Virus (1980)

A film about a virulent new virus which kills just about everyone it infects, (not to mention vertebrate animals as well), for which there is no known vaccine spreads across the world, precipitating the collapse of civilisation.  Possibly not the best thing to be watching right now, but it has been thirty years, or more, since I last saw Virus (or Day of Resurrection, the literal English translation of its original Japanese title).  So, I decided to give it another watch as it is currently widely available on various streaming services.  Now, I have to confess, that I didn't really rate it very highly on my first viewing.  I was much younger then and overly concerned with more superficial aspects of film-making, like whether the hardware on display was accurate (I was deeply unimpressed by the 'nuclear' submarine which was clearly a diesel sub of WWII vintage, not to mention the casting of Chuck Connors as a Royal Navy officer), or whether things like political and military procedure shown were factually correct.  Moreover, what I saw back then wasn't the complete film.  Rather, it was a severely cut down 'international' version of the film, which had nearly three quarters of an hour of footage excised, (there was an even more severely truncated version shown on US TV, missing more than an hour of footage).  The end result was somewhat disjointed affair which, despite boasting some reasonably well known US actors (Glenn Ford, Robert Vaughn, George Kennedy, Bo Svenson and Henry Silva, for instance), featured some awkward and clunky dialogue and some clumsy plotting.Yet, despite all of this, there was something about Virus which has haunted me ever since that viewing.  I hoped that a second viewing might pin down exactly what it was about the film which had had this effect on me.

Thankfully, the version currently available on streaming services is the original Japanese version, running over two and a half hours.  It is a very different film.  The excised sequences give the film a far smoother feel, not to mention filling in vital details.  They also return the film's real protagonist, the Japanese scientist Dr Shuzo Yoshizumi, to a central role.  In the shortened version of the film, he only becomes a significant character in the film's second half, whereas here he is clearly central to the film from the outset.  But that, of course, was the 'problem' that international distributors had with the original version of Virus in the first place: despite the international cast and locations, it was actually a Japanese film, the most expensive Japanese film ever made up to that date, in fact.  For a widespread international release, it was obviously decided that the best strategy would be to try and disguise the film's Japanese origins as much as possible, which meant cutting the numerous scenes in Japan (and in Japanese) from the film, pretty much in their entirety.  Which resulted in a film with no real focus, as the original pivotal character - Yoshizumi - all but vanishes from the first half of the movie.  It also resulted in an episodic feel to the film, as the focus switches from dramas at the White House, to an Antarctic base to a British sub and so on, with little feeling of continuity, the narrative baton being passed from one group of characters to another with little continuity between them.

The original version manages its narrative far more effectively by firmly establishing from early on  part of the narrative at the Japanese Antaractic base, at which Yoshizumi is stationed, makes the shift of the action to the Antaractic later in the film feel less jarring.  Likewise, the original pre-credits sequence is a flash-forward, with Yoshizumi aboard the British submarine, on a reconnaissance mission to Japan, to take air samples to see if the virus is still widespread.  Not only does this firmly establish Yoshizumi as the lead character from the outset, but it also makes the subsequent introduction of the sub and its crew feel less arbitrary, as well as setting up the premise that, thanks to virulence of the virus - witnessed by the scenes of a devastated and lifeless Tokyo, its citizens reduced to skeletal corpses - humanity is now confined to the Antarctic (extremely low temperatures render the virus dormant).   The missing Japanese scenes also flesh out the narrative, focusing on the human aspects of the pandemic.  While the scenes concerning the pandemic in the international version are all broad brush, looking at the bigger picture of the virus' spread and impact, mainly via the attempts of the US government to deal with the crisis, the Japanese sequences focus on an individual hospital, where Yoshizumi's girlfriend works as a nurse, and the chaos which ensues as it is quickly overwhelmed by the virus' victims, with finally even the staff succumbing to it.  Yoshizuma's guilt over leaving his pregnant girlfriend behind - she never wanted him to take up the Antarctic post - becomes an important theme in this version of the film, (he never knows that she lost the baby - which apparently wasn't his - due to stress brought on by dealing with the virus at the hospital).

Most significantly, the original version presents a fuller version of Yoshizuma's climactic four year walk from Washington, (where he was on an unsuccessful mission to prevent an automated nuclear exchange between the arsenals of the US and USSR which threatened the Antarctic base), to Tierra del Fuego, where the survivors of the base are now located.  During this journey, as he wanders through a corpse strewn landscape, he expiates his guilt, finally reunited with the female Norwegian base member and her child.  All of which isn't to say that Virus, in its original form is perfect.  The film still has problems.  Much of the English-language dialogue still sounds awkward, presumably the result of having been translated directly from the Japanese and the narrative still feels meandering in places.  Moreover, quite a few of the plot devices do feel too obviously contrived - particularly the business of the nuclear exchange and the mission to Washington DC, which clearly exists primarily to provide the film with some kind of 'action' climax.  (Although, like other more action-orientated sequences, it feels rather perfunctory in execution).  Many of the numerous supporting characters also feel barely developed, many barely enjoying sufficient screen time to register on the viewer, let alone play a properly significant role in the sprawling narrative.  This latter aspect is one of the film's most frustrating - it touches upon so many interesting ideas, but never seems to fully develop any of them, giving the impression that the film's makers couldn't make up their minds exactly what it was meant to be about.  Starting as a disaster film, it then incorporates conspiracy thriller aspects before becoming a post-apocalyptic  story, looking as if it is about to turn into an exploration of how a new society, with an imbalance of men and women, should be organised, before pushing this into the background in favour of an action climax.  Just one of these strands could have made a movie in themselves, but instead they are mashed together in a rather unsatisfactory fashion.

Despite all of this,Virus, in its full form, is a mightily impressive film.  Particularly impressive is its refusal to sensationalise the subject matter - the spread of the virus is shown, as noted, in broad brush terms, with the focus being on the attempts to contain and treat it, either at the macro level of the White House, or the more intimate setting of the Japanese hospital.  We aren't subjected to too many harrowing scenes of individual victims suffering horrible deaths - the film's impact comes from the way in which it conveys the sheer, global, scale of the disaster.  Many individual scenes are very affecting on the human level, (Yoshizuni's girlfriend's suicide alongside the young son of one of his Antarctic colleagues when they find themselves, seemingly, the last people alive in Tokyo, for instance), and collectively give the film its emotional charge.  It also feels very prescient - parts of it make for uncomfortable viewing in present circumstances: the first viral outbreaks are in Italy (it consequently becomes referred to as 'Italian Flu'), for example.  The inadequate response from many governments (particularly the US government) ring true.  While Glenn Ford's fictional US President is more rational than his current real life counterpart, his senior general is obsessed with the idea of there having to be a tangible 'enemy' in this war, convinced that the virus is a biological weapon emanating from the USSR.  (It is, in fact, a biological weapon, but one which has originated as part of a US programme).  The difficulty in producing a vaccine is another aspect which rings true today, (in the film, it takes several years to produce a vaccine which can protect the survivors, an early version enabling Yoshizuni to go on his mission to Washington).

But did I identify what it was that haunted me about even the truncated version of Virus that I saw thirty odd years ago?   Well, yes.  What the film conveys so well (and even more so in its complete version) is the sheer fragility of human existence.  I think that is what struck me most in both viewings - it is the way in which, so quickly, humanity is reduced to a vestige by an intangible enemy.  All of civilisation becomes just a handful of people living in huts in an Antarctic wilderness.  More than that, it conveys the trauma of those survivors, having to come to terms with the knowledge that everything and everyone that they know has ceased to exist, that there is, in truth, no world to return to beyond their freezing exile.  The film puts it all over: the guilt, the grief, the despair, the feelings of utter pointlessness.  There's no doubt that I liked Virus a lot better the second time around - even though the version I saw (on Popcornflix), for some reason, didn't have English sub-titles on the Japanese sequences, although I got the gist of what was going on reasonably well.  Seen in its entirety, I can overlook that submarine, (in reality it was a Chilean Navy sub, originally built for the US Navy in WWII and actually plays two different boats in the film), and even Chuck Connors as as a Brit didn't jar so much.  (He wisely didn't attempt any sort of accent).  Even the awkward dialogue in the English language sequences didn't seem so bad - the cast does the best it can with it and the results are more than passable.  The Japanese cast, even when speaking English, are uniformly good.  All in all, Virus, in retrospect, is a film well worth watching and well overdue a critical reappraisal.