Message from Space

Based on Wikipedia: Message from Space

Japan's Audacious Answer to Star Wars

In 1978, Japanese film studio Toei did something gloriously brazen. They looked at the cultural phenomenon that was Star Wars, still fresh from its 1977 release, and thought: we can do that too. The result was Message from Space, the most expensive film ever made in Japan at that time, clocking in at somewhere between five and six million dollars.

That was roughly half what George Lucas had spent on his galaxy far, far away.

The gamble was enormous. The critical reception was brutal. And yet, this gonzo space opera earned a Saturn Award nomination and spawned a television series. More importantly, it represents a fascinating moment in cinema history—the instant when Japanese filmmakers, masters of giant monster movies and samurai epics, decided to stake their claim in the new frontier of blockbuster science fiction.

The Man Behind the Madness

To understand Message from Space, you need to understand Kinji Fukasaku. This wasn't some hack director chasing American trends. Fukasaku had already established himself as one of Japan's most distinctive voices, particularly through his brutal yakuza films of the early 1970s. His Battles Without Honor and Humanity series had redefined the crime genre with handheld cameras, chaotic violence, and a deeply cynical view of postwar Japanese society.

So what was a director known for gritty gangster films doing making a space opera? Fukasaku brought something unexpected to the genre: a willingness to embrace chaos. His action sequences have a kinetic, almost frantic energy. His villains are theatrically grotesque. His heroes are flawed, sometimes cowardly, occasionally treacherous.

He assembled a cast that mixed Japanese stars with American actors, creating an intentionally international feel that would play to both domestic and foreign audiences. Sonny Chiba, already famous internationally for his martial arts films like The Street Fighter, took the role of Prince Hans. Etsuko Shihomi, who had worked with Chiba on numerous action films, played Princess Emeralida. And Vic Morrow, an American character actor best known for the television series Combat!, was cast as General Garuda, a disillusioned military officer who becomes an unlikely hero.

Seeds of Destiny

The plot of Message from Space borrows liberally from multiple sources. There's Star Wars, obviously. But there's also a heavy debt to Japanese folklore, particularly the legend of the Satomi clan and the eight dog warriors—a story that involves magical beads that bring together eight heroes destined to save a kingdom.

In Fukasaku's version, the planet Jillucia has been conquered by the Gavanas Empire. The Gavanas are memorable villains—their emperor, Rockseia the Twenty-Second, rules over steel-skinned warriors who have transformed Jillucia into a military fortress. The film never quite explains what "steel-skinned" means, but the costume design makes clear that these are not beings you want to cross. They're theatrical in the way of classic pulp villains, all flowing capes and menacing poses.

The Jillucian elder Kido performs one final act of resistance: he releases eight magical Liabe seeds into the cosmos. These seeds will find the warriors destined to liberate Jillucia. Princess Emeralida and the warrior Urocco escape the conquered planet on a space galleon—yes, an actual sailing ship that flies through space, because this film commits fully to its aesthetic choices—while the seeds scatter across the galaxy.

A Motley Crew of Reluctant Heroes

The seeds find their way to an unlikely collection of individuals. Shiro and Aaron are reckless space pilots, the kind of hotshots who race their spacecraft through asteroid fields for thrills. Jack is a gambler drowning in debt to gangsters, desperate enough to sell out anyone for the right price. Meia is a wealthy young aristocrat bored with her privileged life. General Garuda is a military man who has lost faith in the institutions he once served.

None of them wants to be a hero.

This is actually one of the film's more interesting elements. Unlike Star Wars, where Luke Skywalker actively yearns for adventure, most of the Liabe warriors resist their destiny. Jack actually betrays the Jillucians, selling out Emeralida and Urocco to the Gavanas for reward money. He later regrets this, of course, but the film doesn't shy away from showing that being chosen by magical seeds doesn't automatically make you noble.

The eighth warrior presents a mystery. Seven seeds find recipients, but the eighth remains unclaimed through much of the film. This becomes significant later, when Urocco—despite being a Jillucian warrior—is revealed to be one of the chosen. He dies in battle, and only as he falls does the eighth seed glow, confirming his place among the destined heroes. It's a melancholy twist that suggests destiny sometimes arrives too late to save you.

Spectacle on a Budget

The special effects in Message from Space are where opinions diverge most sharply. Critics at the time were merciless. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that the film was "so terrible it has a certain comic integrity," describing effects based on miniatures that couldn't compete with the Industrial Light and Magic wizardry of Star Wars. The Washington Star suggested it made the television series Battlestar Galactica—itself often mocked as a Star Wars knockoff—look like high art by comparison.

But here's the thing: those critics were evaluating the film by the wrong standard.

Message from Space isn't trying to achieve the seamless photorealism that George Lucas pursued. It's working in a different tradition entirely. Japanese special effects cinema, known as tokusatsu, had developed over decades through the Godzilla films and television shows like Ultraman. The aesthetic embraced visible craft—you could see the artistry in the miniatures, appreciate the practical ingenuity of the explosions. The space galleon, with its anachronistic sails billowing in the void, wasn't trying to look realistic. It was trying to look fantastic, in the original sense of the word.

The Variety review understood this better than most English-language critics. While acknowledging that the film "borrows wholesale" from Star Wars, the reviewer noted that "if the Japanese have not come up with something original, they have brought forth an illegitimate baby that is so good that it will not shame its unacknowledged parents." The special effects were called "spectacular" and the action "everything one could wish."

The Business of Imitation

United Artists acquired the American distribution rights for one million dollars. The studio's sales pitch was reportedly: "It's a Jap Star Wars! It'll clean up."

It did not clean up.

Studio executive Steven Bach later quipped that "the only thing it cleaned up was the red inkwell." The film flopped with American audiences, who were not interested in a Japanese imitation when they could rewatch the genuine article. The negative reviews didn't help, nor did the fact that the dubbing for the American release flattened many of the performances.

But commercial failure in America doesn't tell the whole story. In Japan, where the film opened on April 29, 1978, it performed well enough to justify a television spin-off. Message from Space: Galactic Wars ran for twenty-seven episodes, airing from July 1978 through January 1979. The series expanded the universe Fukasaku had created, following new adventures set against the backdrop of the Gavanas conflict.

Echoes of Kurosawa

There's a deep irony in American critics dismissing Message from Space as a Star Wars ripoff. George Lucas himself had openly acknowledged his debt to Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, a 1958 samurai adventure that provided the template for much of Star Wars' structure. The influence runs through the entire film: the bickering peasants who become R2-D2 and C3PO, the hidden princess, the noble warrior protecting her, the journey through dangerous territory.

So when Japanese filmmakers made a space opera that borrowed from Star Wars, they were in some sense reclaiming territory. The mythic patterns Lucas had adapted from Kurosawa were returning home, filtered through an American blockbuster sensibility. Message from Space even draws on the same source material—the legend of the eight dog warriors—that had influenced samurai cinema for generations.

This cultural ping-pong between Japanese and American cinema continues to this day. The Mandalorian draws heavily on samurai films. Anime influences permeate Hollywood science fiction. The exchange has always been bidirectional, even when critics treated Japanese productions as mere imitations.

A Cast of East and West

The international cast gives Message from Space a distinctive flavor. Sonny Chiba brings physical charisma to Prince Hans, a character who could have been a simple noble hero but becomes something more interesting—a man reclaiming his birthright from a usurper, driven by revenge as much as righteousness. Chiba was forty-one when the film was made, already a star whose career would eventually span six decades.

Vic Morrow had a weathered quality that served General Garuda well. The character is essentially a broken man when we meet him, a military officer who has lost faith in the system he served. His gradual redemption through the film's events gives the narrative some of its emotional weight. Tragically, Morrow would die just four years later in a helicopter accident during the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie, a disaster that changed how dangerous stunts were regulated in Hollywood.

Etsuko Shihomi brought martial arts credibility to Princess Emeralida. She had trained extensively in karate and had starred in the Sister Street Fighter series, playing characters who could handle themselves in combat. This wasn't a princess who needed constant rescuing—Emeralida fights alongside her protectors, a characterization that was progressive for its time.

Philip Casnoff and Peggy Lee Brennan played the American leads, Aaron and Meia. Both were early in their careers. Casnoff would later find greater success in American television, particularly in the miniseries North and South. Brennan's career remained more modest, but in Message from Space she brings a rebellious energy to the bored aristocrat discovering purpose in adventure.

The Villain Problem

Emperor Rockseia the Twenty-Second is no Darth Vader. This is perhaps the film's greatest weakness.

Vader worked because he was visually iconic, physically threatening, and psychologically complex. The breathing, the voice, the slow deliberate movements—every element contributed to a villain who felt genuinely menacing. Rockseia, by contrast, is theatrical in ways that undermine his threat. The costume is elaborate but busy. The performance tends toward camp. He rules an empire of steel-skinned warriors, but we never feel the weight of that power.

The Boston Globe review hit on this precisely, noting that the villains were not as interesting as Darth Vader. When your antagonist can't compete with the reference point audiences carry in their heads, every scene suffers. Rockseia shouts and schemes and eventually dies in combat with Prince Hans, but he never achieves the mythic quality that great villains require.

The Gavanas Empire itself remains underdeveloped. We know they conquered Jillucia and transformed it into a fortress. We know the emperor plans to use the planet as a weapon, propelling it toward Earth as part of some larger conquest. But we never understand their culture, their motivations, their history. They exist as obstacles rather than as a civilization.

Destruction as Spectacle

The climax of Message from Space delivers the explosions the genre demands. The Liabe warriors infiltrate the Gavanas base to destroy the reactor powering their fortress. There's a revolt led by Prince Hans. Rockseia dies. Shiro and Aaron destroy the reactor, barely escaping as Jillucia itself is consumed in the explosion.

But then the film takes an unexpectedly somber turn. The Jillucians have won their war, but they have lost their world. Jillucia is gone, destroyed in the same explosion that defeated their enemies. Victory and annihilation arrive in the same moment.

The surviving Jillucians escape on a space galleon, joined by several of the Liabe warriors. Shiro, Aaron, and Meia seem to sacrifice themselves in a final attack on the Gavanas carrier, but they're miraculously saved by the power of the seeds—a deus ex machina that the film acknowledges with a wink rather than trying to explain.

Earth offers the Jillucian survivors asylum. They decline. Their final image is the space galleon sailing into the void, searching for a new home. It's an unexpectedly bittersweet ending for a film that had spent most of its runtime delivering pulp entertainment. The heroes saved the day but couldn't save their world. They sail on, refugees in their own universe.

Legacy and Rediscovery

For decades, Message from Space existed primarily as a curiosity, the kind of film that played at midnight screenings or turned up in bargain VHS bins. The negative critical reception had calcified into received wisdom: it was a cheap Star Wars knockoff, not worth serious consideration.

But time has a way of revising these judgments.

Shout! Factory released the film on DVD in 2013, making it accessible to a new generation of viewers. Critics approaching it without the burden of 1978 expectations found more to appreciate. The AllMovie review gave it three stars and argued it had been "unfairly slagged as a cheap rip-off," noting that the film "makes up for its shortcomings with a devil-may-care energy reminiscent of '40s-era serials."

That phrase—"devil-may-care energy"—captures something essential about Message from Space. The film doesn't apologize for what it is. It commits fully to its space galleons and magical seeds and theatrical villains. The pacing rarely slows for explanation or justification. Things happen because they're exciting, not because they're logical.

Stuart Galbraith IV, in his comprehensive book Japanese Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, offered a more measured assessment. He noted that "what separates a film like Star Wars from Message from Space is the former's timelessness." The disco-influenced score, the 1970s costume and makeup choices, the particular aesthetic of the era—all of these date the film in ways that Star Wars avoided through its commitment to a galaxy that felt neither past nor future but mythically outside time.

This is fair criticism. Message from Space is absolutely a product of 1978. But isn't that also part of its charm for contemporary viewers? The film is a time capsule, preserving a moment when Japanese cinema tried to compete with Hollywood on spectacle while maintaining its own cultural sensibility.

Fukasaku's Final Frontier

Kinji Fukasaku would return to big-budget science fiction two years later with Virus, which surpassed Message from Space's production costs to become Japan's new most expensive film. That project, about a pandemic that wipes out most of humanity, featured an even more international cast and achieved somewhat better critical reception.

But Fukasaku never fully committed to the genre. He returned to yakuza films and historical epics, culminating in the controversial Battle Royale in 2000, a dystopian thriller about students forced to fight to the death that sparked moral panic and influenced a generation of filmmakers. He died in 2003, leaving behind a body of work that ranged from savage crime dramas to cheerful space operas.

Message from Space represents Fukasaku at his most playful. The darkness and cynicism of his yakuza films is absent here, replaced by a genuine affection for pulp adventure. When the heroes win through magical intervention, when the villains overact gloriously, when the space galleon sails through the cosmos with its anachronistic rigging—Fukasaku seems to be having fun in a way his more serious work rarely allowed.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Ripoffs

Every successful film generates imitators. Star Wars alone spawned dozens of knockoffs in the late 1970s and early 1980s—Italian productions like Starcrash, Roger Corman cheapies like Battle Beyond the Stars, Turkish oddities like The Man Who Saves the World. Most of these films are forgotten, remembered only by dedicated enthusiasts of bad cinema.

Message from Space survives because it's not quite a ripoff. Yes, it borrows liberally from Star Wars. But it also draws on Japanese folklore, on the tokusatsu tradition, on Fukasaku's own sensibilities as a director. The result is something that feels both derivative and distinctive, familiar yet strange.

The question of influence in cinema is never simple. Hollywood has spent decades remaking Japanese films, from The Magnificent Seven (adapted from Seven Samurai) to The Ring (adapted from Ringu). Japanese cinema has been equally willing to adapt Western sources. The cultural exchange enriches both traditions, even when individual films fail to achieve greatness.

Message from Space is not a great film. Its villain is weak, its plot is sometimes incoherent, its effects couldn't compete with Industrial Light and Magic even at half the budget. But it's an interesting film, a sincere film, a film that tried to do something ambitious even if it didn't fully succeed. Forty-five years later, that ambition remains visible, and the space galleon still sails on.