ack in August 1996, the first installment of Super Atragon raised a few dozen baffling questions with its incomplete story of alien invaders, secret technology, horrific weapons and frustrated family connections. Two powerful psychics, Annette and Avatar, took to the seas in World War II, using mental powers and experimental submarines to further their unexplained personal war. Both submarines went down as both women fell into comas. Fifty years later, they woke up again and headed right back into the fray -- Annette aboard the resurrected Japanese submarine Ra, and Avatar with a fleet of invulnerable world-shattering gravity weapons.
It was all hard to follow, especially the connections between Annette, U.N. peacekeeper Go Arisaka, and the Arisaka family line. But the release of the second half of the movie straightens a lot of things out. It seems Annette and Avatar are both representatives of an advanced subterranean race who sent Earth's surface-dwellers a test, in the form of a powerful new energy source. When humanity promptly crafted that energy source into weapons -- the Ra and its American counterpart, the Liberty -- instead of using it for peaceful means, the subterraneans decided it was time to eradicate the nasty humans.
But Annette had found some surprising things on the surface, namely courage and love, which she claims her own culture lacks. So she betrayed her people and warned the humans, even as her partner Avatar attempted to carry out the subterraneans' judgment by reducing the Earth's surface to ash.
Anyone order some chaos?
These revelations and many more are sandwiched in between a great many high-tech battle scenes. The exposition tends to be rushed, and it's delivered primarily via a series of overlong monologues, but it does untangle the Gordian knot of the first half's garbled decade-leaping plotlines neatly enough.
Unfortunately, the plot takes a back seat to the endless shots of bloodless carnage, as Avatar's floating gravity disks rip through Earth's puny defenses. After the tenth battleship is sliced in half, the warfare gets a bit old. Granted, there's a little less of this redundancy than in the first installment, but all the explosions still don't leave enough time for Go and Annette to explore their new love in anything but abrupt cliches. And Go's eventual reconciliation with the estranged father who abandoned him, resulting in Go's mother's death, amounts to little more than a shrug and a smile. Perhaps the writers should have taken a hint from their own rhetoric and concentrated less on war and more on human emotion.
Overall, Super Atragon is a moderately effective story, packed with intriguing tech and surprising visuals, and couched in a deliberately secretive storytelling style that keeps viewers interested by repeatedly playing hide-the-plot. But watching a 90-minute movie in bits, with a six-month hiatus between installments, renders the mysteries a little flat. At least with all the puzzle pieces in place, everyone can finally look at the finished picture.
