In the near-future of 1965, alien spacecraft attack and destroy the Earth’s space station, then they come down to Earth and start wreaking havoc with an anti-gravity ray. This weapon accomplishes its goal by freezing things down to absolute zero, thus halting the movement of atoms and making the target weightless. I’m no science expert, but I don’t think that’s the way that things work…but we’ll let it slide for now, because these aliens have set up an attack base on the moon, and they’re planning on even bigger chaos. Luckily, the space scientists of the world get together in Japan and suss out a plan to attack the aliens’ moonbase. Two rocket ships (SPIPs—pronounced “speeps” because, you know, Japan) go to the moon, each carrying a load of scientists from a variety of nations, where they find the moonbase and succeed in blowing it up real good. They lose one of their ships when the aliens invade the mind of a crew member left on board one of them and cause him to blow up the red SPIP, so the crew of both ships have to double-bunk it on the blue SPIP to get home. Of course, all of this only aggravates the aliens, who launch an all-out attack on the great cities of the world, using space torpedoes that look like giant fireballs to destroy New York City and the Golden Gate Bridge, and the alien mothership takes it upon itself to inflict as much damage as possible on what appears to be about two-thirds of Tokyo. Luckily, Earth’s international space force has developed and deployed some super-duper ray guns on both some fighter jets and on the ground, and, in the end, the alien ships are all destroyed.
At the time it came out, this was pretty cutting-edge stuff, not unlike Battle Beyond the Sun, which was made in Russia around the same time. The difference was that the Russian film, in its original form, was serious science fiction (and serious anti-American propaganda as well), and Battle in Outer Space is a pure popcorn movie with not a whole lot more on its mind than shooting ray guns and blowing up stuff—as you can probably tell from the above synopsis.
The film certainly has more than its share of dumb ideas—the space “helmets” that all of the crew of the SPIP ships wear look more like swim caps; one of the crew members floats to his ship’s ceiling once it escapes Earth’s gravity, yet weightlessness seems to only affect him and no one else on the ship, and then only during the time it takes for others to grab his legs and pull him back down (the commander says “You’ve got to remember there’s no gravity on this ship” as everyone walks around normally); and the aforementioned “extreme cold causes things to float” paradigm. But for every lunkhead idea floated out there, there’s something enjoyably retro-cool to see, like the alien spaceships that light up from the inside when they’re shooting their weapons, the amazingly-detailed mock-ups of the Earth and Moon as seen from outer space, and some glorious contemporary footage of the nighttime neon landscape of Tokyo.
Battle in Outer Space is a Toho production (the company that brought the world the original Godzilla films), and many of the crew who had helped bring Godzilla and Rodan to cinematic life also worked on this production: director Ishirô Honda, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, composer Akira Ifukube, and director of special effects Eiji Tsuburaya. This dream team also worked on another science fiction film called The Mysterians a few years before getting together again for Battle in Outer Space, which has been called a sequel of sorts to The Mysterians. I have yet to see The Mysterians, but from what I can gather, the two films aren’t really related in any substantial way. Eiji Tsuburaya DID reuse the alien spacecraft from The Mysterians for Battle in Outer Space as a cost-saving measure (altering the design a bit to try to camouflage their reuse), but the resemblance between the two films pretty much ends there. So, if you’ve held off watching Battle in Outer Space until you could catch The Mysterians first, you can now rest easy that they’re not related and watch Battle in Outer Space without having seen the other film.
It’s link time! Here’s the sixty-second TV spot for Battle in Outer Space—its red tint is, unfortunately, the consequence of its being printed on Eastman color stock:
Just for fun, here’s the Super 8mm cutdown released by Columbia back in the ‘70s: (don’t forget to link the Super 8 cover to the words “Super 8mm cutdown” above)
The full feature isn’t available on YouTube, but you can still watch it–here’s a link to the film from Tubi, if you don’t mind sitting through the ads:
https://tubitv.com/movies/662929/battle-in-outer-space
Up next: 10,000 men attacked – 2 got through!
Psychotronica Redux 