Gamera vs. Viras (1968)

directed by Noriaki Yuasa

Japan

81 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Masao and Jim are two boy scouts who have little in the way of personality other than that they love to play pranks. After a cold open (and a really potent title card drop) that establishes the alien invasion plot and shows us Gamera trying to stop it, we spend some time watching the two boys pull a fast one on their scout leader and some scientists with the end goal of getting them to let the kids pilot a submarine - if they can break it, then they're the only ones who'll be able to fix it, so the adults won't have any choice but to let them pilot it, right? It works, and after a disorienting ride, the scout leader and the head scientist turn the sub over to the boys, who use it to have a little race with Gamera. I really liked this part because if you think about it as coming chronologically after the cold open, it implies that Gamera fought with the Viras aliens, lost, came back to Earth to recuperate, and still made time to have an underwater race with a couple of kids and let them drive their mini submarine around his legs. What a champ.

But through a series of accidents, the boys end up abducted into the Viras mothership, and, by their quick thinking and Gamera's brute strength combined, have to figure out how to thwart the invasion.

The sequence of events where the boys rig up the submarine so that they're the only ones who'll know how to pilot it also establishes a theme that will run throughout the entire movie, and to an extent throughout all Gamera movies: adults do not know what they're doing, and most of the time they just get in the way. Kids in Gamera movies are treated as if they alone are capable of seeing the world in a way that adults just can't, and that's why I like these movies so much. They treat a child's perspective as a valuable and unique thing, not something of lesser value than an adult's way of navigating the world. I've read that this was something Noriaki Yuasa fully intended of his Gamera films - that adults know nothing, and children know everything.

When you think about it, the Viras aliens in their separate forms are an extension of the ignorant adults at the beginning of the film: they never let the kids get away with anything cool (their ship's replicator refuses to give them weapons), they try to make the kids do what they tell them to, they treat the kids like obstacles and want them to get out of the way. I like the individual Viras aliens, even though their combined form is one of my least favorite Gamera enemies. They're all wearing surgical scrubs for some reason. I have this weird idea that when they were observing Earth, they picked up our television signals, saw people in surgical scrubs cutting open, mutilating, and dealing apparent massive violence to other unconscious, helpless humans, and decided that wearing scrubs would be the best way to convey to humanity their intent to subjugate them by force.

This was made during bad financial times for Daiei, and has a third of the budget of its predecessor, Gamera vs. Gyaos. The film makes great use of what original material it's capable of concocting, but it does grind to a halt when the stock footage interlude hits. But aside from the stock footage, there is some real beauty to this. I was, even on this second viewing, still enraptured by the design of that spaceship. It's really something else, and not only is it aesthetically interesting, it's also technologically impressive: it can rearrange its segments and jettison damaged sections in response to an attack. I mentioned in my review of vs. Guiron that one of my favorite things was how the interior of the spaceship just has painted wooden floors, giving it this tangible, realistic feel, and I feel the same way about the interior of the Viras ship too. It looks like a big art exhibit.

I had a lot of fun with this one. I think it's one of the lesser-appreciated Showa Gamera movies, but I enjoyed it. I will say that it's a very uneven movie, though, and while the opening is a grand old time, it does struggle to regain its footing after the lengthy stock footage sequence, and never quite gets to the high point it hit at the beginning. It's still worthwhile for the art design if nothing else - these movies are so well-crafted that there's a timelessness to them that transcends their heavy 1960s aesthetic.

Gamera vs. Guiron (1969)

directed by Noriaki Yuasa

Japan

82 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Strange things are afoot on the pale blue dot. Unusual radio waves and anomalous activity in space have been detected and are being studied by scientists on Earth. This is the last year of the hyper-modern 1960s, and all eyes and ears are turning outward and upward, to the vast cosmos, wondering: who - or what - is out there?

Well, there's Gamera, for starters.

While the adults are concerned with finding the source of the enigmatic radio waves, Akio and Tom are miles ahead of them. Using nothing more than a simple balcony telescope, they witness a UFO and follow it as it lands nearby. They board it with no hesitation and immediately hijack the thing, which is super fun at first, but then a little scary when meteors threaten to strike the ship as soon as it gets into space. But Gamera is there to save the day - until, controlled by some external force, the UFO starts accelerating faster than even Gamera can keep up with, and soon, the boys are on the mysterious tenth planet, unwilling houseguests of the real owners of the spacecraft.

This is a movie that hides absolutely nothing from its viewers. There's satisfaction in picking at and unraveling a complex plot, in watching a film that demands attention and multiple viewings to fully understand it. But there's also something fun about a movie like this where everything happens in a masterfully controlled linear flow from start to finish. This is just one of the ways that this movie caters - and I do not say "caters" in a pejorative sense - to its young audience. Children are the focus here, and although the film was made by adults, it feels like it has such an understanding of what it's like to be a kid. When the boys are using a dart gun to mess with their local cop and the cop tells them to run along now, returning Tom's dart by sticking it to his forehead, he almost turns to the camera for a second, like "aw jeez, can you believe this?" The language of the film is something that takes steps to include children at every turn.

It's also, to me, one of the most visually stunning Gamera movies. Everything about this is the reason why I love tokusatsu. I've been thinking recently, due to an interview I'm machine-translating (spoilers!), about the inherent unpredictability of tokusatsu and how it differs from visual effects achieved by CGI: I'm not implying in any sense that the distinctive aesthetic of this movie is accidental or that the people making it didn't know what they were doing, but the process of creating something like the Guiron suit and putting it on film is one that necessarily entails a lot of discovery. You can't be sure what something is going to look like on camera, and even once you've filmed it, you now have the work of integrating it within the wider narrative of the film through the editing process. This handmade nature is why older films like this have such a unique feel.

I think one of my favorite parts of this is how the room where Akio and Tom end up almost getting their brains eaten has visible wooden floorboards, painted white. I just love the feeling I get from looking at a spaceship with wooden board flooring.

So I've talked about the visuals, what about the real stars (the monsters)? I'm kind of a Zigra stan - love that wacky goblin shark - but upon this most recent rewatch, Guiron is seriously challenging that. Guiron's first appearance is so, so stunning. For some reason I kept thinking about that scene in Rodan - one of my favorite sequences in all of tokusatsu - where the lead character goes down into a mine and witnesses incomprehensible sights, like the giant baby Rodan emerging from its egg and eating giant larvae. The sheer horror of the scene in Rodan is not there at all, but the sense of seeing something that shifts your paradigm totally is. The real feeling of weightiness that Guiron has is what makes him so good: he's a big lug and he feels like a big lug, you can feel how every step is laborious, how much gravity tugs at his body. Gamera: Rebirth took an interesting tack in their redesign of Guiron as a spring-loaded, weirdly ferrety creature, considering how palpably heavy the original is.

And this whole thing is just so coherent. You understand on instinct how the aliens' equipment works. Reiko Kasahara and Hiroko Kai play Barbella and Flobella the spacewomen like they studied from a real exoplanetary culture.

Like Godzilla, Gamera had a debut that established him as a creature that was not actively malevolent but operated as more of a natural disaster, but by this time, Gamera was firmly entrenched in his role as a protector of children. Every single second of Gamera vs. Guiron reflects that: this is one of the most "made for kids" movies I've ever seen, and that's what's beautiful about it. Or, to elaborate, the fact that, in addition to being one of the most "made for kids" movies I've ever seen, this is also - IMO - one of the most visually stunning non-Toho monster movies to come out of the 1960s - that's what's beautiful about it.

Gamera 2: Attack of Legion (1996)

directed by Shusuke Kaneko

Japan

99 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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After Gamera: Guardian of the Universe launched the series into modernity with a movie that was more grown-up than any of the Showa-era films, it would be difficult to follow up with a sequel that would both match the tone of Guardian of the Universe and still be as good without feeling like a rehash, but that's exactly what Attack of Legion did. Somewhat unusual for kaiju film, this is a direct sequel: no one knew what Gamera was the last time, but now they do, and although they're still wary, only having had one encounter with it before, they at least seem to know enough not to shoot a bunch of missiles at it this time.

We start off in snowy, snowy Hokkaido. I love to watch movies shot in Hokkaido during winter because it amazes me that any place can be that snowy. One of Japan's highest-grossing films, Antarctica, was shot in Hokkaido with the intent of making it look like Antarctica (obviously), and to incredibly realistic effect. The whole of the country, not just Hokkaido, is buried under snow as Attack of Legion begins, so this definitely feels like a Winter Movie™. 

The primary antagonist is again introduced by way of shots of various scientific and military institutions tracking it on radar and basically all going "huh?" The audience should be very familiar with this by now and know that those mysterious things theorized to be birds/radar blips/floating islands/etc. are, in fact, an incoming giant monster. But again, the people of Attack of Legion have only had one prior kaiju encounter, and we can forgive them for not being savvy yet. And then, when the title card rolls, it does something interesting and gives us some foreshadowing by using the character for "me" in Gamera's name as a crucifix shape - more on that later.

First I want to talk about Legion for a minute. Forgive me for my enthusiasm here. Bug kaiju aren't something I've ever been overly fond of because I feel like they oftentimes lack nuance; in design they are by necessity quite intricate, to replicate the small and almost alien body structure of a bug, but when it comes to backstory and character detail, I feel like there's a tendency to have "it's a giant bug" be as deep as they get. Not so for Legion. These guys are almost not kaiju but something else entirely that I don't know how to describe. The name sums it up: there's an absurd amount of them. More even than the hordes of Gyaos in the previous film. They're alien organisms that landed on Earth ostensibly because our radio signals were making them nuts, since their own method of communication relies on electromagnetism. But for all intents and purposes, they are bugs. We also get an upsetting couple of minutes of Gamera being completely covered in the tinier Legion, which was also done with the Meganula swarming Godzilla in Godzilla vs. Megaguirus. I feel like this is a relatable moment in both films because all humans can empathize with seeing another creature covered in bugs. None of us ever wants to be covered in bugs.

This film echoes what Guardian of the Universe did with Gyaos by establishing Legion as not just a fantastical creature but an organism, a biological lifeform that is, during the course of the film, studied and (at least partially) understood. I absolutely love this theme of making kaiju the object of study and bringing them from the quasi-supernatural realm of godlike beings (I'm coming up on the "more on that later") to a category of life that, while outsized, is still within the animal kingdom. There is a dissection scene that was one of the highlights of the film for me because the physicality of it was everything I want out of a kaiju film. Not just seeing huge, untouchable creatures fighting each other, but bringing them down to a human scale, showing people touching and interacting with them in a controlled, non-chaotic setting. It's one thing to have a kaiju that looks good when it's trashing a city, but it's another to have one that looks good lying on an operating table with its guts out. Just for nerd reasons, setting aside my usual ambivalence about bug kaiju, Legion is one of my favorites I have yet seen.

The military is understandably ill-prepared in this film because Legion is so powerful and destructive that to show us a military that is prepared to deal with it would beggar belief. However, the military is not presented as misguided at best and trigger-happy at worst the way they were in the last film, which on the whole is somewhat disappointing to me, because I rub my hands together and cackle when a kaiju film casts the government and/or military as inept and interfering. I love to see real-world incompetence or unpreparedness thrown into light via confronting it with a beast or two (or a legion of them). But everyone here is pretty easy to sympathize with, although still very blind to the destruction we're visiting on the Earth. And the sheer scale of kaiju devastation is incredible even for this kind of film: Sendai is essentially leveled in the middle of the film and, unlike some Godzilla movies that only show us the true breadth of civilization that's been annihilated towards the end, we're left to sit with a now-non-existent Sendai for the rest of the running time as a thing that can't be undone.

Now, I'm saving this for last because I want you to skip it if I start sounding really ridiculous, but I have to talk about the vaguely Biblical theme to this film. Please excuse me, because this only occurred to me as I was falling asleep after watching the movie, and it may be something I just made up. The film itself makes its connection to the Christian Bible explicit when it names Gamera's opponent Legion, as well as using the cross motif in the opening credits, but I feel like it also goes further than that in establishing Gamera as a kind of messianic figure. Not only does Gamera arrive to rescue a sinful, misguided human populace in our time of need, it also apparently dies in the middle of the film, only to be resurrected, again, in our time of need. But the interesting thing here is that Gamera does not seem to be a savior solely of humankind: Gamera is a messiah who is here to save the soul of the entire Earth. I find the idea of a Jesus-like figure who is not concerned with humanity by itself, but rather with humanity as just a single one of the many species on a living, breathing planet, very interesting. A savior for every species, not just us.

This is another knockout entry in this trilogy from somebody who really, really knows how to infuse kaiju cinema with depth and an engaging storyline. In any kaiju film, there is the human element; the human characters who are there by necessity because storylines where kaiju are the main and only characters only work in highly specialized situations. But there is also, in the background, Gamera doing its own thing. Attack of Legion presents us Gamera as an unknowable being. We follow the human characters and see Gamera's actions from their perspective because it's the only way we can relate to anything, but beneath that is something else. Gamera is a creature that is self-directed and ultimately we are not privy to what it's thinking. We can say "Gamera is here to save us!" but Gamera is really here to do whatever it wants. I have seen shades of this concept explored in kaiju media that leans hard towards horror, but never how this film does it from a matter-of-fact, non-terrifying angle. I think that reflects a bit of the ecologically-minded nature of this trilogy: A message that animals have interior lives that are completely alien to us, and that this is not something to be suspicious of or to fear, but something to be respected and fought for.

Gamera the Brave (2006)

directed by Ryuta Tasaki

Japan

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This movie retcons the Heisei Gamera trilogy as well as pretty much everything else since vs. Gyaos and places us in a version of 2006 where Japan has not seen a kaiju event since Gamera sacrificed itself to defeat Gyaos 30 years prior. The main character is the young son of someone who was himself a boy when that happened, and it's clear that Gamera and stories of Gamera are something that is deeply woven into the pair's lives. Going back to how things were pre-Heisei, children are once again central to this film. This is a coming-of-age story, but to me, it feels like there's a lot here that was intended for the parents watching over their kids' shoulders as much as for the kids themselves.

That being said, though, this also feels more explicitly "for kids" than earlier Gamera films. I think the reason for that is because everything is cute. This movie, being less than 20 years old at time of writing, is more in line with modern tastes and sensibilities than the films that first introduced us to Gamera. I have no problem with cute, and I was in love with the teeny-tiny baby Gamera who we spend most of the movie with, but I think that the insistence that everything made for children has to be in some way cute or stylized is a thing that has come about since Gamera made its debut. In the Showa films, there was not necessarily a lot of cuteness, but what there was was things that were complex and interesting and colorful and made you (if you were a child) want to be in that world and explore it. There's not a lot that's different from our world in the Brave, other than the kaiju. I can't speak for every child, but when I was young, I didn't only want to see things that were adorable, I wanted to see things that made me think in ways I'd never thought before; puzzles and scenarios that felt fresh and new. Something like the kids exploring the Virasian spaceship in vs. Viras and encountering the Virasians themselves, who have glowing eyes and can combine into one giant form, would have felt fresh and memorable to me as a kid. Little bitty hovering Gamera baby, while it is incredibly important and adorable and I loved it, would have felt to kid me like anything else from any other property aimed at kids.

Treatise on adorableness over, with apologies. So one of the things I really liked about this movie is that despite definitely being aimed at a young audience, there's still layers to it. The child protagonist finds a Gamera egg that hatches in his hands, and he takes home and begins to raise the infant Gamera that comes out of it. He gives it the nickname that his mother, now deceased, gave him - Toto, short for Toru. So he identifies himself with this poky creature that is small, doesn't have parents (well, Toru has a good father, but he's quite busy), and needs help getting around. This is something I haven't specifically seen that often: A child personally identifying with Gamera. He gives it the parenting that he wishes he could have had from his mother. The baby of course grows rapidly to abnormal size for a turtle, and it becomes apparent that this is not just a regular turtle, this is a Gamera. Using a kaiju in this instance as a role model is really interesting and works really well: That this creature who's so small can grow into something that can protect and defend other people and the planet is an uplifting message for any insecure young child.

This is where the coming-of-age aspect comes into the film. At some hard-to-define point, external events force the turtle to cease being a small, innocent, helpless creature and propel it into becoming Gamera. To me this felt like a really strong parallel to the moment - often impossible to perceive until afterwards - that a child becomes an adult. This also was one of the things where it felt like the heaviness of it was reserved for the adults watching. To a child, it would still be tragic to see your beloved pet having to go off and do something else without you, but to an adult who has watched or is anticipating watching that moment come for their own children, it carries more weight.

And I think the biggest place where that dual message for both parents and children comes in is at the very core of the film. Toru obviously cares deeply for his Gamera. He doesn't want to let it go, because he knows what his father told him happened 30 years ago, that Gamera died in sacrifice to save humans. As Gamera grows, Toru struggles with the fact that someday it is going to leave him and he's not going to be able to protect it anymore. He loves Gamera and he knows the world needs Gamera, but selfishly, understandably, he doesn't want it to die. You want to let the thing you love grow and see it live a full life, but that comes with the qualification that it will be in danger most if not all of the time.

But this is also an extremely chill film. There's a real summer-y, casual vibe to it. I got the feeling of being a kid on summer break and not really having anything more pressing to do than run around with a bug net. Time feels stretchy and weird and you live in a place that's safe enough (or as a kid, you don't see any danger) for you to just play in the sun all day. The film is so light and airy that I almost didn't like it at first after watching the darker and more urgent Heisei trilogy, but there is so much heart to this that I eventually saw how it is as good as those films, it's just different. As for the suits, which I always talk about, I liked them but wasn't wowed by them. There's something interesting about how visible the humans inside the suit are here compared to the way they were almost entirely hidden in the Heisei films, and how it means that the actor has to put in more work towards actually performing instead of just animating the suit, but despite that I wasn't enamored with the design of either Zedus (a very forgettable semi-aquatic dinosauroid with no backstory) or the refurbed Gamera and its cowlike eyes. 

I think this is the most complaints I've had about a movie I would still say I loved. It's hard not to be won over when something feels as authentic as the sequence in the end where a relay race of children hands off the object Gamera needs to get its second wind back in its fight against Zedus. I should have watched this at a different time, like possibly some time after the potency of the Heisei trilogy had left my system, and with different expectations.

Gamera vs. Barugon (1966)

directed by Shigeo Tanaka

Japan

106 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

Full disclosure: I was drifting in and out of sleep pretty heavily for about the last half-hour of this movie, so this review may have some gaps where I could not stay awake. I highly, highly recommend watching this on archive.org if you're looking for it; they have the Blu-Ray rip which is in absolutely beautiful quality.

Anyway. After quickly recapping the events at the end of Gamera, we're told that midway through its journey to Mars, Gamera was hit by a random asteroid and knocked off-course, spiraling back to Earth. Convenient for us puny humans, who are in more need of rescue than we had cockily assumed, but probably very confusing for Gamera. There is a marked difference in tone between this film and its predecessor, which is partially due to this one being in (quite vivid) color, but also this somehow just feels more like a movie. Gamera was all about Gamera, and it felt like a slightly unsteady step into the world of kaiju film from a studio hoping to capitalize on the booming popularity of Godzilla and tokusatsu on television. It was both visually dark and had a tone of mild dread, though nothing near as suffocating as Gojira. This second entry rolls onto the scene well-rounded; fully equipped with subplots, a grip of different characters all prepared to backstab each other, nice cinematography, and, as the title gives away, a second kaiju.

For a long time, this does not feel like a monster movie at all. I'm used to this from the Godzilla series, which is fond of introducing Godzilla in a very roundabout and sometimes even completely unrelated way: We have to follow people doing other stuff before anything interesting happens just to get some plot so that the movie isn't 20 minutes of epic kaiju battle and no substance whatsoever. Oddly, though, and maybe this is just because I wasn't sitting there waiting impatiently for my beloved Godzilla to show up, it feels like vs. Barugon does this better. I was perfectly satisfied with the story, which concerns a couple of would-be jewel thieves trying to steal what they think is a huge, priceless opal but is actually the egg of a dangerous creature. I wasn't waiting for the action to arrive - this movie does non-action things perfectly fine.

The amount of blackface here just can't not be addressed, though. It casts a shadow over what is otherwise a really good film. The first movie had this same issue, with fake Arctic natives trying and failing to warn the main characters about Gamera, but where the people in brownface in that film were at least treated as intelligent and made part of the plot, in this one they're nothing but shield-toting stereotypes. It is quite disgusting, and tokusatsu at this period in time was rife with it. There's no excuse for it, and unfortunately when we remember the Gamera series for everything great that it is, we do have to remember that it had some moments that were, at best, ill-conceived.

After some time and a lot of people ignoring the advice of fake natives, the "opal" hatches. I was so impressed by the hatching sequence that I wanted to make sure I mentioned it, because it was done with such delicacy that I was immensely thankful for a beautifully clear picture so I could see it well. The steam rising from the inside of the egg, the way the infant Barugon looks slick and newborn... I thought it was all amazing. (Wikizilla says that the coating on the newborn Barugon was made of "special material imported from the United States", which... just sounds kind of ominous, honestly.) It's not 1:1 realistic; it doesn't look like documentary footage of a hatching egg, and it shouldn't. What makes practical effects scenes like this unique and admirable is that we can see the work that went into depicting a real-life event, and instead of criticizing it where it might not resemble real life, we should appreciate the skill that it takes to execute it. This goes for everything else effects-related in this film as well. Adult Barugon doesn't in any way resemble a real creature, and for that matter neither does Gamera, but it's the manufacturing of such elaborate, fantastical things that makes them beautiful, not whether or not they fool us into thinking they're real.

Longtime Gamera fans will probably read this and think "duh", but what is interesting to me about Gamera as a creature is that it really does feel like a large, confused animal. I've said this before, but my personal headcanon for Godzilla is that he operates at a level of cognition incomparable to humans, and while he is, like Gamera, also ultimately an animal who is not at fault for his destructive nature, he does feel like he has more agency. Gamera is pure instinct, at least in these early installments. Gamera wants to eat and is afraid of being awake in a world that is hostile to it. The same goes for Barugon. Barugon fights Gamera not as a hateful enemy but as a more aggressive animal versus a usually docile one. And this is where I lose the plot a bit, because I had fallen asleep by this point, but I don't remember Gamera even having that much of a role in defeating Barugon - from what I can recall, Gamera gets frozen by Barugon's rainbow beam (yeah) and spends a lot of the battle out of commission while the humans' defense and military forces try to figure out how to stop a huge lizard who can shoot rainbows out of its back.

This is getting lengthy, so I'll stop soon, but what also stuck out to me about this movie is that it is so much about greed - personal greed, not the kind of societal hubris and blindness that leads to Godzilla. Although I suppose the greed of individuals in this film suggests the presence of greed in all individuals, so maybe it's not so personal after all. But at least one (again, apologies, I was exhausted and not fully observant) of the characters who steal the "opal" spends the aftermath deeply regretting what he's done and taking basically the whole brunt of the responsibility for Barugon leveling Osaka. He's disgusted with himself and can't believe that he was so focused on his potential gains in the short term without considering anything else. There are a lot of moments I'm familiar with as a Godzilla fan where the nature of humanity itself is brought to light in all its occasional ugliness, but not since the very first film have we really seen someone personally saying "I am responsible for this, alone" and then dealing with the guilt of that.

There's an interesting mix of elements here, of things that we'd see more and less of in future Showa-era Gamera films; it's brighter and more colorful than the first but also carries a slight soberness to it. It has that weird in-between feeling where it's not quite a children's movie but could at any moment become one. I don't think this is one of the best of the series, but it is an integral one.

Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995)

directed by Shusuke Kaneko

Japan

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I've been watching the Gamera movies in chronological order, which I have heard for some reason is not the ideal way to go about doing that. But I continue anyway, which means this is the first of the Heisei Gamera movies I've seen, and the first after the lackluster Gamera: Super Monster. Maybe I answered my own question there - maybe the reason why it's not great to watch these chronologically is because it makes certain movies look great by comparison to others. But, frankly, this is a good movie any way you choose to watch it.

There's something so special about franchise films that arrive many years after the last installment and take a fresh approach to their subject matter. It had been 15 years since a Gamera movie, if you can even count Super Monster as "a Gamera movie", so people that were children when they watched their last giant turtle adventure were now young adults. It is definitely palpable that the intended audience for Gamera had shifted during that absence, as Guardian of the Universe doesn't have any really young kids in it the way all the previous entries had. But youth is still presented as something important and unspoiled, a vital source of input in a country full of adults too concerned with bureaucracy and self-defense to stop for a minute and look at what's in front of them, and realize the whole planet doesn't just belong to them.

We start off watching a ship hauling plutonium run aground on a mysterious floating atoll, which piques the interest of (of all people) an insurance representative, who begins an investigation and thus kicks off the whole film. We're also quickly introduced to the film's main antagonist, in glimpses: It's Gyaos, and not just one but a whole clutch of them, much smaller than Gamera but making up for it with their numbers and sheer viciousness. Gamera's perennial enemy is given some very interesting characterization here, and I especially enjoyed the ambiguity of them as a species that comes into play later; the way they're sometimes referred to as birds for simplicity's sake, but also that it's made very clear that they're not birds. They're something much worse.

There is a real sense of adventure to the beginning of this and actually to the whole of the film from start to finish, and I think that makes it appealing to people of all age ranges. By shifting up in maturity a little, it doesn't exclude any of the feeling of wonder that the previous entries had. This is a timeline where no one knows what Gamera is, and it's interesting to observe how different it is from the very first Gamera film released, in which none of the characters knew what Gamera was, but neither did the viewers. The first Gamera was quite bleak despite ultimately being a story of a creature who was confused, scared, and too big for its own good; possibly this owes a little to the stark black-and-white it was filmed in, so Guardian of the Universe being in color inherently makes it feel different, but I also think it just reflects the ongoing march of kaiju cinema and the growing familiarity of the filmgoing public with giant monsters that the initial reaction to Gamera in this film feels so much different.

As usual, the human characters are not too important compared to the kaiju. Some may find it hard to suspend their disbelief or find the whole "inexplicable psychic teenager" plot a bit wishy-washy, but it's a good representation of the need to learn about and explore the things you don't understand instead of rejecting them. The plot concerning an ancient civilization and a predestined battle between Gamera and the Gyaos legions is somewhat unoriginal but still, I felt, really engaging somehow, with its message about science run amok and doom that can be learned from. The human characters that are there are very good - it's especially nice to see a scientist who is a young woman be taken seriously throughout the whole film, and that she has basically the second-most important role behind another very young woman who happens to be psychically connected to Gamera. Having both a scientist and a psychic here feels like it represents the marriage of an intuitive and a rational viewpoint on nature, and the way that it doesn't always have to be one over the other.

I was surprised at how much this film tackles the same kind of bureaucratic running around in circles that is done in response to a national catastrophe that Shin Godzilla did. I particularly liked when a newscaster reports to the terrified public that a bill has been introduced to designate Gamera as a threat to the nation and assures them that "it will be debated with utmost importance". I can think of no less comforting words to hear during a disaster than "your government is thinking it over". The military response in kaiju films is usually misinformed at best and malicious at worst, but they really make you think the JSDF are jerks here. Gamera is quickly decided to be the enemy and all hell is unleashed upon it while it's trying to help us in our hour of need. The strike on Gamera in front of Mt. Fuji is deeply upsetting because of the truly wounded cry it lets out when fired upon, and there really is no more succinct image of helplessness than a turtle flipped over on its back. This is what we do to our savior in our ignorance and ineptitude: Even an 80-meter (that's 262 feet) creature trying to help us momentarily gets knocked back by human weaponry. Having that one point where humans actually manage to hurt Gamera felt like a crucial inclusion to the film because it shows that despite being small creatures, singularly, humans can come together as a powerfully destructive force if we go down the wrong path.

I have to talk about the suit design. Of course. I don't know much about Gamera and have been deliberately keeping it that way so I can be surprised by these movies as I watch them, and as such I'm really only familiar with the Showa-era Gamera suit. The updated design is very nice indeed. They have abandoned all pretense of making Gamera look even slightly like it could be quadrupedal - something achieved perhaps not on purpose thanks to how the suit actors bend and struggle under the weight of the shell, looking like at any minute Gamera could drop back down to all fours - but honestly the suit does an incredible job of hiding any trace of the human form inside it. I was not focused on where the actor's head might be the way I unconsciously am during other kaiju media. Gamera really looks like a creature here as opposed to a fabricated object. And Gyaos, my god, they really made them into disgusting little things. Covered in slime and brainlessly violent, replicating at speed, and did I mention slimy? Some of the smaller ones are puppets, but the Super Gyaos that Gamera fights at the end is played by Yumi Kameyama, who was the first (known) woman to play a kaiju*.

This really is everything you could want out of a kaiju movie. The pacing is good, a lot better even than many Godzilla films, and there's a satisfying balance between plot and pure action. I kept feeling like this movie was way longer than 95 minutes because so much goes on during it that it just feels like something you would sit and watch for 2+-hours, and I mean that in a very good way. The franchise may have stumbled a bit after Super Monster, but I don't think I can say it was fully a bad thing that it took such a long hiatus (due in part to Daiei's bankruptcy) because this is a breath of fresh air. I can only imagine watching this with a distance of 15 years between it and the last Gamera film, as opposed to just a few days the way it's been for me.

*technically, Jennie Kaplan as Pigmon (!) in Ultraman Powered was the first woman to play a kaiju, but as a non-Powered fan that fact makes me mad and I don't like to acknowledge it.

Gamera vs. Jiger (1970)

directed by Noriaki Yuasa

Japan

83 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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The Showa Gamera movies, to me, have felt futuristic in a way that's different from what I'm used to in the Showa Godzilla films. It feels more appropriate to say that they feel future-leaning, that they're hoping to act as a showcase - much like Expo '70, during which much of this movie takes place - for the way things could be in the future. Godzilla movies that are set in the future take a more matter-of-fact approach, dropping us in a time where any kind of wacky technology can be explained away as "it's the future, duh". Gamera thus far seems to like to usher us in gently to an even spacier space age. A time when leaps and bounds in technology have already been made, sure, but where the most wonderful and hopeful of new inventions are still yet to come, thanks to the secondary stars of the show - the children.

I'm gonna be honest here, most of the reason why I'm reviewing this at all is so I have a chance to talk about the Jiger suit. The movie itself is pretty good, but I am so in love with that suit that it eclipses everything else. The first thing one notices if one has seen many monster movies before is that Jiger is walking on all fours, not on her hands and knees the way the majority of quadrupedal kaiju do. This is a tremendously difficult position to achieve, which is why it's so notable to me when I see it. I think the best and one of the only examples I can think of is Rie Ota as the GMK Baragon, achieving that stance through an impressive combination of extensions inside the suit and presumably just being buff as hell. It's not at all easy to walk like that inside a suit, much less with that incredibly massive head that Jiger has. I was also enamored with her because of the way, in her first appearance, when she trundles along to take a drink from an in-comparison-pea-sized lake, the footage is reversed so that it looks like water spilling from her mouth is actually being sucked up. This is a small detail, and pretty easy to do, but it shows that the crew were paying attention to those tiny things. Even Gamera looks lumpen and monochrome compared to how much detail is in Jiger.

These movies are also incredibly violent even compared to what I'm used to with Godzilla. Gamera is constantly gushing blood, getting stabbed, having bits torn off it, and in turn tearing chunks out of other kaiju - those tusks ain't just for show. I like this surprisingly physical side of kaiju cinema, but it is jarring how much monster meat is in these movies. It makes sense, though. Kids love seeing stuff get ripped up, even if their parents don't love them seeing that.

In general, watching tokusatsu in Blu-Ray quality is a vastly different experience to watching it in even slightly poorer resolution, because you can instantly tell where everything is a set. Some things you do just have to laugh at - for example this movie features some of the worst green-screen fake driving scenes ever - but most of the time, I'm not laughing, even if everything looks obviously fake and miniature, I'm just admiring the level of work that went into it.

Unfortunately, like the first and second installments in this series and a huge amount of other toku besides, Jiger's origins are rooted in the idea of other cultures (specifically African cultures) as mystical and superstitious. As with the first movie, though, non-Africans are made to look pretty ignorant when they disregard native peoples trying desperately to warn them of some danger that gets dismissed as an uncivilized people being scared of myths and legends. So that's something. But I still don't like the way Africa as a whole is shorthand for weird stuff that no one understands. At least they do have an actual black person in this one, though, not just somebody in blackface. And I do enjoy the made-up "Wester Island" - this is its real name within the film, not the subtitles having a go.

Anyway, this movie gets absolutely wild in terms of just, like, what has to happen for the story to progress. It's like someone was sitting there thinking "How can I get Gamera into the weirdest trouble I can imagine?" For starters, this is, canonically, the one where Gamera gets pregnant, thanks to Jiger's ovipositor (is it ridiculous to imagine a mammal having an ovipositor? Yes! Is it still cool as hell and a fun example of speculative biology? Very yes!). This gives Gamera cancer (?) and makes it become anemic, parts of its skin turning translucent as it returns to water to recuperate. The only option to fix all of this, of course, is to send a submarine into Gamera's internals and physically cut out the parasitic Jiger larvae. The submarine must, obviously, be piloted by children, because kids in these movies really gotta do everything themselves.

While I don't advocate for letting children do dangerous things, such as roam around the inside of a huge turtle with jet propulsion, I do wholeheartedly advocate for just letting children believe they're capable. For so many children, all they hear all day is "You can't do that, you're just a child". While for many things that's true, and while it usually comes from a place of wanting to protect them from danger, it can wear on a child and when taken too far it can really make them feel like second-class citizens, useless and without appreciable skills. A lot of society seems to think a child's job is just to sit there and grow up. Not Gamera! The thing I love about these movies is that they acknowledge children as a vital part of society, and that us adults need the perspective of children, unclouded and unconventional, to solve the problems that we may be too stuck in our ways to puzzle out. Gamera is for the kids, and that's why I love it.