Gorath
| Gorath | |
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original Japanese poster
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| Directed by | Ishirō Honda |
| Produced by | Tomoyuki Tanaka |
| Written by |
Jojiro Okami (story) Takeshi Kimura |
| Starring |
Ryo Ikebe Yumi Shirakawa Takashi Shimura Akira Kubo Kumi Mizuno Ken Uehara Paul Frees (USA) William Eidleson (USA) Virginia Craig (USA) |
| Music by | Kan Ishii |
| Cinematography | Hajime Koizumi |
| Edited by | Reiko Kaneko |
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Production
company |
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| Distributed by |
Toho Brenco Pictures (U.S.) Allied Artists (U.S.) Heritage Enterprises (U.S. TV release) |
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Release date
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Running time
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89 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language |
Japanese English |
Gorath, released in Japan as Rogue Star Gorath (妖星ゴラス Yōsei Gorasu?), is a Japanese science fiction tokusatsu film produced by Toho in 1962. The story for Gorath was created by Jojiro Okami.
Early in the year 1979, Japan's famed rocketship, the JX-1 Hawk is launched from the Mt Fuji Interstellar Exploration Agency site into space on a 9-month journey to investigate the planet Saturn up close. It was discovered that a small, runaway "planet," which some scientists believed to be the solid mega-dense core of a collapsed star that had somehow run amok, and was subsequently named "Gorath" by the international scientific community, had entered Earth's solar system. Upon encountering Gorath and attempting to investigate its rapid movement in the solar system, they discover that Gorath is smaller than Earth but with 6000 times Earth's gravity. The JX-1 is caught in its gravity well and its entire crew of the spacecraft lost their lives as the enormous gravity well of the approaching celestial body destroyed the ship.
However, they managed to transmit data on their discovery back to Earth, where it was collated by astronomers and astrophysicists throughout the international community. It was then realized that the enormous celestial body was heading on a direct course for the Earth, and if a planetary body that huge struck terra firma it would cause an extinction level catastrophe greater than that caused by the Apollo asteroid collision that is believed to have ended the reign of the dinosaurs many millions of years ago.
In order to save the planet from its impending doom, the United Nations resolved to pool their resources towards this all-important goal by pooling together the large amounts of technical advancements they made in the past two decades. A bold and incredible plan was quickly initiated by the U.N. Security Council called Operation: South Pole. The U.N. then sends remaining prototype sub-light spacecraft JX-2 Eagle was quickly modified and launched into space to obtain further data on Gorath.
The South Pole operation base is designed to house a large international team of engineers and scientists. The plan involves the construction of several hundred huge and powerful thruster engines, 500 meters below the surface and in an area 600 kilometers in diameter, producing an atomic force equal to that of 6,600,000,000 megatons. When completed and activated, these mega-thrusters would serve to literally move the Earth more than 400,000 kilometers out of its orbit in 100 days until it was safely out of range of both the approaching star Gorath and its devastating gravity well, and then move the Earth back into its proper orbit once the danger had completely passed.
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Wikipedia