Dogora

#9 in my ranking of Ishiro Honda’s filmography.

Most of Ishiro Honda’s science-fiction films have started out as another kind of film before moving into the genre promised on the posters. Dogora is the first that…never really leaves the genre it starts out in. I liked that. This film seems to be negatively viewed for a couple of reasons, the first being that it never really fully commits to being a monster movie, the other being that the English language version is apparently incomprehensible nonsense, but seen in the original Japanese version, I think it’s a charming and different heist movie that just happens to take place during a monster invasion at the same time.

Inspector Komai (Yosuke Natsuki) is looking into a series of diamond robberies, and his attention is fixed upon an American, Mark Jackson (Robert Dunham), who is having interactions with a small cartel of diamond thieves led by Natsui (Akiko Wakabayashi). There’s also a professor, Dr. Munakata (Nobuo Nakamura), who studies geological formations and has developed artificial diamonds, his assistant Professor Kirino (Hiroshi Koizumi), and Kirino’s sister Masayo (Yoko Fujiyama). As the opening moments of the film play out, it’s mostly a look at a heist of a bank, tense as the police patrol unknowingly outside, that gets fuddled a bit when a mysterious flying space jelly floats through, levitates everyone, and makes off with the diamonds while cutting through the vault with temperatures too hot for an oxygen-powered flamethrower.

I was really expecting this to follow the rather normal pattern so far of Honda’s career where this heisting plot gets dropped steadily until about halfway through the film when it’s dropped completely. And yet, it continues to be the main focus of the film. Dr. Munakata is there through it all to both talk to the properties of diamonds and the weird force wandering around the skies over the world, stealing into vaults to take diamonds while also hoovering up giant piles of coal, but mostly it’s about Komai tracking down Jackson, figuring out his connection to Natsui, and a series of heists around diamonds that always get interfered with by the space jelly.

There’s a moment in the latter half of the film where Komai’s superior chastises him for caring about space monsters at all. They have crimes to solve. I mean, that’s just uniquely framing the central plot. This is a heist movie with monster action influencing it.

And the heist stuff is pretty good on its own. It’s not La Cercle Rouge or anything, but it’s well-realized, clear, and moves nicely. There are little double-crosses and unknown loyalties, and it would stand decently well without the monster action. However, the monster action also adds. Firstly, it adds the contrast between the characters and their focus with the larger events unfolding around the plot. Secondly, the monster action itself. It’s never the focus of the film, but it does a good bit on its own.

And, of course, one must take the time to recognize and praise the work led by Eiji Tsuburaya, the man behind the special effects. The monster, eponymously called Dogora, is a floating jellyfish in space, and it looks really good. The film’s opening moments are not actually the heist stuff but space footage that is shockingly well put together, even within Tsuburaya’s own accomplished body of work. When Dogora floats down to suck up coal mountains, it has this marvelous floating structure to it captured by filming flexible vinyl underwater, a new practice they invented during production. It’s colorful with a bright blue sheen, and it moves wonderfully on screen.

Really, this is a heist movie that has some monster action in it, and the monster action is both kind of great and really different. No more men in suits stomping on little Japanese villages, this is a successful effort to make something new, and Tsuburaya and Honda accomplished that well.

And, through the end of the third act, the heist plot never diminishes. Honda stuck to his guns on this one, and I think it works. The chase is about diamonds, but it’s happening in the middle of sci-fi nonsense about wasp venom attacking Dogora and crystallizing it. That’s delightful.

I think this is one of those Honda films that deserves something of a re-appraisal, but you apparently need to watch the Japanese version and also recognize that it’s not really much of a monster movie. Oh, there’s a monster in it, and it’s great. It’s just that the focus is elsewhere. I mean, I had no idea what I was walking into and had a good time, but that expectation game is apparently really important for a lot of people.

Rating: 3/4