Space Amoeba

#11 in my ranking of Ishiro Honda’s filmography.

Toho’s final special effects science fiction film under its old studio system of contract players and Ishiro Honda’s final feature film for several years until Toho brought him back for the final Godzilla film of the Showa Era, Space Amoeba is an entertaining sendoff for the era, bringing together the basic narrative building blocks of this kind of film in the right amounts to work in combination with its interesting approach to the special effects behemoths that go stompy-stomp.

An unmanned space probe has been sent to Jupiter to study its moons when it loses contact with Earth, gets captured by some kind of amorphous extraterrestrial thing (oh…space amoeba…I get it), and turns around. Its splash down is witnessed by photojournalist Tara Kudo (Akira Kubo) on a trans-Pacific flight back home to Japan (amazing coincidence that honestly didn’t need to happen, but whatever). He’s then approached by a company to photograph a remote island where they are planning to build a resort, publicity photos that he has no interest in taking until Dr. Miya (Yoshio Tsuchiya) walks into the meeting and Kudo figures out that the island and the splash down are the same place. So, they all go on a cruise to the island, joined by Obata (Kenji Sahara) who says that he’s an anthropologist looking to investigate the local population.

The problem is that a giant squid-like creature has risen from the sea and killed one of the company’s workers on the island leaving the other one shaken and the natives antagonistic to the outsiders. There’s a really interesting line (that never gets followed up, by the way) as the new denizens of the island show up where Dr. Miya mentions how it’s remarkable that the natives remained friendly even through the Japanese presence through the war. Honda’s references to WWII had mostly fallen off after Godzilla, only really coming back at any explicit level in Atragon, so I’m always interested to see how this could reflect his changing attitudes towards Japanese behavior during the conflict. There’s an implication that Japan actually did do things wrong back in the day, which is both in alignment with his idealistic treatments in Eagle of the Pacific and Farewell Rabaul but also against the implication in Godzilla.

Anyway, the meat of the film is the monster stuff, and the first iteration of the space amoeba’s physical form is the best. The walking squid lumbers around unnaturally (though, to be honest, you can tell which tentacles are actually legs), and it does great damage, only letting Kudo and Miya go when they go underwater to confront it when porpoises come near. The second form, after the squid is defeated by fire, is a giant crab, and there’s some great action as Kudo shoots out its eyes.

In a surprise move, the central pathos of the finale ends up revolving around Obata who was lying about being an anthropologist and is actually there for a bit of corporate espionage to steal the plans to the resort for a competitor. He, however, gets possessed by the amoeba and becomes humanity’s best hope to fight the extraterrestrial threat, needing to fight the possession while the amoeba gives him great strength to fight against puny humanity’s efforts to stop the amoeba’s quest for world domination.

You see, it’s super basic monster movie stuff, but it’s helped by a few things. The first is that the monsters themselves are not the real threat. It’s the amoeba. Fighting off giant monsters with a handful of bullets and half a tank of gasoline is one thing, but finding the amoeba’s key weakness is something else. It keeps the monsters as a physical threat but directs the characters’ energies towards something more manageable. The second big thing is that we get a few new monsters (though the crab does look a fair bit like Ebirah), so there’s variation. The third is the final act focus on Obata. It’d be better if he were more of an anti-hero and focus from the beginning, but the turn he gets in the finale to help fight the evil within him is surprisingly well done in the limited screentime he gets. I felt something in the end.

And that really is what pushed this film up a notch for me. That ending has a shocking sadness that’s absent from most of Honda’s other science-fiction/kaiju work. Things must be sacrificed to win, and it’s not something to forget as the victory takes shape.

Really, I think this is underappreciated. It’s really quite a good example of the kaiju genre that does its job efficiently and well.

Rating: 3/4