Tag: review

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Family Matters Review: The Unfolding of Family Secrets

Following a screening in Italy, an audience member walked up to writer-director Pan Ke-yin and simply began to weep. They shared no common language, yet in that silent moment, they understood each other perfectly.

When I sat down with Pan to discuss his debut feature, Family Matters—fresh off major award wins in New York and Osaka—he recalled this as the most surprising reaction he’d received on the international circuit. It’s a vivid reminder of cinema’s unique capacity to bridge the gaps between us.

Family Matters earns that kind of emotional investment through an ingenious structural design. Rather than mapping a straightforward timeline, Pan fractures the narrative, presenting separated but tightly interwoven episodes about one family in a strictly non-chronological order.

The story starts with a quiet bureaucratic shock: the teenage daughter discovers she is adopted after requesting a copy of the family registry for a college tuition waiver. The film’s later chapters orbit this single, life-altering disclosure.

We jump into the past to observe the mother enduring the punishing physical and emotional toll of fertility treatments, culminating in a heavy, isolating decision regarding artificial insemination.

Providing a sharp, broadly comic contrast, another chapter follows the younger brother on the eve of his mandatory military service, as he clumsily attempts to forge a connection with a paternal figure he barely knows.

And, slipping through time, the lens shifts to the father, slowly sinking under the suffocating pressure of gambling debts.

This non-linear approach more than al trick. It allows Pan to to layer  secrecy and sacrifice, constantly shifting our sympathies and re-contextualizing the family’s history. As these characters painfully learn the need for  honest communication, they rediscover the bonds that refuse to let them completely drift apart.

The technical execution of Family Matters reflects Pan’s meticulous background as an award-winning film editor. Every aesthetic choice carries distinct narrative weight. The tight, claustrophobic framing inside the family home visually traps the characters alongside their unsaid burdens, while the shifting color palettes of the passing seasons map their internal realities against the external world.

On his press tour, Pan described himself  as a “timid person.” He admitted that stepping away from his established career in commercial editing to direct this feature was, in his words, “the bravest thing I have ever done in my life.”

By committing so fully to a deeply personal, culturally specific story, Pan has crafted a film that translates seamlessly across borders—proving that a precise, well-told family drama requires no translation.