| Virus is based on
the novel Resurrection Day by one of
Japan's more pessimistic sci-fi novelists: Sakyo
Komatsu, whose novel Japan Sinks was
made into the two and a half hour disaster epic
The
Submersion of Japan (1973) by Toho Studios.
After the success of Submersion, then emerging
Nippon mega producer Haruki Kadokawa decided to
buy the rights to make Resurrection Day
into a movie, intending it to be his international
breakout. Kadokawa’s original choice for
director was John Frankenheimer, but Kadokawa
ended up choosing Japanese movie maverick Kinji
Fukasaku to direct instead. Armed with the
biggest budget in Japanese movie history and an
international cast, Fukasaku created one of the
biggest, grandest end of the world epics in film
history, a film which ended up not only being
his largest scale film, but also one of his finest
as well.
An American scientists develops
a horrific pathogenic viral strain dubbed MM-88.
The virus is stolen by East Germans. The American
government sends in a group of secret agents to
try and recover the Virus, but the agents’
plane experiances engine failure and goes down
and the vial containing the virus is shattered,
exposing it to the open air. A few months later,
the virus begins to kill livestock and then moves
on the humans, first becoming an epidemic in Italy,
leading it to be dubbed the “Italian flu”.
Before long, it spreads across the entire planet,
wiping out every human being in its path. In the
end, the only humans left alive are a group of
863 souls in the Antarctica, including only eight
women. The group soon has problems of it’s
own however, when Japanese scientist Yoshizumi
realizes that a coming earthquake in Washington
DC may very well trigger Washington’s missile
system or Automatic Reaction System (ARS), which
in turn will trigger the Soviet Union’s,
one of whose missiles is pointing directly at
the base. Yoshizumi and American Major Carter
are sent to Washington DC to disarm the missiles,
but is there enough time?
It may not be as pure Fukasaku
a film as say, Battles Without Honor and Humanity,
but Virus is an incredibly well made,
compelling and extremely bleak apocalyptic film.
Like say, Fukasaku’s earlier The Green
Slime, this is a US/Japanese co-production
with a mostly Caucasian cast. However, it’s
a full 180 degree turn away from the campiness
and silliness of that film. The first half of
the movie is the most powerful and full of poignant
and horrifying moments, such as the film’s
excellent opening scene in which Japanese researcher
Yoshizumi and the British submarine crew views
images of a now desolate Tokyo through a video
monitor, a sequence where the Japanese army in
Tokyo piles up the bodies of the city’s
dead and torches them with flamethrowers and a
sequence where a dying young boy contacts the
Japanese Antarctic base via radio. The second
half of the film set at the Antarctic base is
less powerful and is not quite up to the epic
first half, though it still boasts a nice, claustrophobic,
snowed in quality akin to John Carpenter’s
later The Thing. The film jumps back into form,
however, when it details Yoshizumi’s long,
slow trek from Washington D.C. to the southernmost
tip of South America.
The film is also very technically
accomplished. Daisaku Kimura's cinematography,
particularly in the Antarctica exteriors, is gorgeous.
Fukasaku’s direction is very slick, far
from the grittiness of his yakuza flicks, however,
it’s hardly dull like, say, his direction
in The Green Slime. The camera work is
a little static, but there is the occasional camera
movement here and there to compensate, much like
the direction in Fukasaku’s later Battle
Royale. The film also boasts a generally
decent musical score by Kentaro Haneda, though
the main theme, a sort of mournful late 1970's
rock ballad sung by relatively popular singer
Janis Ian, is a bit much.
The acting is something of a mixed
bag. Glenn Ford and Robert Vaughn both contribute
good performances, as the President of the United
States and a semi-heroic U.S. senator, respectively.
Henry Silva (of Ocean’s Eleven
and The Manchurian Candidate fame) is
extremely over the top as the crazed, war mongering
head of the military, a performance somewhat reminiscent
of Sterling Hayden’s performance as General
Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s satirical masterpiece
Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb. Rifleman star
Chuck Connors is completely miscast as a British
character who acts and speaks as American as apple
pie. It’s the same story with Olivia Hussey.
She gives a decent performance but is not even
remotely convincing as a Norwegian character.
Bo Svenson (star of the latter two Walking
Tall films and yet another future Kill
Bill star involved with Fukasaku long before
he was involved with Tarantino) is his usual tough
guy self. Masao Kusakari’s acting is somewhat
problematic. His command of the English language
(which sadly is the language of at least 60% of
his dialogue) kind of leaves something to be desired.
It’s such a problem in one scene, a scene
where Yoshizumi describes his dead wife and child
to Marit, Olivia Hussey’s character, that
the scene, which should be quite emotional and
poignant and is staged as such, becomes quite
hilarious. Sonny Chiba and Ken Ogata are barely
in the film at all, but Ogata (who had just played
perhaps his greatest role in Shohei Imamura’s
Vengeance is Mine and would later team
up with Fukasaku and Chiba again for Samurai
Reincarnation) gets a fairly noticeable role
in the Japanese version of Virus and his acting
is highly professional. Yumi Takigawa, who played
Rikio Ishikawa’s spouse in Fukasaku‘s
Graveyard of Honor five years prior,
gives a very good performance as Yoshizumi’s
pregnant wife who plays a large part in the Japanese
version of the film but can only be glimpsed slightly
in the film’s US version.
In terms of character development,
the main focal point of Virus, at least
in the Japanese version, is the character of Yoshizumi.
It is revealed through flashbacks that he made
a decision to leave his pregnant wife, Noriko,
in Japan while he went to Antarctica. It's a decision
that comes back to haunt him as MM88 soon spreads
through Japan, causing his wife to lose her child
from stress and eventually commit suicide. After
he falls in love with Marit and ends up stuck
in Washington D.C. after failing to stop the ARS
from being launched, he decides not to make the
same mistake again and spends about five years
walking all the way from Washington to the southernmost
tip of South America.
Sadly, the film was not the runaway
success that Kadokawa had expected. It lost much
of its box office in Japan to the likes of Akira
Kurosawa’s Kagemusha
(1980) and Star Wars Episode V: The Empire
Strikes Back and thus failed to recoup the
enormous cost of its production. When the film
hit US shores (on pay TV and video only), it did
so in a version that not only cut out 45 minutes
but also completely reorganized the film, nearly
leaving the character of Yoshizumi’s wife
on the cutting room floor completely and reediting
the film into a linear fashion. The US version
also wrecks complete havok on Yoshizumi as a character,
essentially relegating Masao Kusakari from the
lead and focal point of the film to a supporting
role. His motivations are much, much clearer in
the Japanese version compared with the US version.
Some prints even cut out Yoshizumi’s “walk”
completely and end with everyone dying in the
nuclear holocaust, which completely ruins the
message of the film. Overall, If you have only
seen the US cut of Virus, you have barely
seen the film at all. It is a truly epic disaster
film and no doubt the finest of all the Sakyo
Komatsu adaptations, marred only by perhaps a
few stiff performances here and there.
|
(4.5/5)