Fluentiama
Perfect cast and a good story
MamaGravity
good back-story, and good acting
Micah Lloyd
Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.
Staci Frederick
Blistering performances.
unbrokenmetal
Quite hilarious to watch. So many miniatures were used in the production that it feels a bit like revisiting the toy shop where you used to go as a child. "Yosei Gorasu" tells a variation of a familiar storyline "planet on collision course with Earth" insofar as its logical conclusion is not "blow up the invader" but "try and move the Earth out of the way", and for that purpose, an assembly of huge rocket engines is built in the Antarctic region which normally should take 20 years, but they manage the calculation, transport and construction work in a week or so. While any scientist will cringe, the producers openly admit the end of the world is not so serious after all by adding a giant walrus = a guy in a suit who appears without any reason and attacks a power station. The most impressive scenes are those of the flood sweeping Tokyo: a lot of miniatures again with attention to detail, the best you could do in 1962. Mixed bag, but it has memorable moments.
r-c-s
This movie presents some shortcoming typical of TOHO/low budget Japanese productions, EG some miniatures look like garage sale toys and some SFX are poor, yet i found it extremely enjoyable. Remember it was 1962, much before big budgeted Hollywood movies. The movie is easily watchable (got a letter-boxed edition), images are very clear, SFX very good period-wise. The plot (albeit very simple) unfolds nicely. There are many far fetched assumptions and scientific nonsense, EG the moon gets destroyed, earth is moved 400.000 km, YET nothing major happens as Gorath drifts away in the deep space. The space mission obsession continues. In 1982 (that's when Gorath was supposed to collide with earth ) they portray dozens of space stations, and tremendous ease to travel upto Saturn, Jupiter etc. We're 25 years past 1982 and not the tiniest fraction of such advancements has been made. There are a few subplots, which do not get in the way. Character development is extremely limited, if any. All in all an enjoyable movie worth watching twice. I saw the giant walrus, too. I suppose it was a diversion to improve the rhythm, which was running in circles around the Pole operation. A giant planet, whose extension is barely 3/4 earth's but whose mass is 6000+ times, is on collision course with earth. A first space mission perishes while trying to investigate the matter. Yet UN scientists have been alerted and plan to install reactors to the pole to propel earth 400.000 away, to avoid Gorath's devastating gravity. Pretty much all there.The scientific rationale behind stars of incredible density/gravity was popular back then and stemmed from (incorrect) assumptions about the origins of gamma ray bursts first uncovered by US spy satellites looking for Soviet nuclear tests. Gamma ray bursts (according to a theory popular back then) originated from Gorasu kind of stars.
Brian Washington
This was the first Japanese film that I saw that didn't rely on a giant monster to make it an interesting story (there is a giant monster, but it is mainly used as filler). Essentially, the message of this film is about how the people of Earth should learn to cooperate, especially when faced with extinction. We do not need an extreme threat like an onrushing planetoid to learn to cooperate due to the fact that we have such threats as global warming, pollution, crime and hunger that are already eating away at us. Also, I hope one day that an uncut version of this film is released in this country. The message of this film has all but been hacked to pieces by the American distributors of this classic piece of Japanese science fiction.
Vigilante-407
This movie just proves that the main theme of Science Fiction movies in 1997 is not a new thing. The idea of large planetary bodies crashing into Earth has been a sci-fi movie idea since the time of When World's Collide.Gorath is a planet (which looks like a small star) that is on a collision course with the Earth. Mankind unites to come up with a rather unique way to avert total destruction. It's not Armageddon or Deep Impact...but if often seems better acted than either of those huge-budgeted B-movies.