Retrospective: Virus (1980)

[Shane Burridge]

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 at hotmail.com




_________________________________________________________________
Looking for a place to manage all your online stuff? Explore the new Windows Live 
http://www.windowslive.com/Explore