I watched Gamera, Guardian of the Universe (1995), first of the Heisei Gamera trilogy. 9/10, A-. This movie was made to retroactively address every single criticism I have of the Heisei Godzilla movies.
I had an absolute blast with this - very flawed movie, but I'm so glad it exists. Fans of Shin Godzilla need to watch this. This movie mogs its Heisei Godzilla contemporaries so hard.
There's a lot to praise about this movie, so I'm going to get the negatives out of the way first. There's some choppy editing here and there, the performances of the human characters tend to be mixed at best - the actress playing the teenage girl who becomes Gamera's bound priestess is really egregious - and the writing behind getting the human characters in the same room is pretty clunky.
There are also scenes where they really could have afforded to linger on the majesty of the kaiju a bit more, where it feels like the scene is rushed past, and that's a bummer because there are so many scenes where the scale and majesty of the kaiju is incredibly well captured.
Like, the kaiju in this movie, scale wise, I think are much smaller than what Heisei Godzilla depicted, but Gamera 95 does a much better job of depicting them as incredibly cool, huge screen presences. There's so much good about this movie I'm not sure where to start.
-Nagamine, the female lead, is great, possibly the best female lead we've had yet in one of these? There's a great expectation-reversal where they pair her with a police detective on the initial investigation fo Gyaos where she's the braver, more assertive one of the two.
Nagamine's performance can be a bit wooden at times, but her and Linda Hamilton's character from King Kong Lives are the only women in a kaiju movie I can imagine gloving up and shoving their hands into a giant pile of kaiju shit for the sake of science. Of course, I don't need to imagine that, because Nagamine does do that in this movie to investigate undigested articles within a Gyaos' droppings. Excellent scene where she finds her mentor's glasses.
-Gamera is encased in a big pile of rock as he's slumbering. They basically excavate into his shell to dig up an Atlantean prophecy slab explaining his deal. Gamera was designed to save Atlantis from the rapacious, man-eating Gyaoses but was designed too late, so he's a gift to future civilizations.
This movie really goes back to his roots in his 1965 movie that weren't really mentioned ever afterwards - Gamera is an Atlantean bioweapon designed for the defense of the human race. (The fact that the atlanteans wrote in something very close to Viking runes is wild, I don't think i've ever seen that one before)
-This movie really, really gets into the meat and potatoes of how society would respond to Gamera. I remember Shin Godzilla had a lot of focus on how exactly the JSDF could legally respond to Godzilla while still adhering to the Japanese constitution, and this movie really dives into that.
They actually have to submit a bill before the Diet to attack Gamera!
(At the start of this movie, he's mistakenly believed to be the greater threat, because he's recently awoken, rampaging mindlessly, and not yet bound to any human priest/ess, and the Gyaoses are 'only' 15-foot-wingspan-big)
On that note - do you know what else this movie has that Heisei Godzilla didn't? Gamera confirmed to kill people. Textually, on screen, in dialogue.
Gamera, who is portrayed heroically in this movie, Gamera, an unambigiously essential aspect of the defense of humanity, and they STILL don't shy away from the fact that when he single-mindedly rampaged to the stadium to slay the Gyaoses, he was killing people along the way.
Heisei Godzilla didn't have the balls to do this and they had Godzilla as an actual unmitigated villain for seven movies straight!
i loved this asshole - this busybody bureaucrat who has to be dragged along into thinking gamera is an ally and that gyaos can't be captured alive. the scene where he's like 'ugh, the atlantean prophecy shit AGAIN' is so funny
-This movie is so gruesome - the fact that Gyaos is constantly eating people and animals is emphasized so much, we see her dropping a train on people - people die explicitly in this movie, which is such a breath of fresh air after the Heisei Godzilla movies might as well have been kaiju attacking miniatures in-universe for all we heard about civilian casualties and an impact on society.
I'm actually struggling to think of a kaiju whose maneating nature has been emphasized so much in one of these movies. Maybe Baragon from Frankenstein vs Baragon?
But the thing that really made my jaw drop was towards the climax of the movie, where they start talking about the impact on Japan's infrastructure from the kaiju clashing.
Two separate major highways are backed up for a hundred kilometers, trains are at 180% capacity with Japan Railways rushing to get more in. They specifically mention the stock market having a panic!
The yen is rapidly falling because everyone is selling their stocks!
There's a delightfully grim scene where they're talking about the efforts to get people out of Tokyo and away from a nesting Gyaos, and Nagamine and her meh romantic partner/co-protagonist exchange the following lines of dialogue.
"I hear it'll take a week to evacuate everybody from Tokyo."
"Even if Tokyo is emptied, Gyaos will just move on to another densely populated city."
-This movie achieves something else the Heisei Godzilla movies don't - the suits feel a lot more flexible and alive while also achieving basically the same degree of verisimilitude those did. I vaguely remember hearing someone criticize the googly-eyes in this movie, but I found them charming.
The kaiju effects themselves outside of that are excellent - Gamera's spinning flight looks so good in this movie, it's just hard to convey in screenshots. Compared to how slow his flight looked in the Showa Gamera movies, he looks like an actual flying saucer here. (I wonder if Terraspin from Ben 10 was inspired by him.)
There's another positive Shin Godzilla comparison to make - Gyaos' sonic beams. Gyaos has high frequency cutting beams, that's one of his/her key things, but this movie does the same thing Shin Godzilla did with Godzilla's first use of atomic breath.
I.e., it's something that has to be built up to, he can't just do it on the fly in his early stages of life. Those of you who have seen Shin Godzilla will remember that Godzilla first emits puffs of smoke, then bursts of orange flame, and then slowly but surely builds up into the atomic breath we all know. Heisei Gyaos has something very similar - you see this air distortion effect from her supersonic screech that slowly but surely builds up into a steadily narrowing yellow beam. Excellently done.
-There's a scene that reminded me of another from Pacific Rim, the one where Newt panickedly says that through climate change and pollution, "we practically terraformed [Earth] for" the Trespassers, the aliens who are sending the kaiju over. And the only reason the Gyaos eggs have woken in this is due to anthropogenic climate change. Exact same dynamic. Good stuff.
(You can tell I really liked a kaiju movie when I'm comparing it favorably with Pacific Rim, Shin Godzilla, or Godzilla Minus One.)
-The kaiju fight at the end of this movie, and the skirmish at the bridge, are both spectacular. Big smile on my face, some whoop out loud moments. Excellent stuff.
-One last note on Gamera 95 - it might be better to watch the English dub for this one. That's a vaguely heretical thing to say, and I normally always prefer JP aud, ENG sub, and I'll add the extra caveat that I haven't seen the dub, but the official subs have a major problem.
They're exceptional for regular dialogue. I saw no errors there, which is unusual. But one thing they don't do is translate locations and newspaper clippings. So you'll see a newspaper article with Japanese text fly at the screen to establish a scene, or you'll see the name of an island or city in question as an establishing shot, but it'll just be inscrutable kanji you won't recognize as a non-Japanese speaker.
That frustrated me a little, and seemingly the only solution to that is watching the dub. When I rewatch this, it will probably be the dub, which solves the problem with an ugly black and green box covering where the kanji would be. Unfortunate but unavoidable.
-This movie is really good - it has some jank, but I had so much fun with it. If the subsequent Gamera movies are this good, I'll definitely be rewatching them in the future.
