The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979)

Early in The Man Who Stole the Sun, chemistry teacher Makoto Kido and his students are held hostage in their school bus by a highjacker.  He wants to use the hostages as a bargaining chip so he can speak to the emperor about his son.  We don't know why he wants this, but the highjacker is clearly anxious and at the end of his rope.  Kido, his students, and the highjacker remain together on the bus for hours, in a standoff with the police.  

Detective Yamashita leads the effort to save them.  He doesn't hesitate put his own life on the line, and decides to get on the bus himself to negotiate with the highjacker.  He gets the highjacker outside, then grabs his gun.  Yamashita gets injured, but still fights, and eventually wrestles the gun away.  Snipers fire on the highjacker.  We see Yamashita in close-up, blood staining his collar, as he lifts the highjacker onto his shoulder and drags him into an ambulance.  Yamashita's an old-fashioned tough guy, physically strong, carrying a sense of purpose, and capable of powering through whatever injuries he suffers.

Kido doesn't leave much of an impression at first.  We start to notice him when the scattered details of what he does at home and at school start to come together.  We know he's interested in building an atomic bomb, and seems to be up to some kind of criminal activity.  He frequently views a nearby nuclear power plant with binoculars. 

Eventually he makes his move and robs the power plant.  His plutonium heist is practically a music video, eschewing any kind of suspense in favor of dancing from step to step in the process.  It comes in a series of still images rhythmically edited together, sometimes resembling the human stop-motion of Norman McLaren's Neighbors.  This cheery gloss on a heavy matter plays counterpoint to the scene with the bus highjacker.  It conflicts both with Yamashita's classical professionalism and with how that scene depicts its action seriously and methodically.

That said, Kido's theft of the plutonium goes hand-in-hand with the fear and desperation of the highjacker in that scene, and another scene before that depicting the casual robbery of a police officer's gun.  Crime seems normal by the time Kido breaks into the nuclear plant.  It's after the robbery that the film begins to elaborate on the unease everyone in its world feels, but we know it exists long before then.

The most suspenseful part of the film is when Kido is building his atomic bomb.  The work is long, complex, precise, and dangerous, and the film lingers for as long as it takes to show how careful Kido is in preparation and execution.  It sets aside the exaggeration and satirical bite that characterizes the rest of the film. 

The difficulty of this work, the near-impossibility of obtaining power, proves to be a key factor of this film's element of tragedy.  It feels weird to say that about a film that has such a wild sense of humor, but that's part of the beauty of it.  Kido is ecstatic once the bomb is finished, but as it turns out, he struggles to put it to use.  He doesn't know what to ask for.  Once he gets in contact with the government to extort them, his first demand is improvised and trivial.  It would seem callous and nihilistic to make such a petty request when holding the lives of thousands in his hands, but we've seen the care he put into the bomb.  And when he makes demands, we can hear the resentment in his voice when the authorities object, and he retorts that the government can do anything.

To Kido, the status quo looks so all-encompassing that he struggles with imagining how to make it different.  He doesn't mean to be petty, but what person living an average modern life can fully grasp the scale of power he has?  The task of getting it in the first place was hard enough.  He needs time before he can really get started.  The tragic part of this film is that, for various reasons, time is running out.

Kido, the man who stole the sun but doesn't know yet how to use it, clashes with Yamashita, the man who unquestioningly throws his whole being into protecting what already is.  Yamashita is out of step with the times, proudly failing to comprehend Kido's alienation, how the world has been thrown into a new perspective by the emergence of unlimited destructive power.  The clock is ticking not just for Kido but for everyone.  Nevertheless, Yamashita is relentless in keeping things as they are, and no matter how hard anyone strikes back at him, he just can't seem to die. 

The reason I say this film has an element of tragedy, rather than that it is tragedy, is not just because it's more of an over-the-top satire than anything else.  It's also that even while time is running out, it's unknown whether the amount of time remaining is enough.  After the timer on the bomb has started, the wire can still, maybe, be cut.