatum to the people of Earth: humanity must welcome their new alien overlords or be exterminated. The news causes riots and anarchy, in the form of an inexpensive montage of monochrome still photographs. Glenn confronts Namikawa in private, only for the pair to be interrupted by an armed party of Xiliens. Namikawa protests to Glenn that she genuinely loves him; the intruders execute her for defying the master computer with her emotions and detain Glenn.

The Xiliens pre-emptively attack Earth’s interplanetary defences and threaten to unleash the three monsters under their control. (Although this time, the aliens are using magnetic rather than nuclear technology. Why should the kaiju respond to magnetic control? Are they naturally migratory?) They generously give humanity 24 hours to surrender. To counter this, the World Space Agency council and the JSDF develop a weapon to cancel out the magnetic beam.

Glenn is thrown into a cell with Tetsuo, who was taken prisoner shortly before the Xilien plan was revealed. They learn, from a note written by Namikawa and slipped to Glenn before her execution, that the aliens are sensitive to certain loud sounds. This would be why they tried to suppress the patent for Tetsuo’s Lady Guard. By an astonishing stroke of luck, Tetsuo has a Lady Guard on his person. The two men overpower their guards, escape and notify the authorities.

The monsters are unleashed and go on an audience-pleasing rampage. Godzilla sets some trees on fire and is shot at by some completely ineffective tanks; Rodan flaps his wings and causes catastrophic winds; Ghidorah just destroys a bunch of stuff. At last the JSDF are ready to strike back. The sound of Tetsuo's alarm is broadcast via the Tokyo Tower and everybody's radios at home, causing the Xiliens to clutch their heads in pain and their UFOs to go haywire. Some mobile military units – the "A-cycle light rays" – that look like chunkier versions of the heat rays previously seen in Mothra (1961) are used to break the aliens' control over the monsters. The three daikaiju convulse on the ground while, overhead, the Xilien UFOs explode. (It’s not entirely clear whether they explode because of interference caused by the transmitted sound, the A-cycle light rays, the Xilien controller hitting something that might conceivably be a master self-destruct switch, or some combination of these factors.) The monsters fight among themselves again. Rodan holds Ghidorah's tail while Godzilla dances about like a boxer, then Rodan lifts Godzilla and slams him into Ghidorah, knocking all three into the sea. Ghidorah resurfaces and flees. As the closing music swells, Glenn mulls over the offer of a job as Earth’s first ambassador to Planet X.

Invasion of Astro-Monster has perhaps the most contrived, by-the-numbers, pulp sci-fi plot of any Godzilla movie. The Xiliens’ one fatal weakness being so clearly signposted so early on is a major flaw, and it doesn’t help that it’s essentially the same plot device parodied by Mars Attacks! (1996) and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978), but let’s also give a shout out to the familiar old what-is-this-thing-you-Earth-people-call-love subplot. And why on Earth would the Xiliens (or the scriptwriters) assume that only Tetsuo’s invention is capable of exploiting the invaders’ weakness and that buying out Tetsuo’s patent and locking him up is all they need to do to safeguard their plan?

What this film doesn’t give us is any more detail on Ghidorah’s origin. The Xiliens don’t claim to have sent him (or rather, the meteorite he hatched from) to Earth in the previous movie. He’s under their control for at least the latter part of the movie, possibly in the earlier scenes as well, but then so are Godzilla and Rodan. For all we know he really did attack Planet X just as the Xiliens claim, only they were able to bring him to heel. Moreover (spoiler alert!) they won’t be the last bunch of aliens in a Shōwa era Godzilla movie to have Ghidorah under their control. He’s not the Xiliens’ creation or their pet – they just seem to be one in a string of manipulators that were lucky enough to have Ghidorah fall into their hands.

It’s notable for bringing elements of science fiction into the Godzilla series that arguably weren’t there before. The daikaiju themselves are more the stuff of fantasy than science fiction; fantasy military hardware is a common enough sight across mainstream cinema; even the suggestion of aliens in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) did little more than riff on contemporary fascination with the paranormal. Here, for the first time, we actually see alien characters and their technology on their planet, and we see human characters visiting that planet as members of a potent international space force. This is the first Godzilla movie – assuming we don’t count the American King Kong vs Godzilla (1963) with its added framing scenes set on board a United Nations space station – that could plausibly occupy the same narrative territory as Toho’s space adventures The Mysterians (1957), Battle in Outer Space (1959) and Gorath (1962). Battle in Outer Space was even set in 1965, the year of this film’s release, although Astro-Monster hedges its bets by being set in 196X. The World Space Agency here, with its use of the United Nations flag, looks like a call back to the UN-led Earth Defence Force in The Mysterians. The actual level of terrestrial technology on show, with humans nosing around the nearer gas giants in pointy rockets, looks remarkably like that in Gorath, although Gorath was set across the late 1970s. One thing Toho’s scriptwriters seem to have lost between Gorath and Astro-Monster is any sense of the time it would take to travel between Earth and Jupiter – we don’t know anything about the Xiliens’ propulsion tech, but there’s no way the P-1 rocket should be able to shuttle back and forth from Planet X like it does.

Why the shift towards space adventure? It might have had something to do with the US/USSR space race, but that had already been underway for a decade by this time. Notable recent milestones were the Americans getting their first close images of the lunar surface in mid-1964 from their seventh automated Ranger probe; the Soviets sending up the first multi-person crewed orbital flight, Voskhod 1, in October 1964, and (just barely) achieving the first spacewalk in March 1965 with Voskhod 2; and the early successes of the American orbital Gemini programme in 1965. I’m not sure if any of these events particularly fired up the Japanese imagination or led to a major step change in how the Japanese public thought about space exploration. Still, the headgear the Xiliens wear – leaving the face clear but covering all the rest of the head – looks very slightly reminiscent of what the real-life astronauts and cosmonauts were wearing inside their helmets.

The effects overall are pretty good, apart from the Xilien UFOs which look very cheap and plastic. The daikaiju look much as they did in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, although Godzilla's mouth is a bit puffier again. The series of shots looking back at Planet X as the crew of the P-1 leave Godzilla and Rodan behind is a nice touch.

As usual, there are some familiar faces among the lead cast. Takarada Akira, starring as the Japanese astronaut Fuji, was most recently seen as the journalist Sakai in Mothra vs Godzilla (1964). He’d also played one of the walk-on princes in The Three Treasures (1959) – Kubo Akira, who plays Tetsuo here, was the other one. This is the first Godzilla film to feature Mizuno Kumi, stealing the show here as the alien Namikawa, although she’d starred in a few other Toho tokosatsu films and we’ll see her again quite soon. Dr Sakurai, Fuji’s boss at the World Space Agency, is played by Tazaki Jun, who’d been Sakai’s editor in Mothra vs Godzilla and the JSDF commander in King Kong vs Godzilla (1962). In the role of the Controller of Planet X is Tsuchiya Yoshio, previously seen as the fighter pilot Tajima in Godzilla Raids Again (1955).

Of great interest is Nick Adams in the co-starring role of Glenn, the American astronaut. His IMDb resumé shows a string of bit parts in cowboy TV shows culminating in the lead role in The Rebel (1959-61), an itinerant-vigilante-fights-injustice series in which Adams played a former Confederate soldier. The decision to present him in the "spaghetti Western" style, with Adams speaking in English and a Japanese voice artist dubbing over him, means Adams can deliver his lines much more naturally, although it also means an obvious disconnect between the shapes his mouth makes and the sounds supposedly coming out of them. I’m not suggesting his performance here is a revelation – what he’s doing is firmly in the mould of B-movie melodrama – but he’s head and shoulders above the stilted performances of some of the American actors seen in King Kong vs Godzilla. He’d already done something similar for Toho in Frankenstein vs Baragon (1965), and we’ll hear more about that (or rather, the follow-on from that) in a few blog posts’ time. I don’t think this indicates some intention at Toho to improve relations between Japan and America by showcasing American actors, more just the opportunistic use of actors who happened to be to hand and were already known in the US. There was a flurry of kaiju eiga around this time that featured American co-stars either dubbed into Japanese or, where competent, speaking Japanese themselves – Robert Dunham had set the bar in Toho’s Dogora (1964), and half of Daiei’s Shōwa era Gamera movies would star American and Japanese child actors side by side.

As far as thematic developments go, Astro-Monster shows a further transition from the daikaiju being generic creatures to being unitary entities. The Xiliens name Godzilla and Rodan as individuals, not as members of a species, even assigning them and King Ghidorah serial numbers as if they were unique. No one seems to doubt that, once the individual Godzilla and Rodan seen here are flown off to Planet X, Earth will be completely free of them. There’s no equivalent of the scene in Godzilla (1954) in which Dr Yamane warns that continued nuclear testing will summon up more Godzillas – as far as everyone’s concerned, the loss of one Godzilla means the loss of all Godzillas.

And once again we’re invited to feel sympathy for Godzilla – and Rodan! – as those heartless astronauts abandon them on the surface of Planet X. The argument given – that they’re more trouble than they’re worth – is pretty close to the grievance expressed by the two kaiju in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. The cinematography and the music in this scene suggest the director wants us to think carefully about how we feel about this.