| The Last War | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Shūe Matsubayashi |
| Produced by | Tomoyuki Tanaka |
| Written by | Takeshi Kimura Toshio Yasumi |
| Starring | Frankie Sakai Akira Takarada Yuriko Hoshi Nobuko Otowa Yumi Shirakawa |
| Music by | Ikuma Dan |
| Cinematography | Rokuro Nishigaki |
| Editing by | Koichi Iwashita |
| Distributed by | Toho |
| Release date(s) | August 10, 1961 January 8, 1967 |
| Running time | 110 min. 79 min. (USA) |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese English |
The Last War, known in Japan as Sekai Daisensō (世界大戦争 lit. "Great World War"), is a tokusatsu film produced and released by Toho Studios in 1961. Its special effects were created by Eiji Tsuburaya who is also known for working on Godzilla and Ultraman.
Toshio Yasumi's script for the film was reused for Prophecies of Nostradamus, which also included re-edits much of the film's special effects, in addition to its family melodrama center.
This movie covers the day to day goings on of several people in a family that is helplessly caught up in the drama of heightening Cold War tensions between two nuclear-armed superpowers, the Federation and the Alliance (fictitious stand-ins for the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.) Addressing the everyday concerns and everyday existence of people who are about to be violently parted with their existence, this film is a sobering one to watch. It depicts major landmarks the world over meeting with nuclear devastation, with the conclusion consisting of a written warning to mankind never to let this happen. As the film ends on a cliffhanger as we do not know if the family has survived the carnage. The closing view is of Tokyo's Diet Building nearly destroyed, with the top half only remaining inside a giant crater left by an atomic bomb.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||