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| Something about that UFO makes me think there are going to be aliens in this one. |
Dear Internet,
You
know what is refreshing, Internet? A work
that does not want me to be depressed or contemplative. "Saikano" and "Sky
Crawlers" wanted to make me feel horrible and failed. "Rhapsody in August" and
"Silmido" wanted to make me think and succeeded. I doubt "Wii Play: Motion" had any
sort of ulterior motive. Trying to talk
about four works in a row that are meant to drain the energy out of the
audience is tiring. Thankfully,
"The Mysterians" has a way of energizing the audience, even if it was
not trying to.
"The
Mysterians" opens up with a spaceship in outer space of alien design. Weird things begin to happen near a Japanese
village. First a fire breaks out in the
nearby forest, burning in a manner that the residents identify as peculiar
before they are burned alive. Later, the
local shrine and surrounding area is swallowed in a massive sinkhole, while radiation
levels spike and drop mysteriously.
Finally, a giant robot with laser eyes begins to terrorize the
countryside before succumbing to the strength of the military. When the top scientists organize together to
determine the reasons for these series of events, they are contacted by the
Mysterians. They are an alien race who once
lived on the now destroyed planet that is now the asteroid belt between Mars
and Jupiter. The Mysterians have a
greater understanding of all science than the Earthlings and make two
passive-aggressive requests. The want a
strip of land for their own, but more importantly, they want Earth women for
species reproduction.
You do
not have to go over that brief summary to know that the film has got enough
corn for a whole field. The film is filled
with science-fiction clichés and tropes.
The giant robot I already mentioned is one of the least mobile suits I
have seen. It looks like a cross between
a mole and a refrigerator. When it
"shoots" its laser beams, they are about balls of blue energy. You can see that the film repeats three very
bad drawings over the frames in the film instead of a nice beam of some sort. The various space ships that the aliens use
and ones that the humans develop are miniatures that would look more in place
in a "Flash Gordon" than on an aeronautical center's drafts table. One of the best ham-handed scenes is when the
humans decide to drop fully built giant satellite dishes mounted to wheeled
structures from the sky. They do not use
parachutes to let the structures fall somewhat gracefully to the ground. No, the satellite structures use jets to
gracefully touchdown, completely ignoring the fact that the structures' center
of gravity would cause it to fall upside down.
My
favorite cob of corn has got to be when the aliens welcome a select group of
scientists to enter their spaceship.
They tell the scientists that the spaceship is somewhat colder than outside. To remedy this, the scientists are told to
wear cloaks. That is right, cloaks. So there are the Earth scientists sitting all
around a table, surrounded by multi-colored fluorescent tubes of future
technology, and wearing full length cloaks with collars that touch their
shoulders. It gets even better when the
aliens show up and half wear the same style cloaks, albeit in primary
colors. Why are they lowering the
temperature of their spaceship if they are just going to go around wearing cloaks?
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| I think Edna Mole said it best. |
The
message that the film attempts to portray is the classic atomic warning. If you start to use nuclear weaponry, all it
leads to is complete and utter annihilation.
Thankfully, the film does not try to nail it into the viewer too
much. It comes up from time to time,
with only three times being notable.
First, when the aliens mention that it is the reason for their planet
being gone. Second, when the idea of
using it against the aliens. Third, at
the end of the film when the moral of the day is being recited. The whole nuclear warning can even be ignored
easily so that the film becomes a B-film action flick, which is about all it is
good for.
The
miniatures are well made and are able to create a sense of calamity. When the village is swallowed into the ground
by the sinkhole, it is able to show the terror of an entire town being
obliterated. When the aircrafts that the
military creates are launched, only a little imagination is required to see the
impossible vehicle taking flight. However,
there are a number of things that the visuals get painfully wrong. As I mentioned before about the mechanized
mole, it feels terribly out of place.
This is mostly due to the fact that it is clunky and acts somewhere in
between a robot and a giant monster. It
is some sort of hybrid between the two and made me laugh more than fear
it. I have already mentioned the satellites
dish structures and how they are immune to the effects of gravity and balance. The most laughable visual is perhaps the
Mysterians themselves. They are some
sort of cross between Pikmin and Power Rangers.
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| Just wait until they summon their Dinozords. |
Overall,
"The Mysterians" does a poor job of reciting a warning, but has fun
along the way. Despite the number of
times that the Japanese military fails to attack the Mysterian base, the fact
that they are fighting to, tongue-in cheek, "defend the women" is really
what makes the audience root for them.
The characters are likable, but bit players playing as character types
rather than unique individuals. While I
found the film enjoyable and wonderfully campy, probably because I have been
swamped by heavy and depressing items from this backlog, I realize that there
is not anything very special or notable about it.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
P.S. Tomorrow is "Shin Megami Tensei: Persona,"
provided that I can get it working. This better not be depressing.
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