Atragon
AKA
Undersea Battleship
(1963)
Page 2
For a movie that sports a badass submarine that actually flies, it's light on Atragon/Gotengo action. The title ship doesn't really do anything until the last ten minutes, and when it does, it takes Mu out with so much ease that you'd have to wonder if an entire movie devoted to this story was actually worth the effort put into it.
The pacing is beyond slow and the movie seems to be trying attempting an adventurous vibe without actually being adventurous. The special effects have their ups and downs. The giant explosion at the end is eye-catching, and some of the Atragon model-work is pretty good. But a lot of the matte shots are horrible and the undersea sequences lack any dynamic qualities.
Getting the worse end of this is the Kaiju, Manda, who would be showcased with better effect in Destroy All Monsters and Godzilla: Final Wars. Manda is a really cool design, and is a monster I reguard fondly, but his puppeteering in Atragon is very poor. It's often obvious that he isn't underwater most of the time, and, unfortunatly, all of his scenes take place there. His motions are too fast and akward for water pressure, and when they aren't, that's because he's floating motionless with very little effect.
Ultimatly, there isn't much to say about this bland movie. I think it was made many years before it should have been, when special effects were ready to make things like this faster and more intense, and on the whole make it a lot more exciting. Instead we got a forgetable feature that tried it's best, but that wasn't enough.
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