The 12 Day Tale of the Monster That Died in 8 (2020)

directed by Shunji Iwai

Japan

88 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Maybe the real covid vaccine... was... the friends we made along the way?

I put off watching this for a long time after reading a negative review or two, but it seemed like the beef a few of those negative reviewers had with it was simply not wanting to be reminded of covid lockdown, which is fair. Personally, the whole concept of this movie holds some specialness for me, because lockdown was the reason why I got into tokusatsu in the first place. I spontaneously decided, while everything was closed and I was stuck inside for several weeks, that marathonning every Godzilla movie was going to be the thing that got me through this. So a movie where people stuck inside during the lockdowns turn to telling each other stories about kaiju and aliens hits very close to my heart.

Takumi Saitoh (later of Shin Ultraman fame) plays Takumi, an out-of-work actor who buys some capsule monsters online and attempts to raise them. It's apparent from the start that this movie takes place in a world just slightly different from our own - one where kaiju and aliens actually exist, and the events depicted in shows like Ultraseven, while having taken place before most of our characters were born, are also factual. So Takumi gets his monster capsules (more like eggs, really) and documents the changes they go through over the course of several days. Other characters include a vlogger Takumi watches who's doing the same thing, with better results; Takumi's friend Non, who buys an actual alien online; Shinji Higuchi playing himself; and So Takei - who I am not familiar with - essentially playing himself as well. It's just Takumi and his buddies, basically, only they're all playing slightly fictionalized versions of themselves.

Although the film shows only a narrow slice of what the worst days of the pandemic were like for a specific section of people, it really does capture that specific feeling of being quarantined and never having gone through anything like this before and just navigating yourself and your world within the confines of your own home. A lot of people made art during lockdown. A lot of people turned inward when it was no longer viable to interact physically with the outside world. Everything and everywhere felt empty - at least for a little while; I'm under no illusion that "lockdown" was ever total and that there weren't still people who had no choice but to continue their jobs as normal under the risk of sickness and death. But certain scenes in this film, like the drone shots of a semi-vacant Tokyo and the interludes of dancers out on the deserted streets, really capture a unique pandemic emptiness that is almost unthinkable today.

This is the kind of movie that gets very close to being ridiculous, but is saved by how earnest everybody involved in it seems to be about its concept. I love this idea of being stuck indoors and starting to just make stuff up. Getting people together over Zoom and making a movie where you all pretend kaiju and aliens are real. The end message of the film is one of personal responsibility in the face of the pandemic, and how something as small as wearing a mask and staying indoors can be a heroic act. If you're not buying into this I can understand how silly it might look from the outside, with Takumi naming his capsule monsters after covid treatments and the final form his remaining capsule takes being the shape of a face mask, but something about it is so authentic that I couldn't help but vibe with it.

I wouldn't call this a spectacular movie, but the concept is interesting, and it reflects an exceptional time not just in the history of one country or group but of the entire world. I don't know about anybody else, but I kind of expected there to be a glut of media about covid, so much so that we'd all get really tired of it, but that never actually happened. Instead, the media about covid that we did get remain little slices of a shared experience that everybody processed and interpreted in their own way, and I think, even if whatever media in question is technically "bad", all of those narratives are worth thinking about.