Patrick Garone: Monster Movie of the Week: GAMERA: GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE (1995)

Director: Shusuke Kaneko

Genre: Daikaiju eiga (Japanese giant monster movie)

THE MOVIE:

Poor Gamera. For years he was viciously mocked on MST3K and for good reason. Gamera was created to capitalize on the kaiju craze in the mid 60’s. He starred in a bunch of Godzilla ripoff movies that were cheaply made and designed to appeal to children.

Even for a giant monster, Gamera is ridiculous: He is an 80 meter tall bipedal turtle who is a “friend to all children,” with the ability to retract his extremities into his shell and replace them with jets which allow him to fly around like a pin-wheeling UFO. Makes Mothra seem downright plausible, doesn’t it?

So when Daiei studios resurrected the character in the mid 90’s to compete with the revitalized Godzilla series nobody expected much. Director Shusuke Kaneko really wanted to direct a Toho Godzilla movie but was not allowed to, so he turned his attention to the Gamera series, and churned out the best Kaiju trilogy of all time. This eventually led to his being asked to direct a Godzilla movie, and he gave us the excellent Godzilla Mothra King Ghidorah, Giant Monster All Out Attack, which is among the best of the Godzilla series. So the man has an awesome track record in kaiju filmmaking.

THE MOVIE

The first of the trilogy, Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, was a pleasant surprise that was at least in the same ballpark as any of the contemporary Godzilla movies as far as quality. The movie even garnered a positive review from none other than Roger Ebert (who relishes its sense of fun while failing to contextualize it as an important giant monster movie). GGOTU reintroduces us to Gamera and gives him a new origin story and sets up for the two sequels that follow. The Gamera Trilogy is one of the rare movie series in which each movie is better than the one before it therefore Gamera: Guardian of the Universe is the weakest of the three but the best place to start.

The story involves a pair of dueling mysteries: the appearance of a mysterious rogue island which is moving around the Pacific on its own accord and the attacks of strange predatory birds on another far-flung island. These mysteries manage to entangle an ornithologist, the Japanese military and a schoolgirl named Asagi who has a special connection to Gamera and who appears in all three movies much in the same way that Miki Saegusa had a special psychic connection to Godzilla in the Heisei movies.

The mysterious atoll turns out to be no island at all but Gamera who has resurfaced from an ancient slumber with the return of the Gyaos creatures. The Japanese have captured the creatures for study but Gamera comes ashore to destroy them. In this continuity, Gamera was created by the ancients to do battle with Gyaos. The creatures escape him and flee into the world where they continue to grow and change.

The Gyaos were apparently fixures of the old Showa Gamera movies which were known for having particularly outlandish kaiju. Interestingly, Gyaos are the only carryovers from the old series to the Heisei movies.

After tangling multiple times, Gamera and Gyaos have their final battle which involves the turtle kaiju taking his opponent into outer space and burning her on re-entry before rumbling in a pertrochemical factory.

THE MONSTER/EFFECTS:

The special effects certainly are not up to Hollywood standards for the time (remember we’re a couple of years after Jurassic Park here.) Most of the monster effects are through suitmation, miniatures, and puppets. And sometimes what are apparently hand-puppets. Unfortunately, CGI is very sparingly used in this one.

The Gyaos effects in particular are bad. Flying kaiju are the best kind of kaiju when they are done right but in the 1990's the Japanese effects were not quite there yet. Some shots are very clearly puppets and the wings don’t to seem to beat fast enough to keep the animal in flight (a disorder I call Rodanitis.) The Gyaos design is also a little too retro and goofy for my tastes.

Gamera is well-realized and nicely updated from his Showa roots. The suit is a little bulky here but improves throughout the series. Gamera gets redesigned a little bit in each of these movies, getting increasingly more ferocious-looking in each new movie. In the first film, he is at his most Showa and "cuddly." Overall, the effects greatly improve with each movie to the point where the Gamera Gyaos Shibuya fight in Gamera 3 remains one of the greatest kaiju sequences in cinema.

The movie does establish a heightened level of violence in these movies too. Kaneko seems to take some pleasure from beating the crap out of Gamera and he is often sliced, diced and layered in these movies (Gyaos has a pretty gnarly laser attack.) The Gyaos monsters are also put through the ringer in these movies and it is not uncommon to see them meet a gory demise.

MONSTERS FEATURED:

Gamera and Gyaos.

MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE:

There is a wonderful shot of Gyaos in silhouette, perched on the remains of Tokyo tower against the setting sun. The shot is beautiful and awe-inspiring and sums up what is great about this genre.