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.