{"id":55948,"date":"2026-07-09T22:33:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T22:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/55948\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T22:33:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T22:33:07","slug":"66-years-later-netflix-just-quietly-rebooted-an-underrated-japanese-sci-fi-gem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/55948\/","title":{"rendered":"66 Years Later, Netflix Just Quietly Rebooted An Underrated Japanese Sci-Fi Gem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Japanese filmmaker Ishir\u014d Honda was responsible for 46 different feature films in the 26 years he was active as a director, and although the original Godzilla<\/a> is what he\u2019s most known for, there\u2019s a wealth of versatility and depth in his filmography overtaken by his most famous creation. He was a pioneer in the tokusatsu genre<\/a>, a term referring to live-action Japanese films heavily contingent on special effects, but it wasn\u2019t just his technical wizardry that made him such a massively influential and celebrated artist. Honda\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The nuclear horrors of Godzilla<\/a> are a testament to this, but so was Honda\u2019s work on his \u201cTransforming Human\u201d 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\u2019s a movie that gained a cult following due to its surprisingly tragic core \u2014 and now, over six decades later, it\u2019s been reimagined by Netflix as an eight-episode series that truly honors Honda\u2019s thought-provoking, politically-minded approach to sci-fi entertainment.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re introduced to television reporter Kyoko Kono (Y\u00fb Aoi) in the middle of an interview with research scientist Dr. Sano \u2014 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\u2019s increased maturity and intensity as well as an early glimpse at the VFX work done by the team behind 2024\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The one-two punch of Uta Uchida\u2019s performance and Shirogumi Inc. on special effects makes the Human Vapor a fantastic antagonist.<\/p>\n

Netflix<\/p>\n

Uta Uchida\u2019s depiction of the Human Vapor is a radical departure from the sardonic, secret romantic of the original film. He\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s not just a villain; he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s web they uncover White Center\u2019s connection to the clean-up of a contaminated meteorite that crash landed 27 years prior \u2014 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\u2019s 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 \u201chuman fuel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite being a pretty radical reinvention of the \u201860s original, Yeon Sang-ho utilizes many of the same characters and gives them new layers of depth.<\/p>\n

Netflix<\/p>\n

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 \u201860s 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\u2019s obvious that both of them are clearly suppressing a lifetime of trauma behind their reckless commitment to their work \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Netflix\u2019s modernization of Human Vapor is a perfect example of what exactly a contemporary reimagining should look like. It never fully abandons Honda\u2019s 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\u2019s first partnership with Toho in what might become a long-term relationship built on reimagining the legacy of classic tokusatsu \u2014 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 Ishir\u014d Honda\u2019s lesser-known works are just as deserving of a chance to be re-envisioned for a new generation.<\/p>\n

Human Vapor is now streaming on Netflix.Learn Something New Every Day<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Japanese filmmaker Ishir\u014d Honda was responsible for 46 different feature films in the 26 years he was active…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55949,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[935,2789,36917,36915,36916,36914,8,17,6904,33367,3369,7667],"class_list":["post-55948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-entertainment","tag-homepage","tag-hp-latest","tag-international-television","tag-inverse-recommends-tv","tag-inverse-tv-reviews","tag-japan","tag-japanese","tag-netflix","tag-science-fiction","tag-streaming","tag-tv-shows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}