Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 9 (Gamera 2: Attack Of Legion)

With the spooky season comes that oh-so-familiar time of year. It ain't just slashers and found footage that become seasonally appropriate, oh no. It is officially KAIJU TIME BAYBEE!!! Last year a pal suggested I view 1995's Gamera: Guardian Of The Universe, a gloriously fun movie about a heroic turtle kaiju beating the shit out of a giant bird kaiju with a message about environmentalism and spiritual psychic links to said heroic turtle kaiju. I enjoyed it. I guess a bunch of people in Japan also enjoyed it because a sequel got made, and I sat down to watch it with that pal. What giant turtle adventures did we discover?

Well, I do love the feel of this movie's first third. Uniquely for my kaiju experience so far, it actually begins in Hokkaido, up in northern Japan. This leads to the movie being full of snow and creating a chilly wintertime atmosphere, with not just shots of snow everywhere but weird aurora borealis caused by the antagonist monsters of the film lighting the snow in an unnatural green. Strange ethereal colors are good, and so is this snowy vibe that the movie gives. It's really a shame that the threat moves further south, bearing on Tokyo as it inevitably must; I would have adored the film a lot more if it kept that chilly aesthetic. There's also a sudden visceral nature with the threat, as it initially appears to be a lot of alien bugs. They attack a subway and later some soldiers investigating the subway, and there's a surprising amount of gore and tension. At times it feels like the movie has become Aliens, except it also gives the alien bugs, the titular Legion, Predator vision with lots of thermal POV shots. 

The film's got a bit of a slow pace, as Gamera mostly shows up to attack big alien flowers that the menacing Legion are trying to bloom, protecting the planet from them blooming and blowing shit up. Gamera as a natural force protecting Earth here is contrasted by Legion; they're not just an alien threat from outer space, but are also a lifeform which consumes silicon and is thus drawn to technological things like electricity and radio signal. Maybe I am talking out of my ass here because this kaiju film is a little more subtle than others, but this contrast seems to be the point of the film. Legion, the rampaging force that is many (which soon helpfully evolves into a giant bug kaiju for Gamera to wrassle with at the end of the second act), eventually distracts Gamera long enough for the movie to really bite the bullet and do something I have not seen any kaiju film do so far. Another of those alien flowers completely levels the Japanese city of Sendai, leaving it as a charred ruin and Gamera seemingly dead with it. Do I even need to make invocations of those other bombs from 50 years prior? Holy shit.

Of course, Gamera comes back to save the day, but it's how Gamera comes back that intrigues me. The girl who holds the spiritual magatama which gives her an attuned psychic link with Gamera channels the hopes and wishes of the Japanese kids in the ruins of Sendai to revive Gamera, but at the cost of breaking the magatama and her link with it. To a Western viewer like me, this seems like some kind of growing out of Neverland thing. I'm not sure what the Eastern makers of the film intended, but either way it leads to some glorious battle between Gamera and Legion. Hell, even the human side characters get to kind of save the day by distracting the Legion swarm with technology! I guess you can find a perfect balance between the two, so long as you keep one ear open to hear the heartbeat of the planet and the heroic giant turtle protector in your heart. Or something like that. It's not a bad movie, this. I kind of wish it kept that snowy vibe up and made some of its themes a little more explicit so I don't feel like I'm grasping at straws in the dark during a moment of cultural impasse. Still, I did my best to look under the hood here and found some stuff. The giant turtle movie ain't half-bad.