While Tsuburaya Productions mostly focuses on new variations of Ultraman, the series originator Ultra Q (which I watched in its entirety a few years ago) still holds a vital place in the history of Japanese monster media, and remains highly influential. The series had enough name brand value that they spun off this movie version of it in 1990 (as well as a few new TV series in the mid-two-thousands), although it seems strangely obscure, with little widely available information—so obscure, in fact, that in order to watch it I had to use a version with far from optimal subtitles, but I’m not going to let that hinder me. Apparently Shusuke Kaneko and Kazunori Ito, director and writer of the nineties Gamera trilogy, were originally supposed to work on it (Kaneko ended up including references to Ultra Q in his Godzilla movie), but the director of the final product was Akio Jissoji, who was an Ultra series regular and directed a number of memorable Ultraman episodes. It was made during Tsuburaya’s long wilderness period, where their output became somewhat sporadic—Legend of the Stars was made not long before Ultraman: Towards the Future and The Ultimate Hero, which are all examples of the company trying to keep its franchises in circulation during a down time in the early nineties. For me, what’s interesting is just seeing what an early nineties interpretation of Ultra Q looks like.
The movie stars the same group of reporter characters from the TV show (all played by different actors), but puts them in the employ of a TV station rather than a newspaper, and for the most part it feels like a feature-length version of the show, which is to say that the reporter characters are mostly there to lead us through a plot that they don’t really affect at all. It opens with them investigating a series of mysterious deaths, with people shot with powerful projectiles that leave a seawater residue, all found near an archaeological site that is being dug up so they can build a parking lot over it (ooo bah-bah-bah.) A professor of ancient history (and friend of the reporters) stays in a seaside village near the construction site, and witnesses the people of the village wander over to the beach in the middle of the night, and then he promptly disappears. Meanwhile, the construction site itself experiences an earthquake, and something seems to rise up from the ground in the midst of it. All these things lead to our intrepid reporter trio heading to a mysterious island not far form the beach, and encountering a woman named Mayumi, who tries to convince them to leave—and when that fails, she turns into a robot and attacks them. After that, we gradually learn more about the history of the area, and Mayumi reappears many times to unravel her own connection to it (and to the thing currently residing beneath the earth), while warning people of what might happen if they don’t leave well enough alone.
This plot is based in some very early nineties broad strokes environmentalism, just like Towards the Future—Mayumi, who as it turns out is an ancient mechanical being from outer space called Wadatuzin (who resembles the android from Metropolis), has been observing humanity for millennia, and is growing increasingly irritated by the way people are starting to treat the planet. The bulldozing of the archaeological site just seems to be the last straw, leading to her unleashing her giant monster companion Nagira—at first, it is only to directly protect her when she is surrounded by police, but later she sics Nagira on the village when it becomes clear that the business-types in charge aren’t going to stop. Despite being stated outright, though, the environmental angle is not played up nearly as much as you’d think (there are a few shots at the end showing tons of garbage being thrown around during the launch of an alien spacecraft, so the theme is at least visually represented at one point)—and the movie itself seems more concerned with the disrespect towards a historical site. There is an argument to be made that our treatment of ancient history and of the environment are connected, and in general the point is that modern civilization could probably slow its march towards “progress” for a bit and do better by the past, which was certainly a theme that is in line with the original Ultra Q as well.
In order to give that theme some extra weight, the story brings up specifics about the history of Japan—we see a living version of the Dogu figurines, ancient clay artifacts from the pre-common era that are staples of both Japanese pop culture and ancient alien gobbledygook, as well as many references to ancient legends, including the stories of the princess of the moon and Urashima Taro (the fisherman who travelled to the undersea palace of the Dragon God.) There are references to an ancient people who came to the Japan from the South Seas and seek a land of immortality (a direct reference to the Urashima Taro legend) and become connected to the alien presence—the history professor, alongside the villagers who form a cult with Mayumi, seem to be descendants of those people, which is what gets them involved in the situation. Combining all these things together with a science fiction twist is an interesting choice, one that at least gives it a bit more of a historical through-line, and demonstrates how integrated into the country’s history the alien stuff is. Again, all of this is very much in vein of what the show was doing in the sixties, slightly updated for the nineties—and in fact, there was an entire episode based on Urashima Taro, so clearly they went back to familiar territory for this movie.
Also pretty familiar is the inclusion of a classic-style giant monster—Ultra Q is all about finding ways to get a guy in a rubber suit into the plot no matter what. I mean, it’s pretty much the reason Eiji Tsuburaya started the company in the first place (and to try to keep things in the family, Tsuburaya’s grandson is in the cast.) The monster in this is a slightly demonic-looking dinosaur who, as mentioned, responds to the commands of its alien buddy, and gets three pretty short appearances throughout the movie that look very Godzilla-esque thanks to the nighttime setting and mouth laser beams. While the suit is good, the miniature sets it gets to stomp around in, a construction site and a small village, are not particularly elaborate-looking, which could be a bit of budgetary efficiency—that, as well as the lighting choices, remind me of how Towards the Future looked, so maybe it was just Tsuburaya’s style at the time. None of the effects in this movie look bad—Mayumi/Wadatuzin flying around in her two alien forms is silly, but pretty much par for the course for this sort of thing—and there’s even some attempts to include interesting camerawork by shooting things in askew angles and doing some cutaways to symbolic objects, but this is definitely not on the level of the contemporaneous Godzilla movies, and sometimes doesn’t look that much better than a TV movie. If you’re coming to Legend of the Stars expecting a surplus of monster mayhem, you won’t be getting that—it’s mostly here to prove a point, which is apparently that we shouldn’t dig up places where giant dinosaurs are asleep to build parking lots.
The whole movie feels like something destined to become a footnote, not having much to it that would make it stand out in 1990, let alone today, aside from a surplus of ideas. But I do think it carries the general tone of Ultra Q—being about the modern world clashing with nature or the ancient world was a recurring motif, and having the alien’s final decision essentially be “you guys are hopeless, I’m leaving” is the exact kind of ambivalent/cautionary ending the series had been dealing out since 1966 (also, the last shot of the movie shows us that the giant monster is part of the spaceship, which is so silly and I love it.) If you look at it as a one-hundred minute episode of the show that aired twenty-four years later, rather than a standalone movie, it becomes a rather interesting little oddity in the history of a fairly important franchise.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 