Five months ago I began my search for an online service that would allow me to watch the Japanese film
Before We Vanish (
Sanpo suru shinryakusha) in the comfort of my own home (see
this blog post) and I finally found this movie on HULU where it became available about a 3 weeks ago (July 30th).
Telepathy?
We never get to see the aliens in
Before We Vanish. In fact, we are told that humans can't see the true form of the aliens. However, the aliens can take control of human bodies, so during the film we see three "
pod people", the bodies of three humans that are under the control of three aliens.
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| Yuri Tsunematsu as Akira (alien-A) |
Before We Vanish is a techno-thriller with a strong horror element and minimal devotion to the science fiction genre. Most of the horror elements of this film cling to just one actress,
Yuri Tsunematsu, who plays the role of a woman (Akira) whose body is controlled by one of the three aliens (who I will call
alien-A). In the image to the left, Akira/
alien-A is causing a car accident by walking down the middle of a highway. Latter, she is killed when struck by a car that is driven by
Masami Nagasawa (in the role of Narumi Kase).
Nanites?
We are never told why
alien-A does not migrate to a new human body after Akira's body is terribly smashed in the car accident. The story in this movie was cobbled together by
Kiyoshi Kurosawa and
Sachiko Tanaka based on a 2005 play written by
Tomohiro Maekawa. Is it possible that after a period of time the aliens become "trapped" in a human body and they can no longer shift their
nanite components out of that body? This is a movie, so don't ask too many questions.
It is not clear that this film can support the weight of a Sci Fi-oriented analysis, but here I go... The type of
alien invasion depicted in
Before We Vanish might make sense if
alien-A and the two other aliens shown in this film are a form of nanoscopic artificial life. The alien nanites can take up residence inside human bodies and set about the task of trying to understand human culture.
Maybe the aliens in
Before We Vanish do not really have telepathic powers. It looks like they can take partial control of nearby people, functioning like thought vampires and rather than sucking blood, they suck out people's thoughts. However, maybe what looks like telepathy in this film is all accomplished by sending nanite probes into people's brains so that the aliens can learn about Humanity.
Borgsan
Why do the aliens in
Before We Vanish even bother visiting Earth? We are told that the aliens intend to exterminate Humanity. Why? No explanation is given. The answer is that some human wanted to make an alien invasion movie and, as usual, there need be no further justification... just splash enough blood across the screen, have some loud explosions and watch the money role in.
Stories about invasions are well ingrained in human society simply because our planet is large and human tribes have been invading each others territories for as long as our species has existed. Usually the mixing of tribes is peaceful, but depictions of normal life is not of interest to movie makers. When human fascination with violent invasions was brought into the
science fiction genre by H. G. Wells, he created a fully British invasion story; there was even a "reason" for the alien invasion. The poor Martian's were from a cold, dry, dying world and they coveted the lush green planet Earth.
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| Invading spores - 1955 |
It is tempting to imagine that the alien visitors in
Before We Vanish are similar to the
Borg or the "spores" in
The Body Snatchers. Maybe they simply spread from place to place, assimilating other forms of life or exterminating them. However, an alternative reason for the invasion is suggested during
Before We Vanish: maybe the aliens arrived on Earth in order to save Humanity from self-destruction. The only way they can do this is to start an invasion of Earth, stimulating the Earthlings to work together.
Wiii 3
The three alien visitors depicted in the film remind me of the aliens in
Isaac Asimov's novel
The Gods Themselves. Asimov imagined an alien species with three different genders: rationals, emotionals and parentals. In
Before We Vanish the three individual aliens seem quite different, each with their own mission on Earth. However, we have no doubt that the three aliens are working together; they appear at the same time, in one small region of Earth and we are told that these three alien scouts must first collect information about Humanity then assemble as a group and transmit a signal that will then trigger a full-scale attack against the people of Earth.
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| alien-A |
Akira (who through most of the film is the human host to
alien-A) is introduced to viewers as a school girl who carries home a goldfish in a bag and announces cheerfully, "I'm home." Minutes later she is covered with blood and her two parents are dead; the poor fish is floundering in a pool of blood. Later, "
alien-A" tells us that upon arriving on Earth, "she" first was inside of the gold fish, then she transferred "herself" into the body of a woman, but she pulled out her own internal organs in order to study them. Eventually, "she" settled down inside the body of Akira.
"Settled down" is a joke, because
alien-A is quite violent, killing a dozen or more people during the course of the movie.
Alien-A's mission on Earth is highly constrained: she is supposed to construct a communications device that will be used to signal for the main invasion to start, a fiery battle fought with flaming meteor-like bombs which will destroy human civilization.
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| Shinji (alien-C) and Narumi |
However, soon after the flaming meteor bombardment of Earth begins, the attack is called off. This is apparently due to the fact that
alien-C (
Ryuhei Matsuda as Shinji Kase) has learned about love from his wife, Narumi.
In
The War Of the Worlds, we humans are saved when Earthly microbes kill the invading Martians. In
Before We Vanish, the people of Earth are (mostly) saved by love.
The third alien, Amano (played by
Mahiro Takasugi) keeps the plot of the movie moving along.
Alien-B makes use of a journalist (
Hiroki Hasegawa as Sakurai) as his "guide", someone who conveniently has a van with a radio transmitter on the roof.
Alien-A is a tech wizard, crafting a hi-tek communicator out of bits of wire and various crappy electronics components that are available on Earth.
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| school girl vs soldier |
I don't know which is sillier: 1) hand-to-hand combat scenes in which a school girl (
alien-A) is depicted as incapacitating soldiers who are armed with machine guns, 2) the movie's equivalent of Japanese
Men in Black, unexplained dudes who lurk in the background of the film and who are depicted as having the cover story that they are trying to deal with a "new virus" that is relentlessly filling up local hospitals with deranged patients during the course of the whole movie, or 3) Sakurai, the journalist, who after unsuccessfully trying to sell his alien invasion story to the local press outlets then gleefully helps call down the storm of flaming alien meteor bombs that is designed to wipe-out Humanity. Is Sakurai under the telepathic control of
Alien-B? Who knows.
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| 3 aliens |
A Cinelogue Concerning Two World Systems
Salviati (
alien-C) and Simplicio (
alien-A)
represent the
Interventionist and
pek factions of these alien invaders.
Salviati becomes intrigued by the importance of family and love for
Humanity, and ultimately "he" decides to stay on Earth. Simplicio
casually kills any human who gets in "her" way while she relentlessly
works towards the destruction of Humanity; from "her" perspective,
humans are no different than fish.
Sagredo (
alien-B) just does his job, although he seems to have fun doing his work. In particular, "he" seems vastly amused that Sakurai is ready and willing to place Humanity's fate in the hands of the alien invaders.
In a sense,
Before We Vanish is a study of contrast in human nature. On one side there is the human capacity for curiosity, cooperation and caring for each other. Those aspects of human nature are contrasted with human isolation, indifference and narcissism. In this film, Sakurai embodies the human capacity for isolation, indifference and narcissism; he is quick to abandon all hope for his zombie-like fellow humans and join forces with the aliens who seem to wield vastly greater power than we Earthlings.
When the end grows near, Narumi's first impulse is to give up on life and reach for death. She asks her "husband" to strangle her. Only in a final act of desperation does she finally decide to give-up her mental construct of love and allow her understanding of love to be transferred from her brain on to
alien-C.
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| Sakurai calls for the alien invasion. |
Welcoming You
I feel like parts of
Before We Vanish were simply lost in translation. I've seen various translations of the Japanese title of the film, usually these are a variant on "aliens wandering"; the three alien "scouts" of the film seem to spend a lot of time just wandering around... even bumbling around in full-on
inept alien invader fashion. However, none of the bumbling in
Before We Vanish quite rises to the level of
Scotty drinking an alien invader under the table during a
Star Trek episode ('
By Any Other Name').
At the end of the movie, Earth and Narumi are slowly recovering from the aborted alien invasion.
Alien-C is at her side, waiting for Narumi's damaged memory system to heal.
As viewers of
Before We Vanish, we can't avoid making comparisons to
The War of the Worlds. Near the start of
Before We Vanish, we see a sign that says "Yankees Go Home!" However, at the end of the film we are left with the idea that the alien invasion somehow "saved us from self-destruction".
I'm not sure if the people of Japan ever feel that the American military occupation of Japan saved the Japanese from self-destruction, but that seems to be an idea that is raised by this film. The European view of invaders from Asia has often been that militarily powerful barbarian invaders disrupted European civilization. An alternative view is that contact with Asia brought technological innovations to Europe.
In the case of alien invasions, it is certain that any space-faring civilization that reached Earth would be far more technologically advanced than we are. Such technologically advanced aliens are not going to come to Earth for some mundane purpose such as briefly living as a gold fish or collecting our
gold. So why would an advanced lifeform travel across vast interstellar distances to a planet like Earth?
The recent film
Arrival also played up the idea that aliens might arrive and unite the people of Earth, saving us from self-destruction.
SIHA Nomination
I'm nominating
Before We Vanish for the 2018
SIHA award. At least in my mind, I can imagine the aliens of
Before We Vanish as being an artificial lifeform composed of
nanites. These aliens are able to recognize that Earthlings have some interesting features, so at least until the sequel, we humans are allowed to survive.
Related Reading:
Aliens and Hollywood
Next: Another
2018 SIHA nomination.
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