Sayonara Jupiter
                            
Director:  Koji Hashimoto
Year: 1984
Rating: 6.0
Aka - Bye Bye Jupiter

Toho goes big with yet another exploration of deep space in this wonderfully pulpy mess of a movie. Director Koji Hashimoto makes some very peculiar choices as the film goes along but as the Assistant Director of many of the classic Kaiju films of the 1960s and then after this as the director of the revitalization of the Godzilla franchise in the 1980s, I guess he earned the right.  Toho had last visited space with the 1977 War in Space but sci-fi or Tokusatsu (special effects) films were very much in fashion and Toho goes whole hog on them. The 1984 version of them of course. Great models of spaceships as expected but space as well - the glory of it, the bizarreness of it. The vast space and the planets - Jupitar and Mars and the Moon. There are nods to the past from Toho - the main character is named Eiji Honda - a tribute to the great director and special effects man of the past. Appearing for little more than a cameo is Akihiko Hirata who was such a familiar face in so many of those Kaiju films. He was to die shortly after this film - so it is also a sayonara to him. One character switches from a Toshiro Mifune film to Ghidorah.



You can't call this a good film. It is at times badly edited, the acting by many of the cast of foreigners is amateurish, it is often hard to follow, has a lot of technical gobbledygook that makes no sense, the entire premise is absurd, the film takes big leaps in the timeline - but give it kudos for its ambition, imagination and idiotic fun - but it plays it all totally seriously. And of course, the weightless naked sex sequence. You won't see that in Star Wars, though I imagine some people had fantasies of it.



It is 2125. Most of us will hopefully still be here. Along with the other 18 billion people on earth. Elon Musk's dreams have come true and there are another 5 billion people scattered among the stars, no doubt with their own McDonalds and KFCs. Space is big business and very fast and cheap. Eiji says he is going to visit someone on earth and the next minute he is on a beach trying to save a dolphin in a Jaws inspired sequence. There is so much illogic going on that you could fill a school bus with it. But so what, really?

 

Up in space they are extracting water from Mars and in the process they uncover ancient writing from aliens that points to Jupiter. Perhaps not coincidentally there is a massive project being undertaken headed by Eiji (Tomokazu Miura) to turn Jupiter into another sun. A sun. Sounds a little dangerous but the interplanetary locations need a new source of energy. How you turn a planet into a sun, I will leave to the scientists. There are a group of radical environmentalists who want to stop this. They infiltrate the control spaceship as tourists. They are giving guided tours. One of them has a Prisoner Scorpion large black hat on covering her face and it turns out to be Eiji's love from years ago. They of course have sex and it is so good that it gets weightless as they cruise through the galaxy. On the outside. I tried weightless sex when I was younger and I just got dizzy.



But then a mission is sent out to find out why two unmanned craft have disappeared. They send Hirata and the fan of the Godzilla movies to explore. In a great scene, they are sucked into a black hole. A big one that is coming for our sun. Oh fuck. They quickly build 1000 huge passenger ships to evacuate 18 million people from earth. The Japanese are damn efficient. Eiji comes up with a different plan - and here I got lost having flunked my physics class - but it is shifting Jupiter into the path of the black hole, blowing it up and sending the black hole in a different direction. That should be easy. Fortunately, they have a ten year old genius working the numbers. And those damn environmentalist terrorists having taken courage pills show up with ray guns. And his old girlfriend is one of them. Throw in a number of corny ballads from time to time and a Jupiter Ghost that may be Godzilla or aliens and it is a gonzo film that feels as much inspired by drugs as all the other sci-fi films.