1970s, 1980s, Action-Adventure, Family Films, Fantasy, Scifi

Galaxy Express 999 (1979) / Adieu, Galaxy Express 999: Final Stop Andromeda (1981)

Ginga Tetsudô Surî-Nain / Sayônara, Ginga Tetsudô Surî-Nain: Andromeda Shûchakueki

Director: Rintaro
Screenwriters: Kon Ichikawa, Shirô Ishimori; Hiroyasu Yamaura

By Roderick Heath

Leiji Matsumoto isn’t a household name outside of Japan except to fans of manga and anime, Japan’s beloved, specific styles in cartooning and animation. But for anyone who does love those art forms, he’s been one of pop culture’s most vital figures, and even those who don’t might still have felt his influence in their childhood TV watching and their contemporary moviegoing. Matsumoto, born in Fukuoka in 1938, helped spark a popular sci-fi boom and a revival of the romantic early style in the genre called space opera, a few years before Star Wars (1977) officially did the same thing in the west. Matsumoto’s love of the space opera mode took some time to gain traction in his early career, and he gained his breakthrough with Otoko Oidon, a manga about a young man struggling to get into college. That project might seem light years away from Matsumoto’s later repute for fantastical dreamings, but rooted all his work in authentic reflections on rites of passage for boys struggling to achieve manhood and define what that means. Matsumoto’s success was sealed when he was hired to develop a concept by a producer for a tale about space travellers on a desperate mission to save the Earth from alien assault. Matsumoto’s take saw a wrecked World War II battleship rebuilt as a spaceship, a bizarre notion that nonetheless proved the key to the idea’s success. A TV adaptation of Matsumoto’s manga, Space Battleship Yamato, or Star Blazers as it was called for its first English-language dub, became a perennial touchstone for anime.

Space Battleship Yamato defined Matsumoto’s unique touch, his fascination for combining the super-futuristic with the bygone and antiquated, a sense of possibility and longing at once childlike and sophisticated, and vigorous, spectacular action colliding with dreamy lyricism. Matsumoto soon began producing a clutch of beloved characters who evolved to share a fictional universe in his manga and various adaptations for television and cinema, including Galaxy Express 999 and Space Pirate Captain Harlock, making him one of the first artists of his kind to really embrace what is now called intertextuality. The French electronica outfit Daft Punk so idolised Matsumoto they talked him into directing Interstella 5555 (2003), a feature-length tale woven around the music from their album Discovery. Matsumoto’s style transposed a very personal and localised sensibility onto happily harvested concepts and tropes from a global tradition in sci-fi and fantasy. Growing up in the midst of war and resulting devastation profoundly impacted upon his creative attitude, and his beloved franchises gained much of their power from an informing anxiety about the tragedies of defeat and loss and the irreparable state of lost innocence and youth. Galaxy Express 999 was first made into a popular TV series and then adapted into a film version by Rintaro, one of the storied hands of anime who had first gained repute working on morning children’s programming perennials Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion series in the 1960s, adaptations of another legend of manga and anime, Osamu Tezuka.

Rintaro (born Shigeyuki Hayashi) became chief director on the TV version of Matsumoto’s Space Pirate Captain Harlock, and went on to helm many successful anime series and films including a chapter in the acclaimed Neo-Tokyo (1987) and Metropolis (2001). Rintaro worked with Matsumoto, who was credited as planner on the film and, most interestingly, the director Kon Ichikawa, maker of such classics as The Burmese Harp (1956) and Fires on the Plain (1959). Ichikawa had started his career in animation and began dipping his toe back into the field in the ‘70s, and served here as supervisor and co-screenwriter with Shirô Ishimori. Ichikawa’s talents for adaptation and feel for mediating a poetic lustre meshed with Matsumoto’s vision and Rintaro’s visual skill. Galaxy Express 999 revolves around a similar motif to Space Battleship Yamato, a spaceship voyaging through the void built to resemble a far less sophisticated piece of technology, in this case a steam train, in a storyline replete with picaresque discursions but always arcing towards an ultimate confrontation with a formidable foe. But the martial valour and warlike spectacle of the other series were swapped out here in favour of images and ideas more redolent of westerns, and an overall aesthetic that pushed Matsumoto’s romantic and sentimental streaks to the fore.

Matsumoto’s sci-fi style had a host of readily recognisable inspirations, including the Victoriana dreaming of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and space opera of E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith and Alex Raymond, but he also drew on more specifically Japanese properties, particularly the novel Night on the Galactic Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa. There’s a strong similarity in sensibility, too, to works like the poet Hagiwara Sakutarô’s poem “Night Train,” and the opening chapter of novelist Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, where the act of travelling by train takes on near-spiritual dimensions, being dissolving into a near-ethereal state of communion. From Sakutarô:

Near daybreak in the dark
Fingerprints chill on the window
Like a soft spill of mercury
White glimmer on the mountains
Passengers hang between sleep and waking
Over them the light-bulbs
sigh with fatigue
(…)
Unexpectedly
we draw close in sadness
and gazing at the eastern clouds
watch light touch
a nameless village in the mountains.

Galaxy Express 999 unfolds in a future where humankind has achieved tremendous technological leaps to colonise many nearby planets and travel to distant galaxies. But a new force is taking hold and redefining existence, as an increasing number of people are travelling on the famous Galaxy Express 999 transport to its distant, scarcely-seen final stop to swap their frail mortal shells for cybernetic bodies, and conflict between the finite and the virtually immortal seems to be nascent. Young Tetsurô Hoshino (voiced by Masako Nozawa) is an orphan living a hardscrabble existence on the streets of an Earth city called Megalopolis. Tetsuro harbours relentless ambition to get off the Earth again and track down the nefarious robotic overlord Count Mecha (Hidekatsu Shibata), who murdered his mother for sport when they accidentally strayed into his hunting grounds whilst traversing a distant colonial planet. Idolising the outlaws of space whose faces he sees on posters, including Captain Harlock and his fellow pirate Emereldas, Tetsuro wants to obtain a robotic body of his own so he can stand a chance in battle with the Count. He tries to steal a pass for the Galaxy Express from a passenger at a ticketing office, bringing down the wrath of law enforcement.

Tetsuro glimpses a mysterious woman during his escape, and she helps him evade the cops and hide in her apartment. Tetsuro is startled by the woman’s resemblance to his dead mother, and the woman, whose name is Maetel (Masako Ikeda), agrees to help him achieve his goals. She buys a ticket for Tetsuro and becomes his travelling companion as the Express blasts off into space. The inherently dreamlike conceit of an intergalactic craft that looks like a rattling old steam train is mediated through some expertly deployed technobabble as the engine, actually an incredible, self-aware piece of engineering, sustains all within an “anti-energy infinite-source electro-magnetic barrier.” More importantly, as Maetel explains to her young charge, it’s an aesthetic choice that means the same thing to its passengers as to the movie viewer: it’s designed to foster a sense of nostalgic delight to offset the intensely alienating sensation of travelling deep space and encountering a vast and teeming cosmos.

Tetsuro gets to know the train’s crew, including its assiduous Conductor (Kaneta Kimotsuki), a squat, glowing-eyed entity in an official uniform, and the attendant Claire (Yôko Asagami), a robotised girl whose body is made of transparent crystal. The Express stays for the length of one day on each planet it lands on, which can be, in Earth time, a couple of hours or a couple of weeks. When it lands on Titan, which has been colonised and terraformed into a lush and rustic backwater, Maetel is kidnapped by some bandits headed by the bristling old warrior Antares (Yasuo Hisamatsu), who is dedicated to battling off the encroachment of the robots and raises a gang of children, all orphans made by Count Mecha. Ignoring Maetel’s pleas for him not to risk himself by chasing her, Tetsuro tracks down the bandits, who test both him and Maetel with x-rays to see if either is a robot; surprisingly, Maetel proves to be entirely human. Tetsuro encounters an old woman (Miyoko Asô) living alone in a cabin, and she finds him so similar to her long-lost son Tochirô in his fighting spirit that she gives him two of her valued possessions: a battered-looking hat, and a laser pistol, the only one of its kind capable of killing robots.

The movie narrative reproduces the episodic storyline inherited from the manga and TV series, as the Express moves from planet to planet. The filmmakers turn this to their advantage, as each new world reflects as aspect of Tetsuro’s psychological journey as well as his external quest, whilst also suggesting encapsulations of different epochs in recent history. The crude arcadian beauty of Titan blesses Tetsuro with a grandmotherly figure and allows him to step into the shoes of the missing Tochirô to gain a more specific identity, and accumulates the garb and convictions of a mature being. When he and Maetel next disembark on Pluto, which is used as a giant refrigeration unit to keep the discarded mortal shells of the robotised humans, Tetsuro encounters Shadow (Toshiko Fujita), a robotised woman who fills the job of caretaker for the ice cemetery to be close to her own human body, a beautiful corpse she keeps in a glass coffin to pine for and worship. Desperate for human contact, she tries to claim an unwilling Tetsuro as her child, but Maetel fends her off. Maetel herself seems fascinated by something in the ice which Tetsuro doesn’t get to see. Here lurks the threat of frigid emotional stasis and a frightening surrogate mother figure who provides a distorting mirror to Maetel in the role.

The gritty frontier atmosphere of Trader’s Fork reproduces a western feel and exploits that genre’s suppressed evocation of rootless melancholy to convey Tetsuro’s alienation as he encounters other characters, like the sad chanteuse Ryuzu (Noriko Ohara) and the real Tochirô (Kei Tomiyama), who share his state of exile and longing. Tetsuro gains a peculiar family in the form of ambiguous but devoted Maetel and the train’s crew of oddballs, and fearsome friends and comrades in the form of Harlock (Makio Inoue) and Emereldas (Reiko Tajima), who both intercept the Express and find their fates linked to Tetsuro’s. Antares has told Tetsuro that only Emereldas knows where Count Mecha’s wandering Time Castle can be found at any time, so when her spaceship flies by the Express Tetsuro brings it to a halt with a blast from his pistol and soon finds himself confronting the fearsome female pirate, who proves, despite all to be defined once more by a pining absence, longing for a lost lover who proves to be the sickly, dying Tochirô. Tetsuro finds Tochirô in the wastes of Trader’s Fork and helps him achieve his dying ambition, uploading his consciousness into a computer system so he can serve as the navigation system for his comrade Harlock’s space ship. Harlock turns up shortly after to thank Tetsuro for giving his friend’s mortal remains a burial, and repays the favour by beating up some of Count Mecha’s goons who have attacked Tetsuro.

Tetsuro is the hero of Galaxy Express 999, but it’s Maetel who is its most obsessive locus of images and pivotal figure, and the ultimate example of Matsumoto’s recurring figure of femininity. Her iconography is exact, with her cascading mane of blonde hair and huge, long, limpid eyes, and all-black garb of fur coat and cap, resembling some fey-gifted young Russian Countess riding the Trans-Siberian circa 1900, the centrepiece of the film’s uniquely Proustian take on sci-fi adventure. She’s dogged by an air of inexplicable melancholia, her mystique in seeming both infinitely enigmatic and yet deeply familiar embodying a half-forgotten ideal from childhood. Willowy and fragile-looking, she nonetheless constantly proves more powerful than she seems. She’s at war with her own identity in profound and disturbing ways, as it’s revealed she’s the daughter of Queen Promethium (Ryôko Kinomiya), the terrifying, witch-like mastermind and controller of the robot horde. A weirdly dichotomous charge wells up when Tetsuro accidentally walks in upon her in the shower, and Maetel comes to occupy a perverse Freudian nexus as, alternatively an echo of Tetsuro’s mother, avatar for a worldly big sister, and a dream of first love.

This aspect makes Galaxy Express 999 feel crucially similar to Jaromil Jires’ Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) in contending with the intensely protean experience of adolescence where the roles of life and the people who fill them blur into commonality. In the series Tetsuro was a small, naïve boy, where in the film he’s on the cusp of adolescence. It’s ultimately revealed that Maetel is actually inhabiting a cloned reproduction of Tetsuro’s mother’s body, which doubles down on the perversity. The other female characters – the wretched Shadow, haunted Ryuzu, sweetly transparent (literally) Claire, brooding, powerful Emereldas – all resemble her (aptly, in one of his revisits to his creation, Matsumoto revealed Maetel and Emereldas are twin sisters). This is certainly partly because of Matsumoto’s famous basic template for his romantic heroines, but it also makes perfect sense given they can all be seen as reflections or distillations of the essence of a cosmic feminine Tetsuro chases across the void but can never quite take a proper grip of as he matures. Tetsuro’s physique sharply contrasts his partner’s, a short urchin with a round face and squiggle of a nose, he almost becomes lost to the eye once he dons his complete signature costume, with overcoat and hat reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s in his Sergio Leone westerns.

Tetsuro himself has many doppelgangers and brothers in spirit, from Harlock, who stands as an idealised version of the man he’d like to be, Tetsuro, whose boots he steps into, and Antares, the grizzled old warrior who’s taken on duty of care to a host of waifs with the same tragic story. The theme of life journey conjoins with Matsumoto’s anxious confrontation with the forces of modern transformation, which had gone through a breakneck process in his youth: the Galaxy Express itself belongs to an evocation of a pre-war world and dreams of gilt splendour as glimpsed in the retro classiness of the great railway station Tetsuro and Maetel pass through, even in the surrounds of the glittering superstructure of Megalopolis. The new and the old are in constant dialogue throughout, both in terms of physical entities and the gap between action and remembering. Tetsuro’s desperate desire to grow up and take on the evils in his universe is constantly retarded by a growing awareness of the ephemeral nature of his life. Maetel carries a device that allows one person to tap into the dreams of another, a sublime metaphor for the act of creating and sharing art itself, and also a vessel for mutual comprehension, or lack of it, for the characters: Tetsuro’s maturation is measured in part by his choice not to tap into Maetel’s dreams, for all his desire to parse her foreboding opacity.

Matsumoto’s gleeful mix-and-match of ages and styles is even justified in terms of his tale’s internal logic as the characters are all desperate to locate themselves through clinging on to pieces of the past, to familiar and amusing things that subvert the impersonality of an oncoming state of total, alienated modernity, embodied by the robot people. The tavern full of toughs all weep in listening to Ryuzu’s song of longing for lost childhood. It’s not until they reach their destination in the Andromeda galaxy that they confront a shining, alien, inimical bastion of pure modernity that just so happens to look like any sleek new train station or airport, a setting equated with the loss of identity, physicality, and the pleasures of liminal existence. The robotised people Tetsuro encounters are all haunted by their loss of it, like Claire, who gained her crystal form to please her mother, or driven into utter hysteria, like Shadow, or completely lose humanity, like Count Mecha. Ryuzu testifies to abandoning her human body to please the count and eventually evolving into a spiritual force with power over time itself, but losing in the process all sense of tangible existence. The basic theme could be read Rintaro and Matsumoto’s next-generation burlesque on the comfortable power fantasy of Tezaku’s Astro Boy as well as mediating the post-human disquiet of arguably the most famous anime works, Akira (1987) and Ghost in the Shell (1995).

Despite being produced on a relatively small budget, Galaxy Express 999 proved the biggest hit of the year at the Japanese box office upon release, a sea-change moment that coincided with Hayao Miyazaki’s debut on Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro in announcing cinematic anime’s arrival as a potent cultural force. Miyazaki’s later films would often sport his particular brand of young heroine who combine the qualities of Tetsuro and Maetel. Galaxy Express 999 was soon taken up by New World Studios and became the first anime film in many years to be released in the US, albeit in a sharply truncated form. The animation style of the film is fairly limited because of the budget, and yet it’s a stream of visual pleasures, particularly the ecstatic sequence when the train takes off for the first time, Tetsuro’s enthralled perspective conjuring the sight of his mother in the stars set to a theme song provided by the band Godiego, best known for scoring the cult TV show Monkey; the band were experts at creating a sound at once carefree and wistful. There’s a strong echo of Yellow Submarine (1968) throughout, not just in the basic conceptual conceit but also in the evocations of a fantasy landscape built out of the detritus of a nostalgic perception of the world, a child’s vision of adult realms inflated and transmuted into the stuff of dreams.

That quality is apparent in settings like the towering, cavernous halls of the Express’s railway station, and echoes on through the film’s visions of surreal splendour. Shots of the train speeding across the face of the Earth and amongst the stars and planets, and descending through the cloudy atmosphere of Titan. A Plutonic landscape of hazy grey clouds and hovering moons with thousands of human bodies locked in the ice. The abstract green sworls and winging snowflakes around Tetsuro and his mother as she dies, her hair shimmering in the wind, and the appearance of Count Mecha and his hunters with their single huge glowing eyes. The grotesque sight of Tetsuro’s mother’s body mounted and stuffed in Mecha’s banquet hall, in the midst of his faux-gothic castle. The stark, near-featureless faces of Shadow and Queen Promethium, whose dress is bedecked with stars and whose appearance most clearly echoes a figure out of Noh. When Tetsuro finally locates the Time Castle thanks to Emereldas, he sneaks into its halls and finds that Ryuzu is Mecha’s concubine and servant, and is promptly surrounded by the Count android guards. But Antares appears, having followed Tetsuro, and helps him annihilate Mecha’s guards and finally, heroically blows apart the shield Mecha and Ryuzu hide behind, whilst Ryuzu fatefully betrays Mecha by refusing to transport them in time, giving Tetsuro the chance to shoot the Count dead. Ryuzu grievingly strips down to her robotic body and lies with Mecha as he and his castle crumble into a rusty pile of scrap.

Success against Mecha does not sate Tetsuro’s anger, however, as he now believes robotisation is a scourge destroying all that’s worthy about life. He resolves to travel on to the last stop on the Express’s route to the machine planet and destroy it to. But he’s in for a rude shock as he learns the name of the planet is the same as his travelling companion, and learns from the robots who meet him at the station that although he’s killed the robots’ hero Count Mecha, he’s nonetheless a very fit candidate to be turned into a cybernetic component of the planet’s vast machine complexes. Stung and betrayed, Tetsuro smacks Maetel and is strapped to an operating table under Promethium’s approving gaze. But Maetel’s own, ultimate purpose finally reveals itself: she carries with her an amulet device containing the stored consciousness of her father, who is appalled by what Promethium has become, and intends destroying the machine planet, having stored up an explosive lode of energy to do so. Harlock and Emereldas throw in their support, attacking the planet with their pirate vessels to give their comrades a chance. Maetel falters on the very precipice of destroying her mother’s empire, so Tetsuro has to help her throw the amulet into Promethium’s power supply, whereupon the planet begins to disintegrate. Maetel and Tetsuro manage to get back to the Express, but find Promethium has managed to get aboard too. Rather than let her kill Tetsuro, the only person she ever felt was truly her friend, Claire grabs the Queen and detonates her own robotic body, blowing both of them up. Tetsuro pockets the only piece of Claire remaining, a piece of crystal shaped like a teardrop.

Maetel’s considered act of parricide, however necessary, cruelly mimics Tetsuro’s own orphaning, releasing them both from the obligations of identity but also now needing to reconstruct themselves: for Maetel this means recovering her original body. And of course, being as they are a pair who love each-other but who cannot reconcile it to any familiar life role, they’re doomed to never quite meet in any sense, and Maetel delivers Tetsuro back to Earth and leaves again on the Express after a jolting moment when she kisses him on the mouth. In a moment reminiscent of the finale of David Lean’s Summertime (1957), Tetsuro runs alongside the Express as it departs, with Maetel gazing back at him, becoming the ghost of all things lost in growing up. It’s one of cinema’s great tragic finales, so of course there had to be a sequel. Adieu, Galaxy Express: Final Stop Andromeda was released two years later. Far from releasing the galaxy from robotic domination, Tetsuro’s actions prove to have sparked all-out war between humans and mechanicals. Hordes of robots are laying waste to Megalopolis, and Tetsuro is now one of a ragged and weary band of resistance fighters cowering in the ruins. Tetsuro settles down in a muddy puddle in his disheartened and exhausted mindset, only for the old, tough commander of the unit to tell him he might as well be choosing death. One night whilst gazing up into the sky, Tetsuro sees the familiar glowing green squiggle that is the Express’s wake coiling through the sky, but no-one’s seen it land on Earth in ages.

Nonetheless Tetsuro soon receives a device from a dying runner carrying a voice message from Maetel calling him to board the Express. The rest of his unit volunteer to help him get by the robot patrols to the station, at the cost of their lives: the old commander uses his dying breaths to make sure the Express can take off. Tetsuro soon finds, to his bewilderment, he’s the only passenger on the Express and that Maetel is not on board. The Conductor introduces him to Claire’s replacement, a robot maid named Metalmena (Yôko Asagami), who claims to have taken the job to get a chance to get hold of “the most precious thing in the universe.” The Express makes its first stop on the planet La-Metal, where the human settlers are battling the robots. Tetsuro is wounded by a flying robotic sentry and saved by a guerrilla unit, and he becomes friends with an alien warrior, Meowdar (Kei Tomiyama). The duo explore a ruined castle and find huge portraits hanging on the wall that look startlingly like Promethium and Maetel, and Meowdar tells Tetsuro the rumour abroad that Maetel has taken her mother’s place as controller of the empire. Tetsuro is so enraged by this notion he slogs Meowdar. The two are almost captured in a robot ambush, but the appearance of Harlock’s ship helps them escape. Parting as friends, Meowdar leaves Tetsuro at the La-Metal station, where Maetel appears, striding out of the steam plumes, entirely unchanged.

It’s not explained why Maetel never recovered her body and with the portrait on the castle suggesting she’s always looked this way, the cloned body idea seems to have been dropped (pedantic consistency of detail was never something Matsumoto’s properties have been famous for anyway). Tetsuro is joyous upon seeing Maetel again, but becomes increasingly perplexed and aggravated as she fends off his questions and encourages him to leave the Express. The train has strange encounters with other vessels. A craft the Conductor calls the Ghost Train bullies its way past the Express, much to the engine’s shame and chagrin. A spaceship commanded by a menacing cyborg calling himself Lord Faust (Tôru Emori), who seems to have a specific interest in Tetsuro comes next. Maetel almost gets herself killed leaping between the two when Tetsuro tries to shoot Faust, and his spaceship explodes from damage Tetsuro’s gun makes. Tetsuro makes it aboard the Express and Maetel is plucked on the edge of death from space by Emereldas, turning up in the nick of time. During a stopover on the heavily industrialised planet of Mosaic, Tetsuro sees the Ghost Train parked and thinks he hears the sound of a music box belonging to Meowdar, but he can’t break into the menacing craft. Maetel finally reveals that she didn’t send the message that brought Tetsuroi aboard the Express, and someone wants him to come to the true capital of the Machine Empire, Great Andromeda. Soon enough the Express gets there and Tetsuro learns that Meowdar wasn’t wrong: Maetel really has returned to take her mother’s place as queen, and Promethium’s remnant consciousness is still sustained as part of the planet infrastructure.

Adieu, Galaxy Express is darker and punchier in many respects than its predecessor, kicking off with scenes of grimy warfare and cyberpunk terror that sharply anticipate oncoming preoccupation with apocalyptic imagery in much acclaimed ‘80s and ‘90s anime. The plot leads into a revelation that evokes Soylent Green (1972) as well as carrying strong holocaust connotations as Tetsuro learns that the energy pills the robot people take to sustain themselves contains life force drained out of captured humans, ferried to Great Andromeda on the Ghost Train. The film also displays increased directorial ambition from Rintaro working with crisper, more fluid and confident animation, apparent in an emphasis on dreamlike ellipses like the fades in and out of black interspersing the credits with the opening scenes and flashing, mono-colour backgrounds the envelope Tetsuro in moments of pain and crisis, and some cleverly animated battle sequences, including a nod to North by Northwest (1959) as Tetsuro is pursued by a flying robot sentinel. The Express’s arrival at Great Andromeda, passing through barriers of time, space, and energy, becomes a dazzling psychedelic interlude, particularly well-scored by electropop artist Osamu Shoji. Both films are marvellously scored at that, the first replete with syrupy beauty by Nozomi Aoki and the second with Shoji’s spacier synthesiser strains.

But Adieu, Galaxy Express noticeably lacks the sense of poetic metaphor that made the first film so striking, and wields a more generic edge to its animation concepts at times. The absence of Ichikawa’s input on the sequel tells, and the plot essentially boils down to a retread of the original’s, with appearances by the likes of Harlock and Emereldas feeling like afterthoughts. The best call-back is the most minimal, as Tetsuro catches a glimpse of Shadow still watching over her frozen charges in silent pathos. Maetel doesn’t turn up for a good fifty minutes, which means the film lacks its obsessive pole to Tetsuro’s for too long. Still, it’s just as desperately romantic and outsized in its evocations of dire emotional straits, becoming particularly gruelling as Meowdar and Metalmena die, and offers up moments of deliriously transformed emotionalism like Harlock’s mouthless female alien crewmember weeping spherical, crystal tears. Rintaro offers ideas reminiscent of Mario Bava’s Operazione Paura (1966) in his portrayal of a malign mother punishing a hostile world and following a relentless quest for power ever since she and an infant Maetel were exiled from their home on La-Metal, a tragedy suggested as in Bava through portraits on the walls of a ruined castle. High gothic paraphernalia and technological Gotterdammerung collide as Maetel once more confronts her mother and steps into her shoes – if only, as it proves, to access a sanctum and find out the truth behind the fate of the human captives. Metalmena’s object of desire proves to be Maetel’s body itself, hoping to transfer her consciousness into it, but learning just where the power capsules she likes consuming come from drives Metalmena to attack some of the robot guards, getting herself terribly wounded but earning Tetsuro’s admiration.

Adieu, Galaxy Express also goes memorably for broke in a spectacular finale when an even more formidable threat than Prometheum and the mechanical empire appears, a force dubbed Siren the Witch, an all-consuming cosmic void attracted by the wealth of energy on Great Andromeda. As Siren begins sucking in everything in its path, the crews of the Express and the pirate ships have to try and make headway whilst not using their computer systems or other sophisticated machinery, which means for the Express quite literally driving its engine with coal in the boiler. Meanwhile Tetsuro has to duel the looming Faust upon the train roof, trying to use the lesson he learnt for Meowdar about listening for robotic enemies rather than looking for them. Tetsuro wins the duel, only for Faust to reveal, as he drifts off into Siren’s maw, that he’s Tetsuro’s long-lost father: it was he who arranged Tetsuro’s journey so they could fight out the basic battles between human and mechanical, old and young. There’s such wild spectacle here, with an undercurrent thrusting the material back into the correct zone of Oedipal frenzy, that it makes up for the feeling of déjà vu, and also suggesting the ultimate irony that a Matsumoto property was suddenly in debt to George Lucas rather than vice versa.

A bittersweet coda beholds the wastes of Great Andromeda, reduced to the frozen asteroid it was originally, the ghost of Prometheum’s consciousness still clinging to it in delirious longing for her daughter’s touch, who stands upon the planetoid with Tetsuro regarding the waste. The most interesting, tantalising, painful idea constantly repeated throughout the two films is the awareness that gaining anything, from victory over evil to achieving maturity, usually requires losing something just as vital, and to exist means being gnawed at eternally by that sense of loss. Inevitably, Maetel parts from Tetsuro once more, now with the stated awareness that she’s a wanderer in time whose job it is to help other boys grow up, and Tetsuro’s last wail of her name from the departing Express still carries with it the charge of loss even as a final title declares he’s become a man at last. Anime has grown a lot as a school of cinema since these films, but they stand as estimable, defining classics in the style. Mainstream worldwide cinema perhaps owes them a debt both immediate and through their influence on the mode – would the filthy, glistening world of Blade Runner (1982) exist otherwise, or the fierce images of human softness in the clutches of robotic hellspawn in The Matrix films, the poetics of Wong Kar-Wai (his 2046, 2004, borrows a lot from the Galaxy Express 999 concept as well its obsession with the ephemeral, and his The Grandmaster, 2013, references it in a key scene), or even perhaps the “King of the World” scene in Titanic (1997)? At any rate they’re marvellous lodestones for the gregarious pleasures of anime, and at their best attain that rarest of conditions for popular art, the feeling that they’ve cleaved off and kept safe a piece of a collective unconscious, like that shard of Claire’s heart Tetsuro keeps in his pocket.

An English-language dubbed version of Galaxy Express 999 can be viewed here…

…and the sequel, Adieu, Galaxy Express 999: Final Stop Andromeda here.

1970s, Action-Adventure, Scifi

The Land That Time Forgot (1975) / At The Earth’s Core (1976) / The People That Time Forgot (1977) / Warlords of Atlantis (1978)

Director: Kevin Connor
Screenwriters: Michael Moorcock, James Cawthorn, Milton Subotsky, Patrick Tilley, Brian Hayles

By Roderick Heath

Movies like Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) stand large as templates for contemporary blockbuster cinema, for better and for worse. But I’ve long thought of them rather as a culmination in popularity for a neo-pulp movement in cinema that sparked to life in the midst of a moviemaking era generally celebrated today for its tough and arty sensibility, a time when doses of pure escapism and wonderment were sometimes hard to come by, especially for young moviegoers. The neo-pulp mode was initially sparse but doggedly popular, and was practiced by some old stalwarts of the movie industry. Neo-pulp was distinguished by a cheery but essentially deadpan take on material more often played as outright camp during the late ‘60s pop sensibility. Roger Vadim’s film of the naughty comic strip Barbarella (1968) adopted a pseudo-camp attitude but also purveyed pure pulp imagery, and might well have started the movement. Ray Harryhausen kept his brand of retro sci-fi and fantasy going with entries like The Valley of Gwangi (1968) and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974). George Pal’s final film as producer was a slightly tongue-in-cheek revisit to pulp fare, with Doc Savage: Man of Bronze (1975). Robert Stephenson’s The Island at the Top of the World (1974) saw that old-timer concocting Jules Vernian adventures for Disney, in the process laying down a blueprint Disney still refers to and detectable in the likes of TRON: Legacy (2010) and the revived Star Wars films. Not every contemporary special-effects-driven epic counts as neo-pulp but some certainly are, like John Carter (2012) and Pacific Rim (2013).
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Edgar Rice Burroughs, a master of the old school, passed away in 1950, having lived long enough to see his most famous character Tarzan become a pop cultural legend. By the 1970s his kind of fiction was generally written off as an archaic embarrassment as science fiction, fantasy, and the other genres that had flowered in large part thanks to writers like Burroughs were getting all grown up and self-serious. One of the loveliest flowerings of the neo-pulp cinema started in 1974, however, when British director Kevin Connor joined forces with producer John Dark to make three adaptations of Burroughs’ works, The Land That Time Forgot, At The Earth’s Core, and The People That Time Forgot. The appeal Connor’s films wielded for young viewers who might have caught them in the movie theatres at the time of their release or on video years later (as I did), their proliferating populace of dinosaurs and monsters, is today serviced in that regard far better by the Jurassic Park films and their ilk, but without the charm or, frankly, the ideas; struggling through the tepid franchise expansion of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) made me long for these films.
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And not just for nostalgia; they’re lovingly crafted little odes to a modestly executed but pure and wholehearted variety of fantastic cinema and their literary roots. The big difference between Connor’s films and those of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and their inheritors was less one of sensibility than one of budget. These were films too cheap to afford Harryhausen’s exacting, laborious stop-motion techniques, and far too early for CGI, so Connor’s crafty special effects teams, led by stalwarts like Derek Meddings, made use of models, puppets, and animatronic effects. Also, there was a certain pride exhibited by such straitened inventiveness that felt motivated by a slightly different spirit to the drive towards greater realism in special effects Connor’s Hollywood heirs wielded. Connor’s works insist on a certain delight and sense of aesthetic fertility in artifice rather than realism. In that regard they feel just as anticipatory of self-conscious artists of falsity like Terry Gilliam and Michel Gondry as they do of Guillermo Del Toro and Peter Jackson.
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Connor still directs movies for television today and has known a long and hardy career, but he’s nonetheless a filmmaker who I’ve always felt might have become much more. He’s also never really gained any kind of due, despite making these several dogged cult works, including these films, the black comedy horror film Motel Hell (1980), a work that replays The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) as a more overt and stridently freakish lampoon of fast food industry aesthetics, and the memorably bizarre miniseries Goliath Awaits (1981). If Connor had an identifiable interest in the fantastical projects he took on, it was his delight for worlds in miniature, characters cut off from the greater continents of humanity and obliged to adapt quickly and fiercely to harsh terrain and weird social outgrowths. Connor worked his way up in the British film industry, becoming a sound editor and working with a swathe of great directors, before making his directing debut for Amicus Productions, a film company set up in Britain by American impresarios Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg, best-known for a string of anthology horror movies. Connor debuted with one, From Beyond the Grave (1974), before Amicus made a play for a bigger audience by backing Connor in making The Land That Time Forgot.
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The adaptation arrived with a stamp of genre literary cred. Moorcock, one of the most colourful and prolific figures of contemporary sci-fi and fantasy, had gained his first writing jobs penning Tarzan stories, and eagerly paid tribute to his roots by penning the script for the film along with James Cawthorn. Moorcock’s surprisingly sober, literate contribution to the film backed up Connor’s energy and skill in stretching a tight budget a long way. The Land That Time Forgot also gained an unexpected boost from obtaining American star Doug McClure, whose name remains a byword for good-natured cheese. McClure had a brief spell of attention as an ingénue in movies in the late 1950s but had mostly found a niche in TV. After initially hesitating, McClure eventually signed on for Connor’s movie, only to find he’d gained a whole new niche playing two-fisted heroes fighting off rubber dinosaurs. McClure brought an open, straightforward quality to his heroic characters that was ill-placed in the more shaggy and eccentric ‘70s but turned out to be perfect for this kind of movie.
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McClure plays Bowen Tyler, doyen of a shipbuilding family from Santa Monica, who finds himself shipwrecked after the British passenger ship he’s aboard is torpedoed by a German submarine, the U-33, in 1916. Cast adrift in a lifeboat along with shell-shocked fellow survivor Lisa Clayton (Susan Penhaligon), Tyler soon links up with another boat filled with British sailors from the ship. They successfully board the U-33 when it surfaces and surprise the crew, managing to take it over. The submarine’s captain, the intelligent and gentlemanly Von Schoenvorts (John McEnery), is locked away, but his wily, malevolent second officer Deitz (Anthony Ainley) sabotages the sub’s compass, fooling Tyler into sailing the sub close to a rendezvous point with their supply ship. After seemingly being outwitted by the Germans, Tyler and the sailors are imprisoned, but Lisa breaks them out and Tyler vengefully torpedoes the supply ship. This saves Tyler and the rest from being shot as pirates, but also leaves the sub lacking food and fuel. Drifting with the current into Antarctic waters, the U-33 encounters a fringe of ragged cliffs. Von Schoenvorts believes this must be a land first reported by a Italian explorer, who named it Caprona after himself.
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Taking a chance by sailing the sub up an underground river, they soon discover the island’s interior is a lush and fertile space heated by volcanic activity and inhabited by an astounding array of organisms, from microbes to massive dinosaurs to stages of human development. The various nationalities from the sub agree to work together to escape the island. Lisa and Von Schoenvorts, who share a passion for scientific enquiry, tackle the mysteries of Caprona’s abundant and perplexing life forms. Tyler and the sailors set themselves to the more practical tasks of finding food, drinking water, and a source of oil they can refine into fuel. They’re helped in this by Ahm (Bobby Parr), one of the hominids of Caprona, who also guides their understanding of what’s happening on the island through his own belief he will spontaneously pass into a higher stage of human development, moving from the primitive state of Bo-Lu to the more sophisticated Sto-Lu and then the superior Ga-Lu. The castaways are obliged to fight off hungry dinosaurs, but find the hominid tribes more dangerous and deadly. A volcanic eruption finally destroys the equilibrium between species and tribes. Deitz seizes a chance to grab control of the U-33, imprisoning the Brits, shooting Von Schoenvorts, and stranding Bowen and Lisa on the island, only for the submarine to explode and sink as he tries to sail it away across Caprona’s boiling central lake.
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The film’s opening commences an ouroboros-like storytelling conceit that links to the narrative concerns of change and rebirth, as Bowen hurls a canister containing his testimony from Caprona’s cliffs into the ocean. Connor tracks the canister on its voyage across dark rolling oceans under the credits, ending when the canister is retrieved from rocks by an old salt. Connor weaves a marvellous sense of atmosphere throughout The Land That Time Forgot, with the early scenes conveying a sense of lonely, near-numinous isolation for the warring parties and their oceanic adventures, believably transporting them from realistic immediacies of seagoing warfare to a place of sequestered wonder. Bowen and Lisa are first glimpsed resolving out of a dense fog bank, bedraggled and stunned by their sudden plunge into a world of hurt. Connor’s background in handling movie sound makes itself apparent in the subtlety with which he purveys the film’s first third, emphasising the omnipresent thrum of the submarine’s engines, avoiding incidental music during fight scenes, lending proceedings a tense, intimate feeling. The early fight scene where Bowen and the sailors try to take over the sub gains for this approach, punctuated by the sudden bark of a gun that saves Bowen’s life, which proves to have been fired by Lisa, roused from her daze to snatch up a dropped pistol and intervene in a struggle.
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Moorcock wasn’t happy with the film – what sci-fi writer ever is? – but his influence on the script is plain in touches like making Lisa a potent intellectual, and the odd dashes of intelligence apparent in the dialogue, as when Lisa asks Von Schoenvorts if his proposal the microbes in Caprona’s streams have a purpose could be construed as indulgence of German metaphysics, only for the Captain to retort it’s his version of British empiricism. Moorcock also preserved the most intriguing aspect of Burroughs’ book, the aspect that most distinguished it from a precursor like Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which was Burroughs’ depiction of Caprona as a land where every organism is connected to each-other and to the land as a kind of colossal, constantly metamorphosing living entity. Connor and his special effects team wring as much flavour and piquancy as possible from the elemental appeal of World War I-era technology clashing with dinosaurs, and museum diorama-like depictions of a carnivores and horned herbivores clashing. At one point the sailors try to fend off a pair of hungry Allosaurs stalking their number. Later, Bowen and Von Schoenvorts stand off a pair of bullish Styrachosaurs to give their fellows time to reach the sub, and menace turns to pathos as the sailors loose the sub’s deck gun on the animals, killing one. Von Schoenvorts warns Bowen that their own fate might be connected with the natural processes at loose on the island, a warning underscored by the sight of a tear slowly leaking from the eye of the dead animal.
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There’s a great sense of humour, too, in moments like when the crew sit down to uneasily make a meal of a plesiosaur they were obliged to shoot dead when it tried to eat Bowen. Somewhat jarringly, McEnery, then a well-known actor, had his dialogue dubbed over by Anton Diffring; one reason for this I saw somewhere was that the producers felt McEnery overacted outrageously, but I suspect it was rather because he didn’t play the part as sufficiently Teutonic. Connor’s excellence as a scene builder is repeatedly demonstrated during sequences other directors might have thrown away. The U-33’s gruelling underwater voyage to penetrate Caprona sees the craft slamming against stony walls and struggling against a seemingly malign current. The spare, eerie quality that defines a great deal of mid-century British sci-fi mates surprisingly well with Burroughs’ American gusto via Connor’s sense of staging and atmosphere. When he surveys the ape-men hiding in the long grass and watching the interlopers, and contemplates the lonely camp fire of the sailors amidst a grand and primal Capronan night, Connor conveys a sensation that recurs throughout the movie, that of some hidden force balefully and patiently lying in wait. That lurking force proves to be nature itself, noting the competition of species and tribes with a detached eye before rebooting the whole process with intermittent gotterdamerungs.
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The last section of the film deals out some pretty familiar adventure movie shtick as Bowen saves Lisa from some Ga-Lus who take her captive, and the island begins its great convulsion: papier-maché boulders tumble and two-fisted gallantry proliferates. But there’s still real intensity to the epic finale, in which the island convulses with metaphysical rage: Connor’s careful construction in ratcheting from a whisper to a scream is fulfilled as the tale reaches explosive crescendo, the submarine meeting its fiery end imbued with tragic gravitas by composer Douglas Gamley, amidst scenes of lava consuming the dinosaurs and decimating the seemingly stable and fecund life. Burroughs’ idea, which was to dramatise evolution as an idea, is well-sustained by The Land That Time Forgot, into its last moments as Bowen and Lisa give themselves up to the unique logic of the island, trekking north according to the flow of all life, last glimpsed clad in furs and hurling their missive to the waves on the way to becoming Adam and Eve for a smaller, more volatile world. The film’s concluding images of survival and surrender to a new yet familiar logic of life have a haunting patina that’s very rare in the genre, a quality bound to be despoiled by revision. Sure enough, Connor later made The People That Time Forgot, a sequel roughly based on Burroughs’ two follow-up novels, didn’t follow immediately. Despite the success of Connor’s films, Amicus folded during production, so the film was bought up and released by AIP.
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The People… is a much lesser affair all round, entirely lacking Moorcock and Cawthorn’s touch in the script, if still a moderately entertaining outing. This entry depicts a rescue expedition mounted by Bowen’s friend Ben McBride (Patrick Wayne), in the years following the war’s end, following the recovery of Bowen’s manuscript. The expedition is bankrolled by a newspaper magnate, which means Ben is obliged to bring along the magnate’s journalist daughter Charly (Sarah Douglas), as well as his own wartime pal and plane engineer Hogan (Shane Rimmer), and inquisitive scientist and fellow veteran Norfolk (Thorley Walters). Brought close to Caprona on a ship by the hardy Captain Lawton (Tony Britton), the adventuring quartet board an amphibious aircraft and fly over the great ice-clad cliffs, only to be attacked by a pterodactyl, which harries them until it catches its beak in their propeller, forcing a rough landing. Whilst Hogan remains behind to repair the plane, Ben, Charly, and Norfolk start trekking inland. They soon encounter Ajor (Dana Gillespie), a Ga-Lu who belonged to a tribe Bowen and Lisa made friends with and helped advance into bronze-age civilisation. But this stirred the anger of another advanced tribe, the Nargas, who wiped out the tribe and spirited Bowen and Lisa to their citadel. After a regulation series of tussles with the island’s men and monsters, Ben, Charly, Ajor, and Norfolk are captured by the Nargas. They find Bowen also imprisoned in their citadel, Lisa having since been sacrificed to the Nargas’ volcano god, a fate Charly and Ajor are quickly doomed to suffer as well.
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The People… mostly leaves behind the inquisitive aspect and moody evocations of The Land… in favour of very straightforward action-adventure shtick. A theme mooted in the early scenes, the process of recovering from the war for Ben, Hogan, and Norfolk, who find a much grander stage to be heroes on, is not invested with the same pertinence the war background of The Land… achieved. The notion that Caprona is alive and working to prevent anyone escaping is reiterated, but otherwise new ideas and enlarging concepts are mostly absent. The title’s promise to venture into a more sociological wing of this fantastical creation goes no further than offering the Nargas, who dress like samurai and have a deadly religious fixation, with the elided irony that in this clash of modern rationalism and atavistic faith, the faith has a point, as Caprona starts erupting in a hissy fit when it doesn’t get its sacrifices. Certain recent exercises in franchise expansion have learned little from The People…’ demonstration of the desultory effect of bringing back beloved heroes of earlier instalments only to serve them poorly and kill them off with little gravitas. Dinosaur action is minimal and the production team had been reduced to recycling models. Where Moorcock casually made Lisa the smartest person on the island, The People… dedicates itself, like a lot of genre films from the time, to mediating the women’s lib movement by having proto-feminist Charly squabble with he-man Ben, at least until she gets freaked out by a spider. Gillespie, better known as a pop singer, had appeared in a very similar part a few years earlier in Michael Carreras’ delirious The Lost Continent (1968), is an adolescent boy’s wet dream with her pneumatic physique encased in leather garb.
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The People That Time Forgot finally feels like a rough precursor to the spasmodic craze for sword-and-sorcery films the early 1980s would see with the likes of Conan the Barbarian and The Beastmaster (both 1982). Still, despite the lack of ambition and wit, it flickers with moments of jaunty good fun, like Norfolk intimidating a hulking Nargas opponent with some expert fencing skills, and one of Connor’s well-sustained suspense sequences as the plane struggles to take off in the midst of an exploding landscape. Wayne is a toothpaste smile and GI Joe figurine physique without a personality to match, but Douglas, who would later usually play villains in films like Superman II (1980) and Conan the Destroyer (1984), gives a breezily charismatic performance as a heroine who seems a bit like Peanuts’ Lucy grown up and tossed in with giant lizards. After our heroes stage an escape, dump the Nargas’ evil high priest (Milton Reid) into the volcano, and flee across country, Bowen dies standing off the Nargas warriors long enough for the others to get away, allowing a sliver of effective pathos when Bowen admits he’s always been trying to live up to his fondness from childhood games with Ben for playing the hero. The rest of the heroes manage to get back to the ship and sail away safely, and Hogan delights in the notion of introducing a bewildered Ajor to the exotic climes of Cincinnati.
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In between the two Caprona films, Connor and Amicus made another Burroughs adaptation, At The Earth’s Core, this one tackling another of the author’s fantasy zones, the world of Pellucidar, a great cave deep in the Earth inhabited by humans and strange life forms. Burroughs wrote several Pellucidar novels, including one where Tarzan descended to the hidden realm. The script for the adaptation, written by Subotsky, briskly and efficiently gets through the business of introducing heroes David Innes (McClure) and Professor Abner Perry (Peter Cushing) as they embark upon testing their huge experimental drilling machine, the Iron Mole. Financing the vehicle’s construction has been David’s gift to Perry for teaching him and his father geology, an education that’s made the Innes clan rich in mining. David and Perry take the Mole for a test voyage in Wales, but find it works too well, as they can’t turn it around before they’ve descended deep into the Earth’s interior, and crash out into the Pellucidar cavern.
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The duo are pursued by a colossal bird monster and then captured by a gang of chattering subhumans called Sagoths, who oppress the humans of Pellucidar on the behalf of the more monstrous rulers of the land: the Mahars. The Mahars are a race of psychic, anthropomorphic ramphorynchus, who like being fed human sacrifices and need an army of slaves to maintain their city, which is built over volcanic channels to exploit the great heat, vital to incubating the Mahars’ spawn. Perry is put to work transcribing ancient Mahar tablets and gains knowledge of their society and weaknesses. After falling for the captive princes Dian (Caroline Munro) and accidentally spurning her in a faux pas, David breaks out and forges an alliance with Ra (Cy Grant), a hunter belonging to one of Pellucidar’s many, disunited tribes, convincing him to try bringing together the humans to battle the Mahars.
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Connor’s films weren’t the first to purvey the joys of reviving an older tradition in genre storytelling. Richard Fleischer’s adaptation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) had kicked off a run of retro adaptations including Byron Haskin’s From The Earth to the Moon (1958) and William Witney’s Master of the World (1961). But Connor’s films revolve around the luxury of evoking a bygone era’s idea of technological accomplishment and discovery with a sense of awareness of how they graze against modern concerns, an approach that feels like particularly vital stepping stones towards today’s steampunk mode. The Iron Mole in At The Earth’s Core, has an aspect of super-futurist technology realised with the polished brass and plate iron charm of Victoriana. The wonderful opening credit sequence depicts the construction of the Iron Mole from its beginning as a stream of molten metal to the final technological monster being wheeled out of the assembly plant, a grand statement of scientific faith. The music score, by former Manfred Mann member Mike Vickers, expertly evokes the dichotomous spirit apparent in Connors’ films by alternating passages of weird, throbbing synthesiser music, giving his score accord with the contemporary modes in prog rock and early electronica as well the spacey, eerie vibe of the BBC TV sci-fi tradition, and big, garrulous orchestrations that anticipate John Williams’ work for Lucas on Star Wars in evoking vast horizons and adventure.
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At The Earth’s Core was my favourite movie ever when I was seven years old, but it’s long had a bad reputation otherwise. Both reactions are due, I think, to the fact it’s probably the purest entry any filmmaker has managed in transposing the feeling of the classic pulp sci-fi and fantasy magazines onto the big screen. Most other films in this mode are pallid pretenders compared to Connor’s sense of illustrative verve and punchy action set-pieces, and the ever-so-faint way the film acknowledges its own absurdity whilst playing things, generally, dead straight, outwitting the likes of Flash Gordon (1980). In contrast to the sober, location-shot approach of The Land That Time Forgot, At The Earth’s Core instead aims for and squarely hits an atmosphere of hallucinatory colour and strangeness achieved on the sound stage. Cushing, who would go on to bridge traditions by appearing in Star Wars a year later, gives a peach of a comic performance as Perry, a gangly, punctilious savant who finds himself initially overwhelmed by Pellucidarian peccadilloes but soon enough fashions himself a bow and arrow with his spectacle cord used as a string and sets to work bringing down fire-breathing toads.
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At The Earth Core wields a wry sense of humour about the old-fashioned values at play as David is obliged to play by Pellucidar rules in matters of courtship, which means he has to battle Dian’s rival suitor Jubal, “the Ugly One” (Michael Crane): “Never mind the Queensbury rules!” Burroughs’ imperialist sensibility, wherein good-looking white guys arrive in strange lands and set about setting things right, is mediated through a more contemporary sense of fellowship as David convinces Ra to try and unite the fractious human tribes and realise their own strength before the insidious evil of the Mahars. Perry commands David during the fight. Connor’s direction is at its most inventive here, in sequences like one in which David and Ra spy upon the Mahars as they mesmerise their sacrificial victims before pouncing upon them, conveyed in intense zoom shots upon blank beatific faces and beady saurian eyes with piercing electronic whines on the soundtrack. The special effects are particularly, happily cheesy throughout, but loaned a peculiarly tactile intensity in scenes like the battle between two hulking horned monsters who fight over a human snack.
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Another quality of this series all the entries shared was being photographed by the great Alan Hume, who worked wonders won a low budget, often utilising hand-held camera effects to give the films their muscular, immediate look. At The Earth’s Core also deploys some time-honoured fantasy adventure canards like the compulsory arena battle where David and Ra are chained up to be devoured by a pet monster, only for David to break loose and slay the beast in a goofy tussle, whilst Ra strangles a vengeful Mahar with his chains. Connor articulates the straightforward, cheer-along simplicity of the liberation-and-overthrow fantasy exceptionally well but shades it at the very end as the victorious humans survey the exploding Mahar city with the knowledge it cost the life of Ra and other brave souls. The melancholy streak continues as Dian declines to go with David and Perry to the surface world for fear she won’t thrive there, but the very last shot, under the end credits, strikes a cheery note as the Iron Mole drills its way up through the White House lawn and sets two guards scurrying about in Keystone Kops-style panic.
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Warlords of Atlantis, the last of Connor’s weird fiction series, stands apart from its predecessors in not being a proper adaptation of Burroughs. It is rather a newly-concocted tale in a mould that could easily have been penned by Burroughs, Abraham Merritt, or a swathe of other writers of their time. The storyline was written by Brian Hayles, who’s best remembered to posterity otherwise for creating canonical Doctor Who antagonists the Ice Warriors, and indeed the film itself strongly resembles a lot of early Doctor Who. Connor opens with a vision of a fiery red comet plunging into Earth’s atmosphere and frightening the Neolithic human inhabitants before plunging into the ocean. Around 1900, a ship called the Texas Rose steams out into what is called the Bermuda Triangle, nominally to test a bathysphere built by Greg Collinson (McClure yet again) and designed by his scientist friends, Professor Aitken (Donald Bissett) and his son Charles (Peter Gilmore) for underwater exploration. What the Aitkens aren’t telling Greg, or the rather scurvy crew of the ship, is that they’re hunting for signs of the lost civilisation of Atlantis, and Greg and Charles recover a remarkable relic made of solid gold when they take the bathysphere down. But when it’s hoisted aboard, the relic sets the minds of the crew towards mutiny and homicide, and the Professor is shot in the back.
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An assault by a giant octopus emerging from the depths prevents further violence, as the monster snatches most of the crew from the deck, and drags them and the bathysphere down into a system of caves where the inhabitants of Atlantis live. They meet gold-haired guardian Atmir (Michael Gothard), who escorts them through the underworld, bypassing cities that have fallen prey to decay over the centuries, before reaching their capitol. Charlie is taken in hand by the statuesque Atmir (Cyd Charisse – yes, you read that right), who wants to add his great mind to the pool of their knowledge. The Atlanteans prove to be Martians, trapped after migrating from their dying planet and so have been steadily manipulating the evolution of human society in a warlike direction, anticipating the eventual creation of technology that will allow them to move on at last. They’ve been capturing and enslaving humans to upkeep their crumbling cities and battle off the hordes of mutant monsters spawned by their energy sources, gifting them surgically-provided gills to survive their rigours, and our heroes encounter the lost captain of the Marie Celeste, Briggs (Robert Brown) and his daughter Delphine (Lea Brodie).
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Hayles’ script gives the established formula a shot of new ideas and some depth of concept and hints of parable. The Martians are portrayed as effetely detached aristocrats enabled by an enslaved underclass. Charlie’s tour through the high echelons of the Martian society seems him encountering levitating meditators and granted a terrifying vision of the future when he has a crystal helmet placed on his head that shows him the Martian-engineered horrors of Nazism and nuclear war the oncoming century hold in store, whilst draining off his mind to make him a part of the Martian gestalt. Such ideas offer a different perspective on the retro adventure ideal: where writers like Burroughs, Merritt, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and their like had found cogent ways to express delight and disquiet in nascent modernity, Warlords of Atlantis betrays a slightly heavy contemporary heart over where it all led. The simple liberation fantasy of At The Earth’s Core is swapped out for a more forbidding sense of evil forces at work in human history, and our heroes are happy merely to escape the Martians’ clutches.
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Warlords of Atlantis is a frustrating attempt to expand the series’ scope, however. The underground cities, the Martian tech, the colossal monsters which nudge closer towards Toho kaiju this time around – all have a splendid vividness and flavour in their threadbare hype. But where the Burroughs adaptations were distinguished by their ability to both provide a rollicking pace and relax within their little constructed worlds, Warlords of Atlantis rushes through its most interesting concepts and images, and clumsily drags out climactic action scenes, as in a scene where Atmir bombards our heroes with energy bolt after energy bolt without quite managing to hit their big, fat target of a bathysphere, and then the octopus returns to the surface to torment them some more. Connor’s next film, Arabian Adventure (1979), saw him move properly into outright fantasy for an enjoyable, if minor, adjunct to the series before he headed for Hollywood. Films like these are generally a punchline today. They’re tacky and goofy and soft targets for lampooners, and the sort of bad-old-days fare genre fans tend to cringe at. But to me, they contain far, far more of the essence of the fantastical than so many of their inflated children.