Film / Virus (1980)

Dr. Krause: Unless a way is found to neutralize this monster, we are left with a doomsday weapon.
Spy Z: Which means a weapon that would never be used.
Dr. Krause: By a rational man, but any student of history can tell you that a rational mind is not always a prerequisite to a position of power.

Based on a 1964 novel by Sakyo Komatsu, Virus (known as Day of Resurrection in some regions) is a 1980 Japanese post-apocalyptic film directed by Kinji Fukasaku. In the first part of the story, an American bioweapon is accidentally released and decimates the planet's population, leaving the few survivors to eke out an existence in Antarctica. The rest of the story follows these survivors in their attempts to stop an automated missile system aimed right at them from being triggered by an impending earthquake.

The original Japanese version of the film is 155 minutes long and was released theatrically. In the US, the film was released on home video in a 102-minute cut which removed many scenes following Yoshizumi, The Hero, as well as the more optimistic ending of the original Japanese cut and the novel itself.

George Kennedy (as Admiral Conway, leader of a Federated Council representing the survivors at the Antarctic base) heads up a cast that also includes Shinichi Chiba, Glenn Ford, Robert Vaughn, Chuck Connors, Olivia Hussey, Henry Silva, and Cec Linder.

The movie has lapsed into the Public Domain and can be watched on YouTube.

One of many films produced by the infamous Haruki Kadokawa

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Tropes:

• 20 Minutes into the Future
  • The book was written in 1964 and begins around 1970.
  • The film was made in 1980 and begins in 1982.
• Act of True Love: Yoshizumi walks from Washington, D.C., to Tierra del Fuego (a distance of over 6,400 miles) to be reunited with Marit.
• Adaptational Heroism: Garland is a vicious Warhawk in both versions, but in the film, he requests the President's permission to arm the automated missile system. In the book, he launches a military coup to do so.
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole: Both novel and film have a Race Against the Clock to turn off a nuclear defense network from firing. There are two such systems, one in the USA and one in Russia. While the USA mission arrives too late, the novel implies the Soviet team is successful, thus no missiles hit North America. The film makes no such mention of the Soviet team, and total nuclear winter occurs; this making Yoshizumi's long walk from Washington to South America nothing sort of an outright miracle as he arrives with nary a hint of radiation poisoning.
• Arc Words: "Life is wonderful."
• Ascended Extra: General Garland only appears in one scene of the book, which lasts about two pages, but he's a regular presence for the first half of the movie.
• Award-Bait Song: "You Are Love (Toujours Gai Mon Cher)" by Janis Ian.
• Baby Factory: Less than twenty women of child-bearing age survive The Plague in Antarctica, and they end up required to have lots of kids to try to save humanity from going extinct.
• Characters Dropping Like Flies: The body count just keeps piling relentlessly through the first and final acts of the film, many of them off-screen, until by the end the only named characters still alive are Yoshizumi and Dr. Latour, as well as a handful of children and women that evacuated from the Antarctica base.
• Darker and Edgier: Than the novel, due to a smaller amount of people surviving the virus and nuclear exchange. The book has a few thousand in South America, immune, and ready to restart civilization. In the film it's only a few dozen, giving humanity another generation at most.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • The crew of a Soviet submarine survives the outbreak uninfected in the book. In the film, they are killed upon arriving at Antarctica for being carriers of the virus.
  • Everyone at the Antarctic base apparently dies in the movie.
• Depopulation Bomb: The MM88 virus wipes out nearly all of Earth's population after its release.
• Everyone Has Standards: General Garland is an unhinged Warhawk, but he does have enough loyalty to the chain of command to not arm the automated missile system without the President's authorization, even when he could do so on his own. Unfortunately, despite his disgust for Garland, the dying President gives this authorization purely to humor Garland, incorrectly believing that there's no one else left alive on the planet.
• Failsafe Failure: The idea behind the automated launch systems was that, even if for some reason everybody in the American (and Russian) chains of command were taken out, retaliation could still happen. Nobody ever thought about the possibility of an earthquake making them fire, or that the reason said chains of command were out was because of a pandemic, or that any of them would be activated by a Warhawk.
• Face Death with Dignity: When Yoshizumi radios back to the base that the missiles are coming, the voice at the other end reassures him that he did everything he could to stop the launch, and urges him to seek shelter for himself.
• Ignored Expert: Dr. Meyer is the only scientist involved in the project that unleashes The Plague to realize its dangers and is institutionalized when he tries to get the project shut down. Well over 99% of humanity dies as a result of his warnings being ignored.
• Racial Remnant: The human race is apparently reduced to 886 people (10,000 in the original novel) who either lived in Antarctica during The Plague or managed to escape there as the infection spread. Then those people find themselves scrambling to disarm an automated nuclear missile system before an earthquake causes it to irradiate Antarctica as well.
• Sole Surviving Scientist: Zigzagged in both the film and the book. Most of the surviving humans left in the world were stationed at scientific research stations in Antarctica. Still only a few have skills that are actually relevant for preventing The End of the World as We Know It.
  • Yoshizumi is a seismologist who realizes that a series of earthquakes might set off an automated nuclear missile system and kill them all.
  • Major Carter helped build that automated missile system and accompanies Yoshizumi to America to try and disarm it.
  • Dr. Latour creates a vaccine for The Plague that wiped out the rest of humanity. He injects Carter, Yoshizumi, and those who flee for areas that are safe from the missiles but still contain the eponymous deadly virus.
• Warhawk: General Garland of the Joint Chiefs of Staff continuously assumes that the worldwide viral infection that is killing everybody is a Russian attack and partially arms an automated response system to nuke Russia in retaliation. He does this even after it becomes clear that Russia is also affected by The Plague, and that the Russians have an automated defense system that will cause Mutually Assured Destruction if America launches its missiles.
• Wasteland Elder: In the final scene, Sole Surviving Scientist Dr. Latour is seen leading a ramshackle farming settlement with a few dozen other survivors (mainly women and children) of both The Plague and the nuclear missile strike that largely wiped out humanity. He tries to keep them optimistic about the future, even as his medical knowledge can only save some of them.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: The first 80% of the novel is just devoted to introducing a progression of one-off characters who play a role in the spread of the virus or provide some exposition or social commentary about the virus and the death of society. Nearly all of them either die during their sole point-of-view scenes or die off-screen with the rest of the world afterward. Yoshizumi, The Hero, is the only character to appear in the final 20% of the book who'd physically appeared at any earlier point in the story. The Movie abandons this to focus on a more limited number of characters before getting to the Antarctic arc about halfway through the story.
• Worthy Opponent: The President tells an infected Senator Barkley (a rival politician who helps bring the origins of The Plague to light) that "you were my opponent in every political battle, but you were never my enemy."

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