Gamera 2000

A while back, I wrote about the history of Godzilla-based video games, and how perplexing it is that such an important pop cultural figure—with a particular influence on video games—has almost no truly notable games to his name. The disproportionate “Influence on games vs. Actual presence in games” history you see in Godzilla might actually be more pronounced in Godzilla’s former kaiju movie counterpart Gamera: there are innumerable Japanese-made games featuring turtles—whether it be a Pokemon, Bowser, or a random Mega Man enemy—where the turtle tucks into its shell and spins around, and every one of those instances is a direct reference to Gamera; and yet, there are only a tiny handful of games featuring the giant, fire-breathing friend to all children. While there might be fewer Godzilla games than you’d expect, there are certainly a lot more of them than there are games based on Gamera.

Part of that is just a result of the two franchises’ histories: Godzilla returned after a decade-long hiatus just as console games were really taking off in Japan, giving him ample opportunity to be adapted into video games from the Famicom days to now. Gamera’s final film for a good long while was 1980’s extra-length clipshow Gamera: Super Monster, and with that movie making a shambles of the monster’s reputation (and original studio Daiei long dead), Gamera was no longer a going concern, and was seemingly relegated to exclusively being a nostalgic reference for certain generations of Japanese (and western) fans. Not surprisingly, then, the first Gamera video games (all Japanese-only, also not surprising) did not appear until the mid-nineties, tied in directly with the high profile revival of the series through Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe—for a brief period, Gamera went from having zero games to a couple of them, and much like the Gamera movies themselves, these games basically followed the same trajectory as the Godzilla games, in microcosm.

That means there that no two Gamera games played even remotely alike, and most of them even seemed to buck conventional wisdom when it comes to making licensed video games. Where a traditional genre cash-in would make sense, they instead went about the things in a sideways manner, creating games that are more perplexing than fun. That brief time where Gamera games were coming out with no real direction, however, did at least produce one interesting result: 1997’s Gamera 2000, the one Gamera game that received some notoriety outside of Japan, with import copies receiving a few surprisingly positive reviews from western game magazines of the time. In this case, an unexpected take on a giant monster game actually resonated.

Gamera the Brave (2006)

Considering that this blog now houses reviews of seven Showa Gamera movies, as well as two of the Heisei ones, a maniacal sense of completism persuades me to also write about what is, to date, the last Gamera movie ever made, representing not so much an era but a potential era that was not to be. Gamera the Brave was released seven years after Revenge of Iris concluded Shusuke Kaneko’s trilogy—and not unlike the first movie in that trilogy, coming out just as the Godzilla series was going on hiatus, one that lasted much longer than the previous one. When one kaiju hibernates, another one comes to take its place in Japanese movie theatres—unfortunately, this one evidently did not get the box office necessary to keep it going, and what seemed like a beginning of another series of giant rocket-powered turtle adventures turned into a one-off followed by a decade-and-a-half of silence (except for a 2015 proof-of-concept short, which also went nowhere.) Unlike the hard reboot of the nineties trilogy—with a new continuity and a darker tone—Brave positions itself as a return to the original incarnation, directly tying itself to the classic films and going back to the child-friendly plots. This is a movie that buys wholeheartedly into the thesis I posited at the end of my last post, that the series ultimately became about the deep empathetic connection between optimistic children and a (fantastical) animal, putting the young audience who loved kaiju movies at the centre. But this movie also mines that youthfulness for drama, taking a rather melancholy turn at many points—this is not just pandering to kids, but playing on both their dreams and their anxieties, and in some ways presages the tone of Jellyfish Eyes.

A Creature Special Report: The Gamera Gauntlet

Gamera is, of course, Japan’s second favourite giant monster, one of the staple kaiju of the sixties Monster Boom whose yearly appearance in theatres (and, in the rest of the world, on television) has given him and his films an outsize influence on pop culture. You’d be hard-pressed to find a turtle in any kind of Japanese media who doesn’t fly by spinning around in its shell, and thanks mainly to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, fans of silly movies in the English-speaking world have formed a real soft (shell) spot for the terrapin tornado. Although starting out as Daiei’s answer to Toho’s Godzilla—considering the original movie was in black-and-white even though it was made in 1965, one might say their direct rip-off—the series eventually diverged in tone, even while maintaining a similar monster fight formula. While both monsters are beloved by children in the audience, Gamera was the one that was directly positioned as the “Friend to all Children”, a playful figure who would usually star alongside young actors in increasingly goofy plots, which is a level of direct pandering that Godzilla never really engaged in (at least until it started directly lifting stuff from Gamera in the late sixties and early seventies.) Gamera was even successfully revived in the mid-nineties with a trio of highly-regarded films directed by Shusuke Kaneko and written by Kazunori Ito, which I wrote about years ago.

While I’ve seen some of the movies in the original series, I’ve never had the opportunity to sit down and soak in the entire 1966-1971(+1980) run until I found the whole series available on our old pal, Tubi TV. The experience of running through the entire Showa Gameras (most of them directed by Noriaki Yuasa) has not only provided a more detailed context for the series and its place in monster history, but also demonstrates the wild evolution the series and its title kaiju took over those five years—what you thought you knew about Gamera is only partially true (he is still really neat and also filled with meat, however.) So, in this special extra-length post, I will compactly address each of the seven sequels—yes, it’s time to fire up the old capsule review machine.

Daikaiju 2014 Appendix: Super Monster Edition

Before reviewing those Godzilla films, I decided to seek out and view the modern reinventions of Godzilla’s contemporary/fellow traveler/coattail-rider, Gamera – all directed by Shusuke Kaneko (who later directed Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah), all regarded as classics of the genre. Considering that I’ve already covered three other pillars of kaiju history, it seemed imperative to get the last of them on this site as well. This was written around March 2014.

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Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995)

This is some good old time rock ‘n roll, here. My exposure to the Gamera series is pretty limited – I’ve only ever seen the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of Gamera vs. Guiron (and, actually, even without the commentary, Gamera vs. Guiron is kind of great – exhibit A, exhibit B) – but I know the trio of 90s Gamera films are supposed to be genre classics, so I thought I’d check them out, starting with the first, which sticks in my mind because of Roger Ebert’s review, the main thrust of which is that it’s a more enjoyable movie than Air Force One (as a child, I suffered through Air Force One at a drive-in so I could see Men in Black, and that’s my Air Force One story.)

First and foremost, I have apparently become a total film snob, because I had to get back into the groove of watching a dubbed foreign film, even though almost all my exposure to giant monster movies is with dubbed versions. I was able to overlook it pretty quickly, and I can see that they at least tried to be respectful to the original, but man, some of those voice choices. I mean, there’s always going to be a bit of dissonance, but it some of the actors seemed to be “doing voices” and that’s absolutely fucking distracting, even in a goofy movie like this.

It’s pretty clear that their goal was to take the stuff people liked about Heisei Godzilla (the suits, the violence, better human characters, the attempts to connect it with modern concerns) while also keeping it simple, avoiding some of the pitfalls of the later G-films. So, we got an origin story that establishes a reason for Gamera to be a good guy and to fight his by-popular-vote archenemy, then tie it in (a little?) to 90s eco concerns (speaking of which, have we had someone really try to tackle 2000s eco concerns in a monster movie? Maybe the new Godzilla will do that) – it’s all very neat and flows nicely. Weirdly, its plot is also very similar to the abandoned Godzilla film that Stan Winston was working on – the good monster created by Atlanteans to battle an evil monster in the present day, with the main difference being the bad guy monster was supposed an alien in the Godzilla movie, and is an artificial life form in Gamera. This movie would have been made at around the same time the Godzilla project was falling apart, so maybe there was some cross-pollination there – or maybe it’s just a coincidence.

Back to the borrowed aesthetics, this movie is pretty violent – blood and goo all over the place. This extends into the tone of the action as well – Gamera always seemed like the friendlier of the giant monsters, and while there are scenes of him going out of his way to protect people, he’s also shown almost mindlessly pursuing his fight, just knocking over whatever buildings are in his way. You can kind of understand why the military thinks he might be a bigger threat (though that still doesn’t explain how they can nonchalantly disregard the threat posed by Gyaos, but whatever), and I guess he’s supposed to be positioned as an anti-hero in these films, although aside from the property damage he’s still more straight heroic. The background stuff also gives this movie more an apocalyptic feeling, which is strangely not as prevalent in the genre as one would think. The human characters are pretty aware that this is a straight-up end of the world scenario, and it’s about accepting that Gamera is going to have to break some stuff in order to prevent other monsters from breaking everything. Monster movies usually come from a place of “we fucked up”, and this is a pretty pure example of that – even going so far as portraying a history of humans fucking up. That actually feels a very savvy through-line from the 50s monster movies, and the darkness feels at least a tiny bit more considered than just “let’s make the childrens’ movie more violent and shit.”

Gamera 3: The Revenge of Iris (1999)

I decided to skip the second entry in the series, Attack of Legion, because the third movie sounded more interesting. This one was dubbed too, but you know what? I kind of enjoyed hearing the same actors in these voice roles again. I am quick to change my tune, I guess.

This movie is exploring the themes from the first one in a lot of interesting ways – it’s a lot more character-focused, and even more apocalyptic. There’s an air of desperation throughout the film – it’s established as a permanently monster-ridden world, with humanity accepting that it has to get involved in steering the future of the planet – whether or not that involves working with the good guy monster. I mean, it’s pretty obvious that they’re going to need Gamera around, but there’s a lot more thinking about the roles and consequences of it all, so even though it’s cliche that the government would still be gung ho to blow up Gamera even though he saves their asses on a regular basis, there’s a debate present, at least.

The whole movie feels darker, especially visually – Gamera looks a lot fiercer than in the previous movie (which helps reinforce the way some of the characters look at him, actually.) It seems like the years between the first and this last movie made a major impact on the look – not only are the designs more complicated and “modern” (especially Iris, which is a weird, very designed creature with lots of moving parts, more in line with something in a animated thing or video game rather than the usual kaiju standard), and there’s way more CGI as well, though it usually blends pretty well with the suits and miniatures. The tone and special effects seem to be of a piece, though – this very much feels like a turn-of-the-millenium movie, in the way it looks and the way it tells its story.

This movie also gets a lot more mystical, I guess in part to play up the interconnectedness of things on earth – the first movie focused on the more Science Fiction-y aspects of the monsters, but now Gamera is recognized as the fighting spirit of the Earth itself with a firm connection with humanity (though he no longer has the direct connection he had in the first film, interestingly, which might explain why he seems to destroy even more indiscriminately here), with the other monsters as his shadow. There are references to prophecies and traditional spiritual beliefs and other mystical concepts all over the movie, and while most of those specific examples don’t necessarily go anywhere, it’s sort of there to give the film a certain atmosphere. Iris isn’t just a hyper-mutating beast like Gyaos, it’s a far stranger and more threatening abstraction of the individual emotional impact the events of these movies have had on people – once again placing us at the root of our own destruction. We even get two pseudo-villainous human characters, who seem to be totally in favour of the whole monsters-killing-everyone thing, based on obscure prophetic interpretations and/or plain old nihilism. All the new characters in the movie are here to present the variety of ways people, touched or untouched by the monster fights themselves, interpret the state of affairs, and we get more time to actually understand all that stuff, as the monster fights are paced in a way that feels more intrusive, probably in the same way the citizenry view them (putting it mildly.)

All this is leading up to an ambiguous ending for the series – it’s really more of a “…and the fight goes on!” sort of ending, but Gamera’s in pretty bad shape, and that’s a LOT of Gyaos coming his way. I kind of like that it arises from what was mainly in the background – when stories provide a wider context that the main plot may or may not be directly related to, it makes it seem more like a real world of big and small stories – but it still feels tonally connected. The final scenes are all about pulling through adversity, and I think a lot of the movie is trying to drive us away from the cynicism that these armageddon situations sometimes breeds within us. I think that seems to be way this series utilizes its own grittiness, to present suffering as something we must confront, but to demonstrate the alternative to letting that darkness infect us.