![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
A kidnapper wouldn't jump into a cold sea
Under very few circumstances while watching Ishirō Honda's Atragon (海底軍艦, 1963) does one have to hand it to Agent No. 23 of the Empire of Mu, the shoregoing operative of a barbarically advanced civilization gathering itself from the bed of the Pacific to reclaim its former colonies which in the millennia since its Atlantean sinking had the temerity to strike out on their own as the nations of Earth, but he is played by Akihiko Hirata in a gold-glint of dark glasses and an out-of-season scarf tucked against the chill of the surface world and when he is held at gunpoint with his back to the tide-line, he only smiles in the slightest of farewells before leaping into the day-for-night-blue surf without even taking off his shoes. "He escaped into the sea?" His introductory getaway was more technically audacious when he drove a stolen taxi straight off a quay, but if he were human he would look like a suicide and once he's in the water instead he rejoins his phosphorescently submerged comrades without so much as catching a bullet. In a high-concept blend of lost-world pulp and post-war politics, he's a wonderfully uncanny touch without special effects, which is not to deprecate the film's ingenious panoply of images from hydronauts in a looseleaf of silver scales to a dragon coiling like a moray from the side of an oceanic trench to the crimson-clouded detonation of a geothermal sun. The people of Mu run hotter than seals: the sea smokes like a geyser around them, a wrench turns red-hot in the agent's contemptuous grasp; one of his colleagues appears capable of generating an eellike stunning charge. "We have special energy. It's useless." Elsewhere their civilization resembles a sort of Egypto-Minoan fusion by way of Verne and Haggard, its laser cannons sheathed in the coils of bronze ceti and the blinkenlights of its enormous computer banks carved around in cyclopean bas-relief. The empress of Mu looks like a nascent anime design with her hood of clementine-colored hair and new wave eyes, a casual ransom of pearls collared over her brilliant draperies and finely ringed mail. Humanity's last, best hope if it can be repurposed from a dream of militaristic nationalism to the defense of global ideals, the Atragon-class submarine of the title suggests a garfish down to its countershading, a sleek leviathan of spy-fi industry artfully equipped with a few indistinguishably magical tricks of its own. When Mu calls in its marker on the land, the inevitable destruction of Tokyo is a one-two doozy of practical and animated effects—business districts jolted to flinders by a precisely triggered earthquake, container ships set ablaze by an enemy sub's lancing ray—but the eye candy doesn't crowd out the food for thought when the sunken empire makes such a successfully fantastical double for the imperial past that Japan must explicitly repudiate in order to inhabit its international future. I wouldn't kick any of it out of bed for eating seaweed crackers, especially not the first glimpse of the sea-dragon Manda, a thick shield-wall of scales, seemingly endless, breathing. I just remain enchanted with the liminal simplicity of Agent No. 23 in his anonymous dark suit, a Magritte figure whose very ordinariness makes him surreal. His voice will narrate a history of his empire from a spool of 8 mm and deliver its modern ultimatum on reel-to-reel. "Admiral, this earthquake isn't a coincidence. Remember me?" He'd be namelessly memorable even if I hadn't loved his actor since Dr. Serizawa. This sea brought to you by my special backers at Patreon.
Atragon
What struck me the most was how willing Honda was to bet that the elements he found interesting--from miniature work to dancing to fish scale diving suits to thematic concerns, would be of interest to his audience.
Compared to a modern genre film, it felt interestingly de-protagonized, not merely in that the sense that Honda likes ensembles, but in these sense that I'm fairly certain if this story was made in contemporary Hollywood, the captain would have a pro forma "character arc" with "emotional" story beats leading him on a hero's journey to save a cat, or some such. As opposed to merely saying "no, why would I save the world" to his mentor and daughter, and then later, almost, if not entirely, arbitrarily agreeing to go deal with Mu.
I'm oversimplifying. Certainly, in context it's telling that he is the one who says "Let her die with her nation" There is some character work here. But it doesn't feel as centered and formulaic as in a modern flick.
Re: Atragon
I'm so glad! Thanks for coming back to let me know.
What struck me the most was how willing Honda was to bet that the elements he found interesting--from miniature work to dancing to fish scale diving suits to thematic concerns, would be of interest to his audience.
As an audience member who likes both miniatures and interrogations of national mythos, I felt catered to.
Certainly, in context it's telling that he is the one who says "Let her die with her nation" There is some character work here. But it doesn't feel as centered and formulaic as in a modern flick.
I appreciate you pointing it out because the film works so well in its more collective form, the absence of conventional beats had actually not registered with me. I did like the callback of the line about rusty armor which the retired rear admiral does not recognize because he wasn't there for the conversation.