I remember the afternoon of watching this movie especially vividly, as right in the middle of the flick our dog Lola (who we had to shortly thereafter take to the Humane Society because while she was sweet, she was huge and utterly retarded) took a massive liquid shit on our at-that-time still relatively white carpet (if you have no kids, but have friends who do, and think their house is a mess when you go over there, take pity on them, because it’s a losing fucking battle, my friends). That said, aside from spending a good 30 minutes scrubbing dog shit the consistency of room-temperature yogurt out of our carpet, I didn’t remember much about this movie until I watched it again tonight, because it’s been almost four years since I’ve seen it.

We start out with a hydroelectric engineer being kidnapped by a mysterious driver, and their car is hurled into Tokyo Harbor as a photographer Hatanaka (Tadao Takashima from Frankenstein Conquers the World) and his assistant (Yu Fujiki, the egg-loving reporter from Godzilla vs. Mothra) look on.

Turns out the car was being driven by an agent of the Mu Empire. Agent 23 (Akihiko Hirata from the original Gojira), to be precise. Seems the Mu Empire is searching for one Captain Jinguji (Jun Tazaki from War of the Garganutas), a submarine captain who escaped them at the end of WWII. They stole his submarine, the A-403, but he and his entire crew escaped, and not even his immediate superior, Adimral Kosumi (Ken Uehara from Mothra) knows where he is.

When the Japanese police capture who they believe to be a Muan agent, the man turns out to be from Jinguji’s crew. He wants Admiral Kosumi and his entourage to come with him to the secret base of Jinguji, where the one weapon that may save mankind from the Mu Empire is even now being perfected. The Gotengo, an incredibly powerful ATV warship capable of sea travel as well as flight and subterranean tunneling, at the command of a man whose mindset remains cemented in WWII some twenty years previous, is the only thing standing between mankind and subservience to a bunch of people wearing togas. Personally, I’d put my faith in the super-sub before Jet Jaguar, who stood between mankind and subservience to a similar, if much shabbier and more heavily back-haired, undersea race a decade later. But then, he had Godzilla to help him. Anyway, Captain Jinguji comes to renounce his imperialist ways after his daughter is kidnapped by the Muans and he sees how cruel and outdated imperialism is. He decides to use the Gotengo for the good of all mankind, and manages to single handedly destroy an entire civilization with it.

Despite boasting some of Toho’s best golden age model photography (including one of their more spectacular “upside-down film of dumping paint in a water tank” explosions), the movie is surprisingly character-oriented and much less concerned about action and set pieces. Even with the token kaiju (Manda the sea serpent), it’s more about Captain Jinguji (and vicariously all of Japan) coming to terms with the outcome of World War II than it is about monsters and science fiction action. Granted, it wasn’t unusual for Toho’s movies to include a social commentary to some extent, but it was largely environmental. The subtext about the dangers of blind nationalism and imperialism is a good deal more personal a demon to exorcise, I would imagine, than “don’t pollute or a giant blob of living sewage will eat you”.

Just three years before Atragon, the biggest political upheaval since the end of WWII hit Japan – the revision of the Japan-United States Mutual Security Assistance Pact, which wasn’t so much about mutual security as it was the U.S. saying, “Look, you guys are fucking crazy and if you have your own military you’ll probably try to take over the world again, so we’re going to neuter you and send some of our military over there to keep an eye on things. But don’t worry, guys, in forty years you’ll build a giant robot lizard with an obscenely powerful WMD in its chest and we won’t even ask questions.” They wouldn’t stop hating us quite so much until 12 years later when Okinawa was returned to Japanese sovereignty.

As much as the Japanese resented having their toys taken away and being told to go sit in their room until they were ready to come out and play nice with the other countries again, plenty of good came of it. Turning their industriousness and discipline inward to more constructive goals, Japanese economy and quality of life skyrocketed. They quickly became world leaders in car manufacturing, electronic goods, and steel working (which probably explains the loving, almost pornographic shots of giant machines being built in huge webs of scaffolding hung with wires and hoses and sparks shooting everywhere that continue to be so popular in many of these movies). If you ask me, quietly becoming one of the biggest economic powerhouses in the world and pretty much taking over the electronics industry single-handedly was a much cleverer path to world domination than blowing things up.

Atragon is one of Toho’s better non-Godzilla science fiction flicks, thanks to the strong acting (particularly Jun Tazaki) and characterization. It serves the dual purpose of working out some of the issues of Japan’s political unrest of the time, while providing a bit of fantasy wherein the old-school Japanese get to play superhero once more through the character of Jinguji and his Gotengo, coming to the rescue of a world that had long ago pushed them aside as relics of a bygone era of glory. It’s less meaningful now, with every other movie coming out of Japan involving their building some gigantic super weapon and no one batting an eye, but if you think about the context of the time the movie was released as you’re watching it, it’s powerful stuff. It’s a touching arc, despite the fact that Jinguji basically commits genocide at the end of the movie. Eh, what’re you gonna do?