Director: Kinji Fukasaku
Writers: Kôji Takada, Kinji Fukasaku, and Gregory Knapp from a novel by Sakyo Komatsu
From: Chilling
Watch: archive.org
Nearly all life on Earth is wiped out by a manufactured virus. Now the final 863 living people have to find a way to survive on Antarctica.
The movie doesn’t have a plot in the way a lot of these genre pictures do, ie. no main character facing off against a specific challenge in hopes of achieving their goal. Instead, when the movie begins in 1983, the world has ended, wiped out by a virus that’s still infecting the air. We flashback to a year before and learn the origin of the virus. All the nations of the world had agreed to stop developing biological weapons, but the United States, fearing that it no longer had first-strike capabilities against the Soviet Union, was working on one: MM-88.
MM-88, we’re told, is a mimic. It can graft itself to other viruses heightening their lethality and contagion. You can’t develop a vaccine because it grows too quickly. A scientist has smuggled MM-88 out of the US in hopes of getting it to the foremost virologist in the world, but the smugglers transporting it end up crashing and releasing the virus. What follows for the next hour is the intractable decay of the world.
The only survivors are 863 people who had been working in Antarctica—855 men and 8 women. They have to figure out how they’re going to survive now that they’re the only people left and the rest of the world is uninhabitable.
Then the main-ish character, Dr. Yoshizumi, a seismologist, reveals that a major earthquake is about to hit Washington DC. Since the US activated their Automatic Response System before the end of the world, the earthquake will be read as a Soviet missile strike. The ARS will then launch all the nuclear warheads at targets in the USSR which will then activate the Soviet ARS, launching all their missiles—including one at the Antarctic base where the last of humanity lives. Dr. Yoshizumi accompanies a former soldier in hopes of getting into the bunker under the White House and disarming the ARS before the earthquake hits.
And the movie actually goes on from there, but I won’t say what happens. As far as plot goes, those are the basic events of the movie, but it’s not a movie that’s very focused on events. Instead it’s exploring the various ways the world would fall apart and how people would react to it. So in some ways it’s a zombie movie without the zombies. In others it’s a deep psychological drama about various characters coming to terms with loss and moving on from that.
So it’s interesting, and I’d even say it’s pretty good, but it’s also very strange as a film. It feels like a TV miniseries cut into one long feature and the earthquake twist at the end comes across as being thrown in to both justify which characters have been getting the most attention as well as all the implicit criticism of the military that’s present in the first half. “Why so much discussion of the ARS while this disease is consuming the globe? And why are we following a seismologist in Antarctica?” Gotta bring them both together.
Another aspect holding the film back a bit is how televisual it feels. Not until the last 10-15 minutes do we get shots that are really cinematic and visually striking. Everything looks like it was made-for-TV. Granted, having George Kennedy play a major role through the second half amplifies that sense. However, this was, at the time, the most expensive Japanese movie ever made and it runs just over two-and-a-half hours long. That something so epic in scope would look so flat on screen is a disappointment.
One content issue I had was with there only be eight women. One of them is sexually assaulted, which isn’t shown, but the new ruling council has to figure out a way to deal with it. Their solution seems to be tasking the women with being the breeding stock of the community, having scheduled sexual encounters with all the men. The details, like many of the details in the movie, are glossed, but the implication is that since men can’t be expected to not have sex, the women will have to find a way to manage things.
I think it’d be more likely that the men would have to queer the fuck up or just get along with not having sex. Even making repopulation a priority, which would have to be a consideration, a person can’t be pregnant with more than one person’s child at a time. The population, even in this desperate situation, could still practice consent. It’s a very small part of the movie and doesn’t really derail things, but it provides a pretty big bump, especially since the conversation is introduced through a woman having been sexually assaulted. Of all the ways the movie could have handled it (and, at over two-and-a-half hours, could have just cut it), this felt like a particularly poor choice.
All that said, I kind of recommend this. It’s not edge-of-your-seat stuff, but it’s not boring either. The acting is usually very good—subtle and evocative—when it’s not hilariously shouty as it is whenever the US military is on-screen. Also, you get to hear a five-year-old (who’s so not five) shoot himself over ham radio. The moment is supposed to be emotionally destructive but it’s just hilarious.
Also, unique among the Misery Mill flicks, I didn’t watch the Mill Creek version of this. The movie is in the public domain in the United States and the full uncut version is on archive.org, so I watched that one. I don’t know if the version on the Chilling set was the shorter US cut or the shorter still TV cut (though I’m betting the latter), but I didn’t even think twice about it. The archive.org copy is a great print, has every scene, and benefits from being long.
The movie is a meditation on extinction, and thus life, and so needs to run in an extended and deliberate way. So I recommend it, cause it’s a good flick, but make sure you have an afternoon free for it.
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