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kamenstranger · 1 year

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Two years after my review of the first Heisei Gamera, it's time to jump back in and talk about the sequel. Following the success of 1995’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, the sequel was put into production soon afterwards, with an announcement made in November of ‘95. Much of the same creative team would return for the sequel, including Shusuke Kaneko in the director's chair, a new screenplay by Kazunori Ito, and Shinji Higuchi once again directing the special effects. Here’s the thing about Gamera 2’s story; it’s dead simple. I don’t mean that as an insult, but I can sum up the broad strokes by simply calling it a classic B-movie plot. In some ways that’s doing a disservice to the unique and captivating characteristics bestowed upon Legion, but otherwise it’s standard plot paying homage to classic sci-fi, most notably Ultra Q, with beats not dissimilar to the previous Gamera entry. However, much like its predecessor, Gamera 2’s brilliance lies in the presentation. There’s an initially slow yet well paced suspenseful build towards the mysterious creatures, what they are and how they operate, keeping the audience wondering what event will transpire next.

The film starts off in classic fashion with a strange meteor shower and bizarre lights, prompting the JSDF to respond to a particularly large impact creator. Troublingly, there’s no sign of the meteor.

We’re then properly introduced to our main protagonist Midori Honami (Miki Mizuno), a curator for the nearby Sapporo Science Center, who becomes involved with the JSDF’s puzzling case. Several more bizarre incidents take place, including one of the eeriest scenes as two bumbling security guards witness a strange creature consuming bottles inside a brewery. The only evidence left behind at the scene is silicon, indicating a possible diet for the creature.

Following the brewery incident, multiple underground fiber optics are destroyed, each attack creeping closer to Sapporo until 5 days later a subway is attacked by a number of monsters. Things escalate as Police arrive, which goes about as well as you’d expect. The dread continues to escalate as communications across the region are cut off, and a massive plant erupts from a building above the tunnels.

The JSDF intervenes shortly after, and once they rescue the subway survivors (the attacks upon whom seem random) they begin monitoring the colony and various forms of atmospheric changes, notably, the oxygen levels are rising dramatically, creating a toxic environment. Honami theorizes that the Legion and the plant are like Leaf-cutter ants colonizing fungus to survive. Ergo, you destroy one, the other will die with it in a symbiotic fashion. Furthermore, the purpose of the plant is called into question given that it’s not a food source. The more dire theory being that’s how the Legion spreads its colonies. I.e. What crashed in Hokkaido may have been a seed launched from such a plant. As such, the JSDF plans to destroy the structure before it can bloom. Because the Legion emits electromagnetic waves to communicate, Radios are largely useless in the surrounding area, leading to more basic forms for communications such as Morse Lamp. I find it notable that the film manages to incorporate a “fear of technology” angle without it being the technology itself being demonized or the threat as it often was in mid-late 90s media. Rather it's the loss of modern conveniences in a hyper modern city, it’s a concept that still holds up really well today. Additionally, the Legion see tech as a threat, as it’s discovered the subway victims all had phones, pagers, radios etc. This will be important later on.

Meanwhile, operations with the plant hit a snag; Oxygen levels have risen so dramatically that attempting to destroy the structure could be just as catastrophic as the flower blooming. A smaller explosion is set off which temporarily disrupts the flowing plant and the Legion, allowing radio communication to resume just in time to hear that Gamera has emerged from the sea and is headed towards Sapporo. Gamera arrives, inhales the excess oxygen, burns the flower, and rips it up by the roots. Thousands of Legion swarm and attack Gamera, who only manages to escape when the fiends are sent into a frenzy by a nearby Transformer. In the ensuing chaos, a larger winged Queen Legion emerges and escapes.

From here on the movie is in full swing. We’re given well needed breathers that keep the film from being suffocating, allowing us to reflect on the events at hand. But the pace is very brisk after Gamera shows up, and we’ve pretty much learned most of the mystery behind Legion, so now it’s about seeing how that knowledge can be applied to defeat them. The one last truly notable story piece that pops up is Asagi Kusanagi returning from the previous film. She is mentioned early on, showing that her story is known about if not widely believed. She appears a couple more times before finally crossing paths with Honami during an evacuation near an airport, just as a battle between Gamera and a now fully grown Legion Queen breaks out over a second flowering plant.

Asagi still has a connection to Gamera, which is both a great focal point of the film and also probably one of the few things I wish was handled better. As poignant as Kusanagi’s role is in this film, she’s barely featured and quite frankly it feels like more should’ve been done to emphasize her significance. I don’t know if they just couldn’t get Ayako Fujitani for more than they did, but it feels like they didn’t have her for long, as she’s in relatively few scenes. One thing I do like is that her connection is far weaker than the first film, which makes sense given that it was implied to be severed after Gyaos’ defeat. It’s questionable how much Asagi’s connection even remains, certainly not enough for Gamera’s injuries to reflect upon her as in the past, nor much to aid him in battle. The Legion Queen is victorious in their first fight and she burrows away. Gamera limps his way to the second flowering plant and manages to topple it over, but it still goes off causing a 6 mile explosion and carbonizing an already wounded Gamera.

In the coming days a vigil of sorts would form around Gamera, becoming something of a pilgrimage site for people hoping for Gamera’s revival, even harkening back to the Showa era’s “friend to all children” angle with families visiting the site.

Asagi remains by his side, still acting the role of priestess, and eventually catalyst. The religious parallels become more blatant when the gathering results in a formation of energy that revives Gamera. However, Asagi’s Magatama breaks apart, unquestionably severing her connection to Gamera, and his to Humanity.

After his revival, Gamera goes off for the climatic battles, a very minor subplot regarding the JSDF’s hesitancy to assist Gamera gets wrapped up when they ultimately fight alongside him against Legion (I can only assume this was a severely downplayed component due to the whole kerfuffle with the JSDF and Godzilla vs. Mothra) We get a few more character moments for our cast, and Gamera finally decimates the Legion Mother in spectacular fashion by demonstrating a power he’s never used before.

But it looks cool as shit. In the aftermath, Honami playfully, if ominously, theorizes that maybe Gamera didn’t save humanity so much as all life on earth, and they should be careful to never be seen as a threat.

And that’s pretty much all of Gamera 2’s story, it’s as simple as that. At an hour and thirty-six minutes long, there’s not much to go over, for better or worse.

You may have noticed I didn’t detail the characters the way I usually do, and that’s because I don’t have much to say about them. Midori Honami obviously gets the most focus. She’s very similar in character to Mayumi Nagamine from the previous film, with that sorta plucky go get’em attitude. She’s someone whose knowledge can be applied to the current situation, and her dynamic with the JSDF’s Hanatani (Tamotsu Ishibashi) isn’t that different from Mayumi’s with Yoshinari. It’s a starchy independent 90s woman of science paired with a well meaning military man. She has a couple of cute moments that reinforce her personality, such as refusing help getting down from a raised platform, but there’s not much to her than that. As for Hanatani, he has less to work with and I didn’t feel he was worth mentioning much.

Another character I’ve yet to mention is Obitsu (Mitsuru Fukikoshi) an engineer at NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) You may recognize Fukikoshi from Ryusoulger, or perhaps Takashi Miike’s Lesson of the Evil. He plays a supporting role here, but he’s probably the most interesting character just for his outside the box thinking. His best moment is near the climax of the film when Gamera is once again swarmed by Legion drones. Obitsu manages to get a power plant to divert a large chunk of their output to a series of nearby transformers, drawing the Legion away and saving Gamera. But that’s about all there is to say. Like the first film, the monsters are the real stars while the human cast moves the story along. The opening 45 minutes or so are the absolute best story wise. But I also think it’s fair to point out that outside those moments with Legion, most of the story beats are the same as the first film. Mysterious creatures require investigating, a woman of science & military man cross paths to solve said mystery, Gamera gets injured and is incapacitated until the final battle. In a way, it feels like a soft do-over of what the filmmakers wanted previously but couldn’t. So most of the story is repeated with a few original tidbits, and another excuse to prop up the big selling point: the Special effects.

Gamera GOTU had some of the most incredible miniature work at the time, blowing anything of the Heisei Godzilla era out of the water. So when we get to Gamera 2, there was a presumed expectation that they had to up the ante-- and they did.

Firstly, the team had much more creative freedom after the surprise success of the first film. Gamera underwent a redesign much more in line with what was originally intended for GOTU; sharper angles, sea turtle fins for a flight mode, and the elbow spikes are now permanently visible. It feels like a proper Heisei era design with all the kinks worked out, in much the same way ‘89 BioGoji is to ‘84 Goji. That’s even seen in the poster at the top, which feels more of the era by emulating Noriyoshi Ohrai’s style rather than a call back to the Showa Era.

The main body was mostly left unchanged, although redesigned dimensionally to better fit Akira Ohashi, taking over from both Manabe and Suzuki from the previous film. The biggest change to the design aside from the sculpt is the mechanical components being improved. Gamera’s eyes are much more expressive, and there’s a wider range of motion for the neck that would move along with Ohashi’s.

Likewise, they were free to incorporate an original monster, by far the best part of the movie. And Legion… What is there even left to say? The Soldiers are great, but the queen is one of the most fascinatingly intricate and unique designs. I have to commend the team for not only the sheer complexity of the aesthetic and size (requiring both Mizuho Yoshida and Toshinori Sasaki to operate) but still making good fight scenes centered around something that’s even more cumbersome than King Ghidorah (Although the soldiers pick up some the slack there) What’s even more amazing is how much of the suit was being worked on to the last minute, and I don’t mean before shooting. According to designer Fuyuki Shinada, they were constantly modifying the suit throughout, and if you look closely, you can see that the arms gain articulation as the film progresses. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a review that didn’t hold Legion as the pinnacle of Gamera 2’s assets. Although they’re far from the only highlight, the best visuals are often built around them. The suspense of the brewery attack, the subway scene that makes the soldiers look like they’re on the ceiling, the massive swarm that attacks Gamera. All of that makes 2 stick out from what otherwise would be a too familiar retread, and that care is seen throughout the film. One of the best examples of their love and attention to detail is when the first flower topples over. In just about any other film it would’ve simply fallen and pyrotechnics go off. But we see the roots of the plant tear through the snowy roads, because it would- and it looks amazing, which sums up a lot of the film. It’s just full of little touches like that.

Another would be the first Legion Queen battle. There are wonderful overhead shots of the monsters, Gamera’s shell gets a chunk taken out, but my favorite moment is where Gamera looks at the flower in the distance about to bloom, the camera pans to the flower, and the Legion Queen sidesteps to put herself between the flower and Gamera. So much personality conveyed in a few simple shots.

That said, there is one other area where the films SFX is rough, and that’s the CG…kinda. Frankly I don’t wanna spend too much time on this because A: It’s no worse than Spawn’s released a year later, and B: They only use it when they absolutely need to. It’s also worth pointing out that Gamera 2 was something of a transitional film for special effects. GOTU used composite and some CGI, while in 2 it’s the opposite, more CGI and almost no composites.

I’m kinda shocked at the stuff they don't use it for. When the hundreds of Legion soldiers crawl up Gamera, that’s CGI, of course. But then it transitions into a practical effect with hundreds of miniatures attached to the suit. Sure, it was probably cheaper than CGI at the time anyway, but it’s incredible that they pulled it off.

There’s also other areas where the CG is actually really great for the era, such as the light effects. The tone matching upon the Actors sells it. Honestly, I’m hard pressed to find any fault with the visuals because Gamera 2 is so much more polished than the previous entry. The one major criticism I would hold against the film’s visuals is how many night scenes there are. The first film was a bit more balanced with a slight skew towards day scenes. Here, the only day scene between the monsters in the airport- that’s it. While I do appreciate the contrast, it also makes it difficult to actually see finer details… which might’ve been intentional given the mechanical issues with Legion and the technological angle with CG looking far better in low light. That said, it’s still better lit than most modern modern Hollywood films. I can still see what’s happening. The fights are more interesting with Legion than Gyaos, scene transitions are better, the snowy environment is fairly unique for this medium and genre. Even the pacing of individual set pieces is better. I can overlook dark environments for all the other positives, which sorta leads into my final overall thoughts.

As much as I notice the flaws more than I did years ago when I first saw G2, it’s still a notable improvement over the first film. Even with some of the repeated character archetypes, it’s hard not to look at G2 as better in almost every other regard. Gamera 1 is by no means a bad film, I heaped a lot of praise on it. But if we compare it to the sequel, well, the first is a hell of a lot more clunky, if more fresh. Gamera 1 has a lot of moving parts for what it is with the whole Atlantis angle and having to explain Gamera in addition to the Gyaos, his connection to Asagi, the environmental angle, etc. Gamera 1 does a better job with the two main leads, but it’s also much rougher around the edges experience compared to Legion. G2 manages to capture the same mysterious aura the Gyaos had and even more so, while trimming out a lot of the awkwardness. Say what you will about the CGI, it’s aged, but I think that’s more forgivable than some of the opticals in 1 which was simply inexcusable for ‘95. You can tell certain aspects in the first film were rushed due to time, or were too ambitious. While that can make the first film more charming in its own way, G2 curbs many of those problems with the experience gained from the first go. You also don’t have anything as contrived as not knowing how to get their schoolgirl protagonist to the base of Mt. Fuji for an important scene, so just have a taxi driver manage to break through a military blockade. Everything is just more streamlined and better thought out in this sequel. It’s not perfect, of course, it sometimes feels like it strokes the JSDF a little too much, bordering on propaganda.

(This Salute and a stand off with a single Legion solider near the climax are perhaps the most embarrassing moments of the movie)

Still, I don’t think you can ask much more from a follow up than working out the kinks and then excelling in nearly all the parts that worked and then some. Gamera 2 is a fantastic sequel that, for whatever flaws it has, is ultimately better than the first and too fun to be down on. If I am allowed to make a very strange comparison, I would say it’s very much like Evil Dead 2. Sure, it’s basically the same plot as the first one, but everything is refined and has enough cool new shit that it doesn’t matter. And for the most part, that's how Gamera 2 was received in ‘96. It won a Seiun Award just like its predecessor, and (Controversially) the 17th Nihon SF Taishō Award. But those accolades sadly didn’t translate to ticket sales. While G2 made a respectable ¥700 million, 180 million more than GOTU, G2 had considerably more weight behind it. While I wasn’t able to find any solid numbers on the budget, we do know that it was more than the first, and Gamera 2 was Toho’s Big Summer release for July. By contrast, GOTU was dumped off in March and was considered to not have made as much as possible due to not courting the Theaters. So expectations were high for a sequel to hit the magical ¥1 Billion mark. I would argue that’s a slightly unrealistic goal for a Kaiju film at that time (outside Godzilla and Mothra). But the fact it only made 180 more than a film released in March, and a poorly distributed one at that, is pretty sad if not pathetic.

Nevertheless, the film made money and was critically well received, leading to a third and final entry. But while I won’t be jumping into that just yet, I do want to talk briefly about the legacy Gamera 2 left. I don’t think I can overstate how much Gamera 2 was a major touchstone for the Kaiju Genre. While that’s true for the whole trilogy, and I even touched upon something similar in GOTU in how much the Legendary Monsterverse took from it, I think it’s a bit more poetic here. Gamera 2 is an unabashed love letter to the Ultra series. You can draw a direct line from Ultra Q all the way to Gamera 2.

The kids who grew up with Ultraman were themselves becoming the next step in refining Japanese special effects, emulating concepts that were established, but doing them better, and eventually elevating the production standards of the franchise that inspired them. The entire time I was watching this for the review I kept thinking “This still looks amazing, but TsuPro is able to do the same if not significantly better nowadays” and that’s not a knock, this movie is nearly 27 years old, many of the artists went to work on Ultraman. But it’s also fitting that's how far things have come. Just like how the Ultra series was putting anything from the Godzilla films to shame because of Toho veterans and new blood, and then Gamera was doing better effects work than Heisei Godzilla. Now once again Television productions are far surpassing the level of detail that was once dominant and only possible in theatrical productions. I can see Gamera’s foot crash through a street and a bike topple over along with a phone booth shattering…and I can see the same thing 3-4 times better in an episode Ultraman Z. I think that’s wonderful. We're not done with the Ultraman comparisons, either. We'll be getting back to those when we get to Iris in Gamera 3.

And for those interested in checking out Gamera 2, annoyingly, it along with G3 were taken down from Tubi just as this was going up (GOTU is still up, oddly) Gamera 2 is (as of this posting) still available on Amazon Prime, along with the other two films. Of course there’s also a fantastic release by Arrow Video, both a Steel book of the trilogy, and a release containing the trilogy and Gamera The Brave. I highly recommend these sets, particularly the steel book, which tend to be pretty affordable. As for the next review, well, I had planned on getting to Gamera 3, but getting screen shots is too troublesome at the moment. Of course, the next big thing on everyone's mind is Shin Kamen Rider. I'm only going so say "We'll see" 7:00 showing on a Wednesdays is far from ideal, even for someone flexible. Regardless of whatever happens there, perhaps it's time to tackle another series...

#tokusatsu #gamera #kaiju #toho #daiei #attack of legion #review #sci fi

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