Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974)

directed by Toshio Masuda

Japan

114 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I wasn't happy about having no other option than to watch this in such poor quality that I could barely make out any of the actors' faces, but apparently Toho pulled this and doesn't want to acknowledge it due to its depiction of mutated humans. I'm not sure what about mutated humans is so bad to warrant banning a film entirely, but that's how it goes.

So this is a movie that came out at a time when environmental concerns were becoming more mainstream, and it was also clearly made by somebody who felt passionate about the looming possibility of full-scale societal destruction due to a number of mounting factors. And I mean really, really passionate about that. It is a little bit weird that the prophecies of Nostradamus are the vehicle used for conveying this environmentalism message, instead of, like, science, but hey whatever. There's science here, don't get me wrong, but it always falls back on "oh man, Nostradamus warned us about this" like it really believes in what he was writing.

The film also takes certain stances that... I'm not really going to criticize, because like I said, this is very of its time and also of its place; it's specific to Japan and it doesn't make sense to map my American feelings about the government onto it. However, it seems to have this weird idea that the people and the government need to work in tandem, and that a significant portion of the blame for global catastrophe could or should be shouldered by regular citizens, which is pleasantly optimistic (at least the first half is) but untrue of any government and any citizenry. It's a weird concept to imagine people and government bolstering each other and each benefiting from the other, because government is inherently unequal. As long as people are elected to the top, there will be people who have financial, personal, or moral investment in keeping other people at the bottom. And the easiest way to do that is to let their houses rot around them and their families be poisoned by toxic air and water.

There's also this sense of naïveté that I see in a lot of mid-to-late-20th century environmentalism where the underlying theme, after all possible solutions are trotted out and the danger of ignoring them is proven, is "oh, but also we have time, we'll turn back before it's too late". It's easy to judge this when you look back from the hell year 2022, and maybe in 1974 it did genuinely look like a brighter future was inevitable once we came to our senses, but... the fact that people ever believed we would come to our senses seems absurd and misguided at best. I really do see this a ton in media from the 70s; people really thought that eventually we would wake up, that it was a given that with a little work we'd someday help all the people to see how our treatment of the planet was wrong and that we need to change, and a change would then be implemented that would set us back on track. Obviously that has never happened and probably will never happen unless we abolish capitalism, classism, and wipe our brains of the fixation with money and power that we've had for centuries.

Weird as it is, though, this is also a Toho film, with their signature practical effects excellence. So there's a ton in here that would feel more at home in a Godzilla movie than whatever the hell this is. It's a dead serious film and I really do respect what it has to say, even if it doesn't necessarily hold up in certain areas, but I also respect the giant slugs and vastly more silly-looking giant bats. I do not respect its depiction of deranged, cannibalistic natives; as I've brought up before, Toho films have a problem with that. It reaches for some low-hanging fruit at times especially with its constant barrage of images of real-life human suffering and its repeated mantra of "how terrible would that be if it happened to US?". Plus there's an attempt to jam in more human drama just so the whole thing isn't one never-ending downslide into death and destruction, and boy, is it boring.

I don't know if I could actually recommend this to anyone unless you have very specific taste, but it's a curiosity that I wish were more widely available. I've heard secondhand that it's the kind of thing that people of a certain age had the joy of accidentally catching on late-night television and were scarred for life from it, forever stuck with bizarre memories of this bizarre movie and unable to satisfy them due to the movie all but vanishing. Once it devolves into showing nothing but massive frenzies of looting and rioting it gets extremely boring for a stretch, but in the end it does wrap back around into something genuinely heartfelt and real. There is a core of urgency to this even if it's hokey and dated.