Akio Jissoji's Ultra Q: The Movie - Legend of the Stars is a dirge, an unhurried examination of the ways in which mankind makes itself incompatible with the utopian ideals of 1960s science fiction and the harmonious futures they foretold. The film adopts the perspective of a disconnected observer - Mio Takaki's Wadatuzin, very much the beautiful, heavenly, princess seen in umpteen tokusatsu productions. This archetype, typically depicted as the peaceful emissary of an intergalactic co-op, is a frustrated figure in Legend of the Stars. Instead of a brief, mostly positive, experience with humanity (usually massaged with a romance with some guileless young stud), this alien woman is embittered, having perhaps hundreds of years of experience with a people that have repeatedly betrayed rather than exalted her.
Wadatuzin's connection is contextualised in the film by allusions to folklore, stories like Princess Kaguya or The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and a less family friendly episode in which a visitor from the sky is aggressively duped. This celestial woman's means of transportation, her cloak, is stolen and hidden by an elderly couple. The adventurer is then trapped on Earth, reduced to making alcoholic elixirs until the toothless thieves decide to kill her. These stories, in which the mundane brushes up against something wonderful then attempts to take possession of it, informs the shape of Jissoji and screenwriter Mamoru Sasaki's film. Legend of the Stars is beautiful but glacial, much more interested in establishing the accusatory mood of the forest waiting to be levelled than the pace of an action-packed blockbuster. Legend of the Stars is far dreamier, a film told like a mass hallucination that draws on fairy tales and special effects television to damn mankind. In Legend of the Stars it is our greed that holds us back. Our society has curdled. Designed, not to ascend, but to mass produce the beach clogging beer cans that swirl in Wadatuzin's wake.
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