Daikaiju Varan (1958)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

87 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I feel like this film tends to be overlooked both when considering the kaiju film canon as a whole and also when thinking about what kaiju themselves mean, and have meant, from the earliest instances to today. It feels wrong to start a review of a film that I love by mentioning an inferior version of it, but I think some of this overlooking might be because it received a re-cut into Varan the Unbelievable four years after its release that is widely acknowledged as completely awful (I've never seen it, but boy have I seen some bad dubs in my day, so I can imagine). Looking at Daikaiju Varan on its own presents us with a story that has a solid place in this corner of history.

The film opens with a shot of a rocket ascending into space. This is early days for kaiju cinema - Godzilla came out only four years previously, Rodan only two, but Toho had already put out several other kaiju films between those bigger names that are less widely acclaimed outside of Japan, and Varan is one of them. Godzilla, as we all know, is a movie that has its origins in the potential for new technology to do harm to humanity, and for humanity to do harm to itself by bringing about increasingly powerful weapons in response to any new threat. This is also largely what Varan is about, but with a little more nuance in some places and much less in others. As the rocket goes up, the narration brings us into the story by telling us what audiences at the time were undoubtedly all feeling in the backs of their minds: We are in a new age, we're reaching further and further out beyond our own planet, into space, inventing new things and uncovering secrets of the natural world that we never could have imagined just a few years ago. But what the narration doesn't talk about, and yet what the film itself will go on to show us, is that there are secrets in virtually our own backyard that exist and have existed for eons that we have been blind to.

I think that the presence of Varan as a creature is a message about how there is more than one way of seeing things. Even in the space age, the physical and "supernatural" world overlap. Varan is interpreted by the scientists who catch wind of it as an ancient reptile, living secluded at the bottom of a lake for millions of years. But Varan is also literally a god. Varan is worshipped as the God of Baradagi by the inhabitants of an isolated village where things that modern society has tried to move on from still exist - this is foreshadowed by the sighting in the village of a butterfly thought only to exist in Siberia at the beginning of the film. Varan is both of these things at once. I truly believe this is what the film itself intends to convey, even though its main characters all vocally take the stance that such things as local gods and rituals to appease them are nonsense that it's hard to believe anyone still puts stock in. I love this movie because it leaves Varan to exist on both of those levels: To be named, quantified, taxonified, and seen as Enemy #1, and to be placated, respected, prayed to.

This is a good movie to remind people that tokusatsu is not only monster movies and sci-fi. The term just means "special effects", and a lot - a LOT - of that is war miniatures. Tanks, planes, boats, weapons, all of that. This is an area that Toho had been extremely prolific in (I've seen a lot of these films - some of them are very good!), and it really shows in Varan. I can't stress enough how good the miniatures are. The military response to Varan's arising pretty much takes up the whole of the film and is nearly nonstop, with little room for considering implications the way it's done in Godzilla - although that is an element of this, and I don't want to overlook it. There definitely is a reluctance and fear about using more powerful weapons than anything created before on Varan, and I think the production restraints that I'll get into in a minute are a big part of why this is not delved into further.

I also want to talk about Varan itself, because as far as kaiju go it is under-appreciated. Haruo Nakajima is in the suit and gives easily as good of a performance as he did as Godzilla or any of the other many, many suits he piloted. (Katsumi Tezuka also filmed the water scenes, which should not be ignored because kaiju water scenes suck to do.) I love the design of Varan and I love how the camera seems to love it too: We get so many close-up shots of its face, and a lot of opportunity to study how distinctive and deliberate its sculpting is. It looks mythical, ancient, and unparalleled. Varan is intended to be reptilian, but its posture and bearing feel like something else entirely its own. Nakajima has said that he looked to real animals to inspire his kaiju performances, and that's definitely there in Varan, but there's also something more mysterious about it that I really enjoy. There was a big push to get Varan into the Heisei era in the initial drafts for what eventually became Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, and unfortunately none of it ever came to fruition, but it did produce some gorgeous concept art including this maquette which I've always thought was beautiful.

There's this really great moment where, after an already-significant barrage of attacks against it, Varan suddenly decides it's had enough of the village and literally spreads its wings to fly out of the lake and towards the wider world. Everyone stands by, stunned, because neither we the viewers nor any of the scientists or worshippers knew until then that Varan could fly. In the same way that the rocket presents laypeople unaware of just how advanced science had gotten with a new view of reality, a Varan capable of flight presents all bystanders with a re-alignment of where they are in, for lack of a better term, the food chain. There are many other "great moments" in this film, too many to individually mention, but I also love every time we get a close-up shot of Varan crushing a tank - such an explicit depiction of "modern" technology failing against nature and time.

There are also many faults to this, mostly due to a rushed production that was the result of those earlier films such as Godzilla and Rodan being such international hits. This was intended to be a three-part TV series (god, can you imagine?) but the time and budget were not there, so it got smashed together into one feature-length film. It is visually muddy in the way of even slightly earlier films, as it was filmed in black-and-white instead of color, but I personally tend to enjoy that, especially in genre film; it gives a feeling of melancholy and sometimes foreboding that color does not. I think the lackluster ending - the only part of this I really disliked - was more than likely also a result of the less-than-ideal production. I've heard that Ishirō Honda wishes he could re-do this one and I can only daydream about what this could have been like with even more resources and flexibility behind it.