A Beautiful Star / Utsukushii Hoshi (Blu-ray release 2017-12-6) is unlike every other movie that features alien. Loosely based on a 1962 novel, three members of a family are triggered by some events to consider themselves as aliens from other planets. The father sees a bright light when driving, loses time and memory, and wakes up in an unknown place. He eventually considers himself to be a martian, and uses his job of TV weather reporter to tell the public to stop damaging the environment.
Some reviews consider this to be a comedy, but I think this is a social commentary that promotes the awareness of environment protection, and (my interpretation) human is so bad that they should all die, leaving planet Earth to be a truly beautiful place, and raises the question of what beauty is. Everything is ambiguous in this movie, and I cannot find a definitive explanation other than some saying it is open to interpretation. Perhaps some hints can be found from the 1962 novel? Anyway, I’ll provide my view below.
SPOILER – Explanation
The following is my wild interpretation, and may be wrong.
Father – As a human he commits adultery. When he sees a bright light, he is abducted by UFO, implanted with a martian soul to carry out the mission of raising awareness of environment protection. Before he succeeds to summon the UFO on the rooftop, his body collapses due to cancer. When the body is dying, he is summoned by the UFO in form of a hallucination of his mistress. At the end the martian soul goes back to the UFO, the father becomes his original self and is left to die.
Mother – As the only non-alien in the family, she demonstrates stupidity by participating in a pyramid scam of selling overpriced bottled water.
Son – He is disrespectful of his female partner in the planetarium, but she does not demonstrate any good quality either, and admits to be with him only because of his superficial beauty. He is an alien from mercury, but his role is to establish his manager as another mercury alien, who has superpower that can inject visions to him in the elevator to test whether he has awakened, and to force push him away in the office.
Manager – Actually this is not an accurate description of his job, but anyway, his mercury voice points out that human is stupid and unable to make correct decisions, should just be left to die as part of true nature of universe. This position is symbolized by pressing a red button attached to an empty box.
Daughter – She is an alien from venus, and demonstrates the ability to summon UFO, which causes a strong wind to break the glass of the restaurant.
Singer – He steals a song from his bandmate and lies about writing it, sells it, borrows money from everyone, drug rapes the daughter, impregnates her and disappears. It is hard to say whether he is really an alien, but he really knows when the UFO shows up and teaches her the gesture to summon UFO. [Alternative: the bandmate lies about the singer due to jealousy.]
Mistress – She sleeps with the father only to advance her career and eventually take his job.
Politician – He represents the selfishness of human.
Teacher – He invites the daughter to join him only because she is beautiful.
Female classmates – They gossip behind the daughter.
Male classmate – He is only attracted to beautiful women and is disrespectful to those who are not beautiful.
Manufacturer of bottled water – They lie about where and how their product is manufactured. This represents yet another bad aspect of human society.