Kinji Fukasaku’s attempt at making a masterpiece which the entire world could relate–a post-apocalyptic narrative involving an international cast set throughout the globe–unfortunately suffered a fate not unlike most of humanity during the film. After almost an hour of cuts, the main character being made subsidiary and the love subplot all but removed, Fukasaku’s film failed to garner an American release, leaving it for the straight-to-television hounds to devour the already decimated corpse of an otherwise well-handled cautionary tale, political indictment, and horror story of epic proportions.
After an unnamed American scientist creates a deadly virus, MM88, Russian and German operatives steal the fatal strand in order to formulate an antidote. However, before it can be safely delivered, it is accidentally unleashed and the world’s population, with the exception of less than a thousand scientists and diplomats residing in Antarctica, perish. Yet an earthquake is predicted to strike the United States, which will trigger the ARS–Automatic Reaction System–a doomsday machine, one of its targets being the Antarctic station containing the last humans on Earth. Can a Japanese and American reach Washington, D.C. in time to disengage the war machine and save humanity?
Fukasaku’s cautionary tale is one of the bleakest post-apocalyptic narratives ever set to film due to the fact that it houses not one apocalypse but two, the first being biological, the last being nuclear. However, though nihilistic, the work serves as a criticism for Cold War hostilities between American and Russia in that the former assumes that the MM88 virus was devised by the latter when, as the director makes explicitly clear at the film’s opening, the deadly strand was the result of an American scientist’s research.
Much like Fukasaku’s Tora! Tora! Tora!, Virus is dependent upon both cultural perspectives–the East and West–in order to achieve optimum effect as he uses the United States and Japan as his polarized representatives of the two diametrically opposed mindsets governing Earth. However, due to the horrendous amounts of cutting, resulting in what can only be described as cultural Bowdlerization, Fukasaku’s Eastern counterbalance is largely absent, making the work not only uneven, but almost exclusively American as the country is forced to serve as a microcosm for the world at large, thereby defeating the director’s intent as we watch as most of the scenes involving devastation revolve around American locales–namely New York and the Capitol–as we are left with only fleeting glimpses, not only of the plight of Tokyo, but of Moscow, London, Rome, and Paris.
Not only this, but plot plausibility is jeopardized as we are forced to question why Yoshizumi (Masao Kusakari) so adamantly demands to go on the suicide mission to disarm the ARS. This is due to the subplot involving his love for Marit (Olivia Hussey) and the death of his former bride and child having been deleted, as is the latter quarter of the film, which tells of his tale to reunite with his love. What remains is a neglected storyline that dangles from the shoestrings of an almost singular survival premise and plot, which hints that its genesis contained much more girth and weight.
Luckily for Kinji Fukasaku, he would release Battle Royale twenty years later, making him an infamous, yet household, name after having to share co-directing credits for Tora! Tora! Tora! ten years before with Toshio Masuda and Richard Fleischer. Though the largest budget in Japanese history at that time was granted the production, its prowess was all but neutered in the editing room. However, though molested, Virus still offers itself as one of the more interesting, viable, and effective post-apocalyptic narratives ever told.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
