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.
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