The Umizaru (literally, “sea monkeys”) film franchise started as a 2004 summer movie, based on a popular comic, starring Ito Hideaki as Senzaki Daisuke, a Japan Coast Guard diver trainee, who faces numerous obstacles, including the devastating death of a diving buddy, on the way to graduation. He also falls for Kanna (Kato Ai), a fashion magazine editor who is more on the Anne Hathaway than the Meryl Streep side of the youth and professionalism scale.
As in An Officer And A Gentlemen and Top Gun, after which it was so obviously modeled, the film ends with the hero a full-fledged pro, though his wedding with the editor is still up in the air.
The movie was a modest hit, but the Fuji TV network, which produced it, had great success with a TV series based on it. In May of last year, a sequel, Umizaru 2: Test of Trust (Limit of Love: Umizaru), appeared in the theaters - and became the biggest live-action Japanese film of the year, grossing $60 million.
The new Umizaru film again features Ito and Kato as starred-crossed lovers, but is bigger in scale, with its Hollywood inspirations being Titanic and The Poseidon Adventure. Also, instead of a class of rookie divers, the focus is on the 400-plus passengers of a ferry that has been hit by a freighter and is slowly sinking in Kagoshima Harbor.
A small team of Coast Guard divers, including Daisuke, rappels onto the ship from a helicopter and begins to evacuate the panicked passengers. Then Daisuke finds a familiar face - Kanna. They had a tiff the night before about their wedding plans - Kanna had already made her dress, while Daisuke was still reluctant to propose - and she left for Tokyo, feeling like a fool. Now she see Daisuke in a different, more heroic light - but before they can properly reconcile, she has to evacuate, while Daisuke searches for stray passengers.
He finds two - a pregnant woman (Ohtsuka Nene) and an excitable man (Fukikoshi Mitsuru) who reluctant to leave his expensive foreign car. Through a series of mishaps, Daisuke, his pal and fellow diver Tetsuya (Sato Ryuta), and the two passengers end up trapped on the ship, as the water seeps in from below and the flames roar above.
The Coast Guard swings into action to save this quartet, but despite the presence of dozens of Guardsmen, the rescue operation does not go smoothly. Who can save them?
Though the makers of Umizaru 2 had less of a budget to work with than James Cameron on Titanic, the quality and scale of the production, from the realistic CG effects to the real Coast Guard ships in the harbor and the hundreds of extras on the shore, is hard to fault. Also, the underwater photography is superb, as befitting a country with millions of divers, amateur and pro.
Finally, unlike the many men-in-uniform movies that crowd characters into the frame, Umizaru 2 keeps the focus mostly on its quartet, Kanna, and a select few of the rescuers, until we get to know them as personalities, not merely pot place markers. At times, the action slows, with melodramatic declarations and confrontations spinning on as the ship continues its unstoppable trip to the bottom. Also, the flashbacks to Daisuke’s traumatic failure to rescue a drowning man in a storm are an all-too-transparent attempt to add depth to an otherwise regular-guy character.
But after so many dirty heroes in Hollywood action movies, it is somehow refreshing to see one who is decent through and through and dedicated to, not killing bad guys and blowing things up, but saving lives. Maybe the real Hollywood comparison for Umizaru 2 is, not Titanic, but World Trade Center.