Honda Ishiro made five films in 1957, when the entire Japanese film industry was reaching its production peak, but his best remembered by far is
With a budget bigger than Honda’s earlier kaiju eiga (monster movie) hits
Godzilla or
Rodan, it was intended as a true SF film, despite the presence of a monster robot.
Tanaka called on Kayama Shigeru to provide the story and Kimura Takeshi (the pen name of scriptwriter Mabuchi Kaoru, who had also worked on Rodan), to write the script.
A new addition to the writing team was Okami Jojiro, a former Japan Air Self-Defense Force pilot and author of detective and SF fiction who helped create the film’s alien technology.
The story echoes both the Hollywood alien invasion epics of the era and Honda’s previous kaiju films. A massive earthquake destroys a village near Mt. Fuji. Soon after, a giant bird-like robot, Mogera, emerges to terrorize the locals.
The military blows up a bridge with Mogera on it, killing the monster, but an analysis of its remains suggests an extraterrestrial origin.
Soon after, not far away, a huge glowing dome bursts through the earth’s surface.
It belongs to the Mysterians, space aliens intent on making the Earth their new home and, more disturbingly, mating with human females to renew their race. Mogera was their way of demonstrating their technological prowess and overawing their human adversaries.
Instead of buckling to the Mysterians’ demands, Japanese scientists and soldiers unite to fight, joined by their counterparts from around the world. Finally, a Battle Royale erupts with the Mysterians that will determine the fate of the Earth.
Shot in Tohoscope, a new wide-screen format, The Mysterians was more ambitious in its scale and effects than anything Honda and his team had attempted to date.
Once the obligatory explanatory scenes are out of the way, the action comes thick and fast, with flying saucers zipping, rockets blasting and laser-like beams zapping, accompanied by Ifukube Akira’s rousing martial score.
The most impressive set is the Mysterians’ domed lair, from its command room filled with exotic gizmos encased in what looks to be bulbous glass to its deep central shaft and a long corridor that seems to extend to infinity.
The Mysterians themselves are humanoid aliens attired in opera capes but speaking in robotic voices and wearing bulky helmets that hide their facial expressions – assuming they have any. Intended as creepy and scary rather than cuddly and campy, they look like precursors to the Stormtroopers in Star Wars – and are similarly ineffective when a determined human invades their sanctuary to rescue the women the Mysterians have kidnapped (but presumably not yet mated with).
For all its displays of snazzy futuristic armaments like the Markalite FAHP (Flying Atomic Heat Projector) – a lensed weapon deployed for the final battle with the alien dome – the film’s final message, familiar from other Honda films, is that the nations of the Earth must unite for peace or face ultimate destruction.