Human Vapor Reinvents The Spirit Of Tokusatsu For The Conspiracy Age
A cinematic curiosity from the creator of the King of Monsters is the subject of Netflix's newest TV series.
Japanese filmmaker Ishirō Honda was responsible for 46 different feature films in the 26 years he was active as a director, and although the original Godzilla is what he’s most known for, there’s a wealth of versatility and depth in his filmography overtaken by his most famous creation. He was a pioneer in the tokusatsu genre, a term referring to live-action Japanese films heavily contingent on special effects, but it wasn’t just his technical wizardry that made him such a massively influential and celebrated artist. Honda’s career was defined by an ability to marry astounding, forward-thinking technological advancement with genuinely thought-provoking material, creating films that were just as capable of leaving audiences awestruck and intellectually enriched.
The nuclear horrors of Godzilla are a testament to this, but so was Honda’s work on his “Transforming Human” trilogy, a series of films linked together by the central concept of bodily mutation and metamorphosis. None of them achieved the level of fame as the King of Monsters, but the most well-known of the three is arguably The Human Vapor, a 1960s sci-fi crime thriller revolving around a bank robber with the inexplicable ability to transform into a gaseous state. As hokey as it sounds, it’s a movie that gained a cult following due to its surprisingly tragic core — and now, over six decades later, it’s been reimagined by Netflix as an eight-episode series that truly honors Honda’s thought-provoking, politically-minded approach to sci-fi entertainment.
Despite its genre trappings, the original film maintains the same kind of humanistic approach that defines the first Godzilla; it starts off as a breezy police-procedural, with Detective Okamoto and his dogged reporter girlfriend Kyoko Kono carrying out their own separate investigations into a series of bank robberies that have left the police stunned. However, it eventually opens up and reveals profound tragedy at its core — the titular thief is a former test pilot named Mizuno, who was experimented on by a scientist trying to help astronauts withstand the conditions of space-travel. However, the process went horribly awry and transformed him into his current monstrous state. Like the best movie monsters, his crimes are those born out of passion: The beating heart of the film is the ill-fated love story between Mizuno and Fujichiyo Kasuga, a classical Kabuki dancer, and his thefts are solely to provide money to allow her to perform.
The Netflix series, showran by South Korean filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho (the mind behind the instant-classic zombie film Train to Busan), totally reinvents the premise, taking the police-procedural trappings and transforming it into a genre-bending conspiracy-thriller that extrapolates on the themes of federal exploitation in the original. The first episode starts with a very literal bang, as we’re introduced to television reporter Kyoko Kono (Yû Aoi) in the middle of an interview with research scientist Dr. Sano — partway through their interview, Sano is swept up in a whirlwind by a cloud of vapor that blows him up from the inside, an immediate and show-stopping declaration of the show’s increased maturity and intensity as well as an early glimpse at the VFX work done by the team behind 2024’s Godzilla Minus One. That initial explosion of blood and guts lays the groundwork for our introduction to a new version of the eponymous Human Vapor, played by Japanese model Uta Uchida.
The one-two punch of Uta Uchida’s performance and Shirogumi Inc. on special effects makes the Human Vapor a fantastic antagonist.
Uta Uchida’s depiction of the Human Vapor is a radical departure from the sardonic, secret romantic of the original film. He’s far more akin to a Michael Myers or a T-1000: cold, unfeeling, and robotic, almost like a wind-up toy animated solely for bloodshed and vengeance. He’s the centerpiece of the entire show and his deadpan and inhuman performance is just as effective as the body horror special effects required to bring him and his abilities to life. Like the original, however, he’s not just a villain; he’s part superhero and part supervillain, a revenant seeking revenge for a very specific tragedy, the threads of which make up the mystery our main characters are determined to unravel.
Yeon Sang-ho crafts an intriguing web of paranoia and conspiracy around the sudden appearance of the Human Vapor and the bodies he leaves in his wake, and like the source material, both Kyoko and Detective Kenji Okamoto (Shun Oguri) are on the case. Their investigation causes them to realize the Vapor is targeting the heads of a seemingly innocuous social welfare organization known as White Center, and as they unravel the spider’s web they uncover White Center’s connection to the clean-up of a contaminated meteorite that crash landed 27 years prior — an event that has shocking and unforeseen connections to both of them. Train to Busan carried with it a subtle class commentary among its zombie carnage, but Human Vapor makes its commentary even more intense, with their search for answers eventually uncovering a horrific history of shady cover-ups and labor exploitation, building off the horror of Mizuno’s tragedy in the original to confront audiences with the reality that in the eyes of those in power, all of us are nothing more than “human fuel.”
Despite being a pretty radical reinvention of the ‘60s original, Yeon Sang-ho utilizes many of the same characters and gives them new layers of depth.
Amidst the far-reaching conspiracy and sci-fi spectacle, the show thankfully never loses sight of the human drama which makes the original film work so well, instead adding new layers. Unlike the sweet romance between Kenji and Kyoko in the ‘60s film, we discover that their romance ended bitterly as a result of their careers clashing in an explosive incident that almost cost Okamoto his job. Both actors bring an incredible lived-in quality to the characters, and it’s obvious that both of them are clearly suppressing a lifetime of trauma behind their reckless commitment to their work — work that ironically brings them back together and allows them to open up to each other in a way they never could before, even as the nature of their investigation eventually threatens to tear them apart forever.
Netflix’s modernization of Human Vapor is a perfect example of what exactly a contemporary reimagining should look like. It never fully abandons Honda’s imaginative mix of science fiction and social commentary (or his sense of humor, which the show displays in a fourth episode detour that brings some much-needed levity to a mostly bleak affair), even while it uses the premise as a launchpad for a new story of institutional corruption. The show is Netflix’s first partnership with Toho in what might become a long-term relationship built on reimagining the legacy of classic tokusatsu — the concept of Godzilla has already been repurposed countless times for new themes and audiences, so hopefully Human Vapor is enough of a success to prove that even Toho and Ishirō Honda’s lesser-known works are just as deserving of a chance to be re-envisioned for a new generation.
