This surprisingly militaristic science fiction movie from Toho Studios finds us surface dwellers under threat from the underwater survivors of the great sunken continent of Mu. Our only defence is the flying, burrowing, undersea-battleship 'The Atragon'*, which is being built at a secret underground shipyard on a tropical island. While Mu agents are searching for the ship and its designer, Captain Jinguji of the Imperial Navy (Jun Tazaki), to neutralize the threat it poses to their plans, Retired Admiral Kusumi (Ken Uehara), Jinguji's daughter Makoto (Yoko Fujiyama), and some reporters locate the secret base and endeavour to convince the Captain to help defend our world against the Mu invasion. Unusual amongst concurrent tokusatsu from Toho (e.g. Gorath 1962), Jinguji has no interest in helping the world but instead plans to use his super-battleship to restore the power of the Japanese Imperial Navy, despite the fact that the war has been over for almost 20 years. He changes his mind after a Mu agent destroys his base and kidnaps Makoto, and so the Atragon goes to war. Despite the fact that the Mu have numerous submarines armed with powerful lasers, flying machines, are capable of generating targeted earthquakes and are protected by Manda, an immense sea-serpent, they don't last long against the might of the Atragon. Considering this film was made less than two decades after Hiroshima, Jinguji's war is surprisingly all out and there is no discussion of negotiated 'peace', just victory vs. defeat. There are a number of scenes in which the Atragon 'away team' use their deadly zero-rays on Mu workers who seem to be only armed with knives and ultimately the entire underwater civilization is obliterated, presumably including non-combatants and children. Even by 1960's tokusatsu standards, the story is contrived and far-fetched. Production values vary: the Atragon may be iconic tokusatsu hardware but looks it looks a little ridiculous when flying and the battle with Manda is somewhat anticlimactic; on the other hand, many of the special-effects shots in the massive Mu power-plant are outstanding for a pre-CGI film. Famed daikaiju director Ishiro Honda does a pretty good job considering he's working with a story that is neither as interesting nor as compelling as his early Godzilla films or standalone science-fiction films such as 'Gorath' (1962) or 'The Mysterians' (1957). Akira Ifukube provided the excellent score, which is similar to his memorable work on in the Godzilla films. All in all, 'Atragon' is an entertaining yarn but it's not as good as most of the science fiction features produced by the legendary studio (although it's much better than 1969's 'Latitude Zero', with which it shares a number of features). *So named in the English-dubbed version I watched - the ship is variously known as "Go-tengo" and "Atoragon" in other versions.
Review of Atragon
