Atragon and the Ghost of Empire

Ishirō Honda’s Atragon begins with a threat from a submerged past, a forgotten empire demanding total global surrender, but its real conflict is  internal.

As the Mu Empire strikes global targets with tectonic precision, Japan turns to a reclusive former Imperial Navy officer. Rumor has it he’s spent his exile building an ultra-powerful undersea warship, a vessel that might be humanity’s last line of defense. The complication? He remains loyal to the dead dreams of Japan’s  wartime empire.

What struck me most while watching this was Honda’s confidence. He bets everything on the idea that the elements he finds interesting—the meticulous, tactile miniature work; ritualistic dancing; shimmering fish-scale diving suits; dryly witty secret agents—will be just as interesting to his audience. He never feels the need to stick to a formula or  justify any of it.

Compared to a modern genre film, Atragon feels refreshingly de-protagonized. It isn’t just that Honda favors an ensemble cast; it’s that he resists the “hero’s journey saving a cat” schtick. If this were a contemporary Hollywood production, the naval captain would have a pro forma character arc—a series of calculated emotional story beats leading him to some redemptive moment.

Instead, Honda allows the Captain to serve as a jagged symbol of Japanese imperialism. When his mentor and daughter plead for help, his responses, “No, why would I save the world?” His eventual decision to fight Mu—itself a symbol of the very militarism Honda detested—feels if not  arbitrary, at least driven by internal  logic not a screenplay manual.

I’m oversimplifying, of course. There is a cold, hard character work at play here. It’s telling that he is the one who sets the Mu Empress free, saying  “Let her die with her nation.”.


The film might be more tightly plotted if Toho hadn’t rushed it. They wanted a New Year’s blockbuster, giving Honda less than four months from script approval in September 1963 to a late-December release. It became their most successful film that year—rough edges and all.

If Atragon is a jumble, it’s a purposeful one. It reflects Honda’s anti-war and internationalist convictions as openly than almost anything else in his filmography.If you want to see a vision of the future built on the ruins of the past, Atragon is on the Criterion Channel.