Atragon - Watered Down

Can I just never be excited? Is that just never allowed? I think so. 'Cause outside of Mothra, whenever I'm excited to watch a movie for the first time in this series, I just leave upset. So, guess what happened this time? If your answer is "You were excited to watch Atragon for the first time and you were looking forward to it hoping it would be another hidden gem, but instead you watched an uninspired mess of a movie that is in general not recommended," then hooray! Your guess is 100% correct!

Strange occurrences plague Japan! Rogue taxi drivers drive into water with passengers and killing them! What look to be creatures are appearing from the deep! The ancient Kingdom of Mu has returned to the surface after years underwater and is back to let the world know they are back for good and ready to reclaim the Earth as their original home that they occupied. It's either submit or face their god Manda! Who will win? Humanity or the underwater empire?!

Alright, so, I'm not gonna beat around the bush: this one is bad. So, before I really dive into why, let's discuss the very minimal positives. Starting with costume and set design! The Muans are a big highlight in this movie from the design perspective. We all kind of have ideas of the wear and attire of places like Atlantis and supposed lost continents and cities, and the look the Muans have in Atragon is pretty dang good. We don't exactly get to spend as much time underwater as I would have liked, but what we see is really cool. Some pretty solid wigs, costumes and details in the background, everything revolving around the look of the Muans is pretty perfect. And there's even more I don't have screencapped here that's fun to look at. 'Cause despite looking super ancient and living underwater, they're super advanced. They actually say that straight up in this movie that living underwater they established such incredible technology that they INVENTED THEIR OWN SUN. I'm not going to question the physics considering the series I'm dealing with, but it's pretty dang good stuff. The Muans are a pretty dang cool society to watch. Well, that is, they are MOSTLY fun to watch. Because there are a lot of problems with this movie and unfortunately, the Muans are certainly one of them.



Atragon has a lot of problems, but since it'd be exhausting to talk about them all in detail, I'm going to try to be succinct. So, first and foremost, outside of costume and set design, the Muans are bad antagonists. They're really nothing but talk. I mean, almost literally. Oh, in the end of the movie they make one attack on the surface world, but before that, they just send tapes to the surface basically being like "We're the Muans, be afraid!" But when you're just told be afraid without anything to back it up, you get absolutely nothing. They just kind of do nothing in the bottom of the ocean and expect you to be scared. A reason that Godzilla and all the other monsters work as antagonists in their movies is because they initially demonstrate their power. Godzilla sank ships. Rodan ate the entire focus of the first act. The Muans just kind of bow all day and then say they're big and scary. They're TERRIBLE as any kind of villain or antagonist. Another character who suffers from this bad villainy is Manda. Manda is hyped up A LOT in the first two thirds of the movie, so when he does show up at around 20 or 30 minutes before the movie is over, he's clearly an afterthought. He barely gets any screentime and is killed in the most pathetic way possible, being frozen to death and just kind of abandoned next to the Muan city. Everything about the Muans that isn't costume and set suffers!

The bigger problem of Atragon however is that it is an absolute SNORE and it has no idea what it wants to do with itself. Nothing even remotely interesting happens in this movie for a really long time. There is a fight on a beach as a bunch of Muans rise out of the ocean at one point. It isn't scary, it isn't threatening, it's just another mundane scene where you sit looking at the screen saying "I get it, they're supposed to be the bad guys. So what?" And that so what basically never gets answered. The Muan secret agent gets away and we don't hear from him for awhile until they go underwater for the first time in the whole movie what feels like 20 minutes later. The movie has no idea what it's focused on, because it doesn't even have a real true protagonist. We do get introduced to Hachiro Jinguchi (played by Jun Tazaki), who has an interesting backstory. Abandoning the Second World War and refusing to fight for Japan or the world unless it is the Imperial Japan. And he doesn't really develop at all. Yeah, he uses his ship, the Gotengo, to fight the Muans. But it takes so long to introduce him and he's not that likable, that it feels more like filling in dots than properly introducing characters.

The BIGGEST problem with the movie overall is it doesn't know what it wants to be. Does it want to be a commentary on war? If so, it's not a very good one. Does it basically want to be an alien invader film underwater? Sure, it kinda does that. It's sloppy, poorly made, and in no way threatening. Does it want to be a big budget monster movie like Toho's other classics? Well, clearly no. Atragon has no focus, no strong characters to follow, and no reason to keep watching. This movie is, in my opinion, the most flawed one we've watch so far. If you can find something you can enjoy out of it, I'm happy for you. As for me, I got nothing. My sole positive however is this: I know it won't be the worst movie we watch. That will come in a little while.

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Tomorrow is an absolute delight, and I really am glad to finish up this review so I can get right into tomorrow. Alright, I can't hide my excitement anymore: TOMORROW IS MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA!