Meta Filmmaking: TAGUMO ATTACKS!!!
or, the one where DC's LEGENDS OF TOMORROW makes TV about making a monster movie where monsters are shown within fake camera footage then humans fight like monsters on a miniature movie set
If that blurb made your head spin, well, hold onto your hats . . .This is Legends of Tomorrow week on ShotZero!!!
I (Mel, long time Legends proselytiser) think looking at meta-filmmaking sequences in 4.05 “Tagumo Attacks!!!” is a fitting start, as Legends is one of the more meta shows not merely in its multiverse but all TV.
Let’s timejump right to 1951 Tokyo and take it one scene at a time.
Set Up Your Conceit
The cold open sets up the episode’s time period, monster of the week, and film-within-a-film conceits while using almost every 'budget-conscious but cool-looking’ technique the episode will hero: black-and-white film-grainy footage; looking at monsters through or in a camera lens; cross-fading from ‘fiction’ to ‘reality’; and a custom stylised title card.
All that in under 60 seconds:
As we we looked at in “No Country for Old Dads”, Legends often finds creative ways to show CGI-creatures through another lens such as a video call, news footage, hologram, etc., because it makes things cheaper and more fun. “Tagumo Attacks!!!” uses Ishirō Honda’s handheld camera to excuse any VFX shakiness.
Which brings us to Ishirō Honda, this week’s real-life character, who would direct Godzilla three years after his encounter with the Legends, and is the driving force behind not just Tagumo’s monster, film set location and heightened style.
Establish Style
The next visit to Honda continues to show off fun techniques while establishing the main set-within-a-set.
This scene take a step further than the opener’s filming of a woman in the ocean is the plane miniature (more on miniatures below!), which combined with the black-and-white really leans into nostalgia and cool factor.
Have a Play
Legends takes its camera zooming along the ‘streets’ of one of its miniatures as Honda talks about how scale makes us feel.
It’s fun, it’s a little bit inside-baseball, and it demonstrates shots we’ll see again as it sets us up for its climax, which uses these scale in the opposite way; instead of making us feel little, it makes monsters look big!
Finish Big
Literally big, but figuratively nicely within a small budget.
[real quick before you ask where the purple three-breasted pirate kaiju came from . . . just watch Legends of Tomorrow Season 4, it’s deliciously good and kinda impossible to explain]
To kick off the action, Honda is mid-sentence when he gasps and bends, actor Eijiro Ozaki selling some physical drama as the the scene cuts into a quick shot and wires a tentacle pulls Hondo out of frame. We get one big money splash on our first look at the monster octopus looming in a CGI closeup before the episode brings all its toys out to play for the climactic battle!
There’s black and white and film ‘grain’ as we see through Honda’s lens, use of miniatures, scale of creature and the city (now to make the creature seem more imposing, instead of humans feeling small), as well as standard techniques such as a moving camera for dynamism, a deus ex machina monster entering frame, Hi/Lo angles, small pyrotechnics and haze, and a mix of CGI and practical elements.
It’s fun, it’s vaguely in keeping with 50s film style, but it’s also true to the tricks the episode has consistently played with.
Takeaways
Director Alexandra La Roche leans into the meta aspects of the story and incorporates all those elements from the very opening scene, bringing them all together in the climax, so instead of feeling like “oh it’s a cheat for them to fight on a city made of cardboard” we’re wondering how Honda’s footage will be spliced in, or when the earlier-introduced plane will come crashing in.
Legends embraces its silliness and never lets a small CGI budget get in the way of a showdown, but it also recognises that making each of your spectacles, fights, and setpieces different and germane to the episode and characters goes a long way!