One of the best films i have seen

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Hostile aliens from the planet of Natal make their presence known to the people of Earth. All that they demand is complete surrender. But humankind won't go down without a fight. All the nations of the planet are thus motivated to band together. An integrated crew mans two rockets that are flown to the moon, where it is believed that the aliens are headquartering."Battle in Outer Space" is fun to watch, to a degree, although this viewer never found it as exciting as he might have liked. It is slightly overlong, and plodding. It takes until the final quarter hour of the movie until the title battle can take place. The characters, by and large, lack any really interesting features, except perhaps for the dedicated scientist Professor Adachi, played by Koreya Senda. There is a quiet romantic interlude early on, but it's over before too long.At the least, it can be said that this is fairly colourful (both literally and figuratively) entertainment. The visuals are nicely photographed in widescreen by cinematographer Hajime Koizumi, and the special effects are rather dazzling. Some of the sequences on the moon are reasonably creepy. One fine moment occurs when one of our human characters risks their own life to ensure that the other heroes can make a clean getaway.The extremely prolific Japanese genre director Ishiro Honda gives the proceedings a decent amount of style. His movie does just fine as a selection for a slow Sunday afternoon.Six out of 10.

The nations of the Earth unite in a common cause to fight off an invader from outer space.The film is considered a loose or "nominal" sequel to "The Mysterians" (1957), jumping ahead several years to 1965, when Etsuko Shiraishi and Dr. Adachi, among others, are now heavily involved in the United Nations Space Research Center in Tokyo. The continuity is not important, though, and if someone did not see the earlier film they will not be confused in the least.Although not the first time "Godzilla" director Honda takes on space, a topic on the forefront of everyone's minds in the late 1950s, this is probably one of his better explorations of the theme. It is always interesting to see what movie creators thought space travel and space suits. This film was able to correctly predict a fair number of things, and even takes a crack at what walking on the moon would look like.Howard Thompson gave the film a generally positive review, stating, "The plot is absurd and is performed in dead earnest... the artwork is downright nifty, especially in the middle portion, when an earth rocket soars to the moon to destroy the palpitating missile base... the Japanese have opened a most amusing and beguiling bag of technical tricks, as death-dealing saucers whiz through the stratosphere... and the lunar landscape is just as pretty as it can be." I have nothing to add to what Thompson has said, other than to note that critics today would likely be even more favorable in retrospect -- the film holds up well and displays a sense of fun and imagination rarely seen today.

A truly great science fiction epic with plenty of futuristic hardware, alien invaders and cool spaceships. The best! It's finally available as of 2009 on DVD, although if you look hard you can find gray-market versions or bootlegs from Laserdiscs. The color is suitably lurid, the acting is done in earnest, the heroic Earth combatants do their best, the music is stirring -- it's really the PERFECT Japanese science fiction film! Why hasn't it been available before now on DVD?The whole Earth joins together to fight the "interstellar bandits" as one actor calls the threat. The spirit of the entire production is tremendously uplifting. It's a terrific picture that holds together even with the sometimes goofy Japanese translations. Absolutely the stuff of dreams for any little kid that loves old science fiction movies. A genuine treasure. Buy this one now while it's available!

I saw this film in 1960 playing with "The Time Machine" as a double feature. Though not as rich in story line as "The Mysterians" this film really takes off when the two Speep earthships go to the moon to battle a base set up by the planet Matal who also fly "Mysterian" style flying saucers. On the moon the action really starts with marvelous raygun battles between the enemy and earth forces. The earth forces possess a marvelous heat ray cannon as well as smaller but potent raygun rifles. Later in the film, the earth forces battle invading flying saucers and a mother ship with X-15 styled fighter craft equipped with heat ray guns. The finale with the mother ship's ray gun destroying Toyko is done quite well.For the time this film was made, the special effects are quite good. Considering my nickname is ray-gun 3, this is a ten star IMDb vote scale film in that department. I think the best scene in the film is on the moon where one of the crew stays behind with his ray rifle destroying flying saucers so the earth force can get away in their Speep spaceship. This scene is one of the best piece of special effects I have scene in this type of movie. A thought to remember is the film was made 17 to 18 years before "Star Wars". An outstanding accomplishment by Toho studios.