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Movies Forum Index » Movie Reviews Forum » Retrospective: Virus (1980)
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| Shane Burridge |
 Posted: Wed Apr 16, 2008 2:33 pm |
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Virus (1980) 155m
Another import bites the dust: as was their custom with many
a foreign film, U.S. distributors chopped up this Japanese
end-of-the-world epic and served it to audiences with nearly
45 minutes missing. What makes no sense in this instance is
that the producers had patently intended the film to be
Western-friendly by employing an international cast (Glenn
Ford, Robert Vaughn, George Kennedy, Olivia Hussey and
several others) and having most of the dialogue spoken in
English, mostly to the detriment of the Japanese actors who
were reciting their lines phonically. It wasn't until the next
millennium when movie fans had access to home cinema
systems that VIRUS (along with a back catalog of other
butchered, censored and re-edited foreign films) was able
to be enjoyed in its original form.
The world has been ravaged by pandemics several times in
films and books and their storylines generally detail the
accounts of survivors rebuilding communities in the face of
adversity, but author Sakyo Komatsu takes no prisoners in
his version: the virus HH88 is airborne and no-one is immune.
It quite simply kills every living thing it comes in contact with.
Komatsu, who has always had a thing about grand scale
destruction (from an entire country in JAPAN SINKS to an
entire planet in BYE BYE JUPITER) forces us to accept
something unimaginable - that without compromise the
virus will extinguish practically all life on Earth. From the
outset we're aware that the sum total of human beings left
on the planet amount to 863 people stationed on research
bases in Antarctica, a fact that affects our viewing of the
first half of the film, as we know that everyone we see will
die, and worse, that they have no knowledge of this
themselves. It's chilling to see a nurse escort a doctor away
from a room of doomed civilians into another room full of
doomed medical staff - the nurse, who in any other scenario
we might think of as a surviving heroine, is just as disposable
in this film as a background extra, and the next time we see
her she is steering a power boat into the oblivion of the ocean.
It's a haunting moment which leaves the final details of death
to our imagination, fittingly echoing the situation experienced
by the survivors on the research base, who know nothing
about their loved ones or exactly what is happening in the
outside world. Unfortunately, to emphasize this point, director
Kinji Fukasaku inserts a clumsy scene in which a group of
Antarctic survivors listen to a five-year-old boy (that is to
say, a voice actor unconvincingly portraying a five-year-old
boy) operating a ham radio, who delivers a speech to the
empty airwaves concluding with the declaration "I don't want
to be alone!", upon which he abruptly shoots himself dead
without even taking his finger off the transmission button.
Other unintentional laughs come from the bizarre casting of
Chuck Connors as a British submarine captain (his sole
attempt at sounding British is to say 'chaps' a few times) and
the rostered "distribution" of the few women on the Antarctic
base, who are outnumbered by the men by about forty to one.
This in itself is an intriguing plot development and a
provocative debate topic, but suffers from an unfortunate cut
to 'One Year Later' with a row of women contentedly cradling
babies in their laps.
The only way to see VIRUS is in its complete form and on the
biggest screen available (the photography of the opening credits
alone is worth setting up a projector, and there's not a special
effects shot to be seen). At two and a half hours it still might
not seem as 'big' as it should, but there's no short way to
document the end of the world and even serialized television
scenarios don't waste much time in getting the actual apocalypse
out of the way so that they can concentrate instead on the
aftermath and all those interesting character dynamics it brings
out. I find VIRUS balances the disaster and its consequences more
evenly than any other film of this type that I can think of. It's a
story of such tragic, inevitable decline that we almost become
skeptical of anything that might turn out right. The ending, epic
and primal, features a lone survivor spending four years walking
the distance of half a planet, north to south - it would be a
far-fetched notion if some rendezvous point hadn't been agreed
on beforehand, but a plausible enough rationale in the
circumstances: if you were the only survivor of an apocalypse,
would you sit still or undergo a quest to give yourself a sense of
purpose and an element of hope?
sburridge@hotmail.com |
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