Zëiram 2 (1994)

directed by Keita Amemiya

Japan

107 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Sequels get a bad rap generally, but this one, made by the same director with the same cast, easily stacks up to the first. While the story is more meandering, everything I fawned over in the first film is still there, and the care put into constructing this movie in all of its analog glory shines through once again.

We can wave our hands and excuse the parts of the story created solely to explain this movie's existence; presuming that Iria is indiscriminate in the jobs she takes, a second mission to Earth feels somewhat unlikely. But she just so happens to end up in Japan again, tracking down a small but very powerful statue made of a unique material that many thieves would kill to obtain. She meets up with the two hapless electronics-parts-store workers from the first film, one of them now about to be married with a baby on the way, and of course they get drawn into the chaos unwillingly once again. If I sound flippant about this, it's not on purpose - it just didn't matter that much to me how the film was set up. Once it got going, all I cared about was seeing Iria do her job and rescue everyone from a constantly moving display of practical effects work so beautiful it belongs in a museum (although to stick it on a shelf in drab lighting would be to rob it of the dynamic motion it had while being worn by a suit actor).

Now that we're familiar with the characters from the first film - and you really do have to be familiar with them for this movie to have its full effect - they seem to slip easier into a rhythm, or at least Iria does. One of two things that bothered me about this movie was that the fight choreography seemed lacking to me, almost like watching a "how to fight" training video where everyone is deliberately moving in slow motion to demonstrate techniques so that an uninitiated viewer doesn't miss anything. But now, thinking it through, the unflashy fight scenes are a point in this film's favor. It's not that they're not over-the-top: At one point Iria and Zëiram, locked together in a sort of death-hug, fall from a height that would kill them both (well, just her, really), but at the last minute, in mid-air, Iria stabs Zëiram through the forehead with a big sword, thus anchoring it to a (solid concrete) wall and allowing her to dangle from a more manageable height instead of plunging to the ground. That's pretty ridiculous, if you ask me. But there's no high kicks, no punching through walls, no absurdly unrealistic fight skills; just efficiency. And I think this fits Iria better because we do get the sense that, especially in her suit, she's much, much stronger than the normal human she looks like. So what appeared as a half-hearted punch to us could have in reality been packing tons of force behind it.

If anything, I just like her character even more now. She has a lowkey manner, not putting on airs either of a too-cool-for-it assumed capability or an aw-shucks fake-surprise that a pretty girl could be an intergalactic bounty hunter extraordinaire. She has an authentically unworried attitude because she knows that she's got it. She doesn't have to show off when she fights because she knows how to fight to achieve her goal, not to wow spectators.

There are some other bounty hunters who are visually implied to be part of her culture as well, and I'm still not totally clear on whether Iria is actually a biological human who somehow landed a really wild job or if she's something else assuming the shape of a human to fit in better, but even her counterparts who don't get cool suits or weapons like her are still kitted out in clothing and accessories that spell "alien". There's one scene where the bad guys summon what has to be 50 fighters from a whole host of unmentioned otherworlds to take on our lone Iria, and every single one of them looks distinct, like they have a backstory, even if they never get focused on and just stand in the foreground before getting messily killed. That attention to detail is what this movie packs into every frame and it's kind of amazing.

Bob is still looking good, too, especially for getting shot in the face-equivalent at one point. Even though he's the biggest digital component of a movie that is basically a celebration of practical effects, he doesn't feel out of place and is as much a character as any of the flesh-and-blood ones. I still think it's amazing how he (or his avatar) completely lacks any anthropomorphic qualities, but he still manages to have "expressions" and convey emotion.

Zëiram itself, which as far as I can tell is supposed to be some kind of second generation or possibly a rebuilt version of the one from the first movie, looks much the same as the first time around, with the addition of some jackal ears. I'm glad of this, because you can't improve upon perfection. It still boggles my mind how they managed to construct the face-worm that lives in its chest (which I think is actually Zëiram "itself", the rest is kind of a shell it pilots around) because, while some shots of it were clearly a puppet, at other times it was indistinguishable from a living person's face. I feel like you would have to not only be a pro at practical effects but also have studied the internal structure and anatomy of the human face for many hours in order to rig it so that the individual muscle twitches in the brow and cheeks looked real (and god, they did). I remain in awe of everything this movie achieves.

Having re-evaluated my big issue (the lackluster physical fighting), my only remaining problem with this is that dog-monster. Zëiram devours an innocent shiba inu and uses its parts to create a slavering, awful doglike minion for itself, and although I feel bad for saying this because the suit is as much a work of art as anything else in the film, it just doesn't fit. It probably has less than a minute of total screen time and it's incredibly intricate and detailed, and in any other movie it could be the star of the show, but it's almost wholly inconsequential here, and its slime-dripping maw (while as beautifully articulated as the face-worm) just felt too explicitly "horror" for this particular film.

I can't think of anything else I was dissatisfied with, though. The plot is stringy and weak at times and basically hinges on us accepting that Zëiram decided to go ballistic after allegedly having been put under control simply because It Did, but I really didn't care. This and the first film are absolute masterpieces of tokusatsu that could not be made today because of their reliance on clunky outdated technology to depict a futuristic, galaxy-trotting network of bounty hunters. They are both just so good.