Apr 021995
 
four reels

four reels

Lieutenant Yoshinari Yonemori is part of a plutonium transport sea convoy that runs into an atoll. Overwhelmed by the near disaster, he pushes his way onto the insurance investigator’s team that’s trying to determine what happened. Meanwhile, zoologist and all-around science expert Dr. Mayumi Nagamine is pulled in by Police Inspector Osako to investigate deaths on an island. They discover giant dragon-like reptiles flying in the region which they later call gyaos. The two investigations intersect, with Gamera appearing to fight the gyaos, and the investigator’s teenage daughter, Asagi, ending up with a pendant that binds her Gamera.

It’s too bad that the title gives away that this is a Gamera film as there’s some nicely built up suspense around the mysterious atoll. But even knowing what’s coming, the detective portion of the film works well and introduces us to our human cast of likable characters that almost make a difference (this is still a Japanese monster movie, so the humans don’t really matter, but for a change they don’t just stand around looking at screens and narrating what is happening).

Nagamine makes for a strong female lead and Yonemori is noble without going overboard. And the switch from the old Gamera films where you’d have cheering prepubescent “Kenny” children connected to Gamera to a teenage priestess makes all the difference, and raises the stakes since she suffers when Gamera does.

The mythology alone makes this film work better than so many others in its genre. Gamera is a gyaos killer. That’s what he is made for. He doesn’t have to be intelligent or noble and figure anything out (he’s a turtle after all, so deduction should not be in his skill set). He was made to kill gyaos and that’s what he does.

By US blockbuster standards, the effects don’t shine. This is men in suits (and for the first time, a woman in the Gyaos suit), puppets, and miniatures after all, but for Japanese giant monster movies, this is the gold standard. Here and there, the FX took me out of the film—the young gyaos’s randomly moving pupils and the animation of a high flying battle—but generally I liked the look of it.

If you dislike big monsters duking it out, or suit-mation, then Gamera: Guardian of the Universe isn’t for you, but if you have even a mild interest in the genre, this is the one to see.