The Great Buddha: Arrival (2018)

directed by Hiroto Yokokawa

Japan

60 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is going to be a short, quick review because I have other stuff to do, but I liked this film so much that I would feel bad if I didn't say something about it. The version with English subtitles that I watched will give you some background before the film, but basically, to recap, The Giant Buddha Statue's Travel Through The Country (sometimes also known as "The Great Buddha Arrival") was a film, made and released in 1934, that is important to the history of tokusatsu. It doesn't feature any kaiju, but as the title would imply, it concerns a giant buddha statue that becomes animate, and the work put into miniatures and presence of a human in costume as a giant being means that it's generally considered the "first"* tokusatsu movie. Unfortunately it is also lost due to the Pacific War; no one alive has seen footage of it, but a few tantalizing still pictures do survive.

There's something really striking about how important and respected the 1934 Giant Buddha is, despite being almost entirely lost with no chance of ever being found. It's something that at this point is so far in the past that no one living has any memory of it. Of course modern art - including film - learns from older art, but typically we learn from it because we still have older art to look at and interpret. Nobody has any way of viewing The Giant Buddha anymore, but it's still part of the tokusatsu canon.

So this film posits itself to be a remake, but in reality what it is is weirder and more difficult to pin down than that. It opens with Akira Takarada (RIP - it's great to see him here, and he doesn't remotely look 84) talking about The Giant Buddha, which was released the year he was born. In the fictional version of events The Great Buddha: Arrival sets up, the earlier film was apparently a recreation of a time when the director witnessed firsthand the Great Buddha of Shugakuen (currently in Tokai City) standing up and walking about. This does not happen in a vacuum, there are historical events occurring at the time that are important to the plot, but that I am not familiar with; evidently there was a rash of suicides around this time that are also covered in the 1934 film, and the director was about to become one of them when the Buddha became animate. So it's not like the statue is walking for no reason, there is a connection between it and the sphere of human activity. I would go further into that if I could, but I'm not aware of it beyond what this film explains to me.

In The Great Buddha: Arrival, the main character - played by the real-life writer of the film - works at a film studio and is compiling all of these snippets of research together to make something like a documentary about the lost film. So this is a half-documentary, half-sequel; again, the way it's so hard to classify is why I loved this film so much. It doesn't simply take an idea and expand upon it. It does that and it takes the existence of the original film itself and envelops it in its own concept, bringing the lost film into something a little different from reality, creating this story where - because there is now nothing left to dispute it - the existence of the film is itself an element in the film's mythos. And while all of this is unfolding, the Buddha statue once again begins to walk.

Narratively, I will admit this film is all over the place. There really aren't any "characters" since it's filmed with something close to a faux-documentary style, and the characters that are there don't actually talk to each other much about what's going on. The two film studio workers have more dialogue about the bike one of them is trying to strap a jet engine onto(???) than the Buddha, or the lost film. Much of the dialogue here is sound bites of Takarada and an huge cast of famous tokusatsu actors from the previous century talking about the Buddha, or about the lost film. And honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way. I didn't need more plot, or more intriguing characters. It is enough for this movie to be exactly how it is.

I guess I'm really not even talking about this movie itself, now. I've been thinking a lot recently about how important it is that there is a current generation making movies like this. I may be overstepping here, as my home country's film industry sucks and I can't lay any claim to tokusatsu other than being a huge fan of it, but I just feel like it's absolutely crucial as time goes on that the memory of the origins of the medium are not forgotten, and are continually retold and reinvented. And I mean, this really goes for any type of film from anywhere in the world. The people who made the movies are going to be outlived by them, and so preserving them and continuing to learn from them and keeping an open dialogue between films from the past and today's culture is what we have to do. Even a film that is lost can remain "alive" if we keep engaging with it.

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*With some qualifications. Reminder that "tokusatsu" just means "special effects", and it's a technique, not a genre; saying this is not like saying something is "the first horror film" or "the first spy flick". It's just one of the earliest movies from Japan to utilize the kind of techniques that would become popular later in the 20th century.