Battle in Outer Space

Another of the DVD box sets I'm just getting around to finishing up is a Mill Creek set of 50s and 60s scifi distributed by Columbia. The last of the films in the set is Battle in Outer Space.

It's quite clear from the opening that this is a Japanese production, with the US rights bought by Columbia so they could dub it into English, probably with some scenes changed to to make western involvement in the story make more logical sense -- I haven't seen the original. After the opening credits, an on-screen title informs us that it's 1965, which is only interesting once you realize that the movie was released in 1959 so the action is taking place several years in the future. This is a future in which they got to having orbiting space stations pretty quickly. But, alas, the space station doesn't have a bright future, as it's attacked and destroyed by what is obviously an alien force.

This force has some interesting powers, ones that you think would make it easy for them to take over Earth, but because this is a movie we can expect that the humans are going to be victorious in the end. (Then again, one thing I was thinking of as I was watching the movie is that these movies never discuss overextended supply lines.) Among those powers is a way of lessening gravity; as the movie theorizes, reducing atomic motion by reducing temperatures to near absolute zero is what decreases gravity. This enables the aliens to unmoor bridges and large ships among other things.

Since the destroyed space station was Japanese, and they suffered some other serious damage, they take the lead in hosting the international conference to determine what to do about the problem. At the conference, one of the delegates gets a sudden headache. Thanks to voiceovers, we learn that this isn't a traditional headache, but the aliens using their radio wave device to take over a human's mind and enslave the human into doing their bidding. (It's not mentioned, but I'm guessing if pressed the script writers would argue the aliens only have enough spectrum to enslave a minimal number of humans at any one time.) Said human tries to kill some of the other scientists, but it doesn't work.

In any case, the scientists along with government leaders realize they have to come up with weapons pretty quickly, as well as rockets to put them into orbit. They figure out somehow that the aliens have a base on the moon from which they're building up the equipment to attack Earth, so an advance team of earthlings is going to have to make it to the moon and attack alien headquarters there. Of course, this will be complicated by the aliens trying to enslave one of the members of this team.

To be honest, the plot of Battle in Outer Space is fairly straightforward and nothing groundbreaking. But then, this is the sort of movie that isn't supposed to be anything big and new, just solid entertainment for either the drive-in crowd (in America; I don't recall if Japan ever did drive-in theaters) or maybe whatever demographic in Japan likes science fiction. In that regard, it succeeds quite admirably.

Battle in Outer Space is one of those movies that I'm really glad wound up on a box set.