Featured Creature Kaiju File 3: The one that's better than Godzilla

 

 

Title: Gamera 2: Attack of the Legion

What Year?: 1996

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: That’s Good! (4/4)

 

In the course of this little lineup, I have already ranted about whether Western audiences and filmmakers can really “get” the kaiju genre (see Colossal). One of the more obvious problems is that our experience and thinking has been limited to the Godzilla franchise. For those who really knows the landscape, this is a blessing in disguise. Sure, we missed out on a lot, but a lot of that is kaka that makes the least of the Toho offerings look tolerable by comparison. To round out this little trilogy, I had to go with a movie to prove that non-Godzilla movies can be good, and I had one in mind. I present Gamera 2, a movie about a giant turtle and a bunch of bugs.

Our story begins with a recap of a previous adventure, in which the jet-propelled giant turtle Gamera defeated the boomerang-headed monster Gyaos. We find Japan in somewhat uneasy peace, where a nominal heroin reporter to annoy various military and government officials without retaliation. Things go downhill with the arrival of a swarm of bear-sized alien bugs and a giant alien plant that sustains them symbiotically. Gamera soon returns to fight them, but can only manage a Pyrrhic victory against the vast numbers of the bugs, dubbed the Legion in a convenient Biblical reference. Things get worse when a bug bigger than Gamera either emerges or spontaneously mutates. It’s up to Gamera to destroy the swarm, the queen and their plant, before the space-borne weed launches its seed to another world!

Gamera 2: Attack of the Legion was a 1996 kaiju film, the second in a 1990s revival of a character introduced by Daiei Film (see Warning From Space) in 1965. The series had effectively ended after 1971’s Gamera Vs. Zigras, though Daiei had previously attempted to revive the franchise with Gamera Supermonster in 1980. Gamera 2 was directed by Shusuke Kaneko from a script by anime veteran Kazunori Ito, both returning from the original remake/ reboot Gamera Guardian of the Universe. Ayako Fujitani also returned as Asagi Kusanagi, a girl able to communicate with Gamera, billed behind Miki Mizuno as the reporter Honami. The monsters and effects were  created with a combination of practical suits and CGI, with Akira Ohashi performing as Gamera and Mizuho Hoshida as the Legion queen. The film was released in Japan in 1996, with distribution by Toho, prior to the US release of the first film in 1997. A third revival film Revenge of Iris was released in 1999. Ohashi and Hoshida continued to perform in both Daiei and Toho films. All three 1990s films are currently available for free streaming on Amazon.

For my experiences, I first heard of Gamera in books on kaiju films and “bad” movies in general sometime in the early 1990s. It took quite a bit longer for the revival films (I know, “Heisei”) to drift into my awareness, including a passing mention by Roger Ebert and a sighting of the first film as part of a museum exhibit. What’s impressive about the whole saga is that absolutely nobody disputed that the original films were far inferior to the Godzilla/ Toho stable. (I’m sure I saw one of them, not long ago, and I honestly don’t remember it.) Yet, someone saw fit to try to revive the franchise while Toho was going strong (see Godzilla Vs. Biollante), which was about as inauspicious as doing a reboot of Starcrash to coincide with the Star Wars prequels. The end result was a film that was quite dark yet also well-attuned to the psychedelic vibe of vintage kaiju genre (see, dear Logos, Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster), and well-made to boot. The sequel was, if anything, an improvement, and that in itself is saying a lot.

Moving forward, most of the arguable pros and cons of this film, particularly compared to Godzilla and its own predecessor, come down to the “rules” of the genre. The science is absolute nonsense. The human plots and side plots fill a lot of time without having much effect on the outcome or getting the viewer invested in the characters. The conventional military forces only appear to prove their own uselessness. The outcome of the monster fights are dictated by how close we are to the end of the movie rather than tactics or comparative strength. However, these issues are if anything less frequent and intrusive than usual. I especially like that the military is good for something here. They actually succeed in getting civilians to safety, including several of the main characters. They make a decent accounting for themselves in battle with the swarm. Even the queen bug seems to take human tanks and artillery seriously enough to shoot back with its bio-plasma weaponry rather than simply stomping them underfoot. These might seem like trivial concerns, but for those who want anything close to realism from the genre, it helps just to get past having the genius scientists, beautiful damsels and plucky kids wandering unscathed long after trained and armed soldiers have been wiped off the map.

That brings us to the monsters. As often happens, the “good” kaiju is less interesting than his foes. Gamera is a suitably balanced hero/ antihero, always looking grim and vaguely disgruntled without turning actively malevolent. There are also plenty of times he shows genuine concern for humanity, at least collectively, as seen in a harrowing fight at a helipad where his little friend is being evacuated. On the other side, the drones of the swarm are truly hallucinatory in their strangeness, like nothing so much as the Medieval-psychedelic demons of a Hieronymus Bosch painting (or a really wonky patchisaur…). It’s stunning to see them literally cover Gamera in their first encounter; this is surely done with CGI, but I can’t see anything that would prove it with certainty. There’s an extra eerie touch when a soldier quotes the Gospel at their approach, which doesn’t seem to make sense for Japanese audiences yet seems to have been taken for granted by the filmmakers. By comparison, the queen is conventional enough to be a tad disappointing, notably lacking any counterpart to the bizarre single eye of the “little” guys, with a lot of further roughness for such a late film. It’s still a very strange and striking kaiju, menacing in its non-anthopomorphic alienness and towering even over Gamera. To me, it feels like what might have been if the Pacific Rim creatures had been portrayed with 1960s-‘70s tech. Considering how many kaiju films Guillermo Del Toro admitted copying from, I’m definitely not writing this off as just me.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I’m going with one I hadn’t figured out from a viewing alone. At the hour mark, Gamera is wounded from his fight with the queen, while the military has figured out that the plant is ready to launch its seed back into space with a sort of biological rocket. (What are the chances they didn’t rip off Larry Niven?) A commander says, “We were defeated the moment it flowered,” then orders a general retreat. As the last of the soldiers withdraw, Gamera charges toward a building engulfed by the alien plant. What gets odd even for a movie like this is the camerawork, which seems either over-exposed or washed out. Gamera reaches the plant, then manages to knock it over. The camera zooms in on the nose of the seed, only to zoom out again as the resulting blast tears through the city. It’s a truly horrific scene that leaves the moral in a gray area. Would there have been any more devastation if the plant had just launched? Would the Legion have been nearly as destructive as we’ve seen if they and their plant had just been left alone? There’s no answers forthcoming, nor a clear acknowledgement of the question, yet even allowing the implied doubt is an intriguing twist on the genre.

In closing, the main thing I have to say is that this movie and series is a major reason I started this feature in the first place. What I hadn’t  necessarily planned on was comparing any entry in the series to Godzilla films or each other. In those terms, I favor the present film to the preceding one, though in most respects, they’re about even. I would also put it about even with Godzilla Vs. Biollante, if only because that film didn’t rise as far above new and old cliches. What really makes the difference in the rating is how far the Gamera revival had come from its motley roots. When a studio that once made a bad knockoff of When Worlds Collide can go toe to toe with the one that made Rodan, we can all take heart that filmmakers can do better if they try. That’s enough for me to call it a night.