Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe

Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995)
Daiei Film Co, Ltd
Director: Kaneko Shūsuke, Higuchi Shinji (special effects)

A note on the title: This isn’t exactly an “Also known as” – there’s no debate about the film’s Anglo title, but there is some difference of opinion over the punctuation. Very helpfully, the on-screen title caption for the film includes an Anglo version in tiny lettering underneath the Japanese. The colon is barely visible, but it’s definitely there (and slightly easier to spot on the Blu-ray than it was on earlier formats). Other sources use titles with a comma, or with no punctuation at all, or even with punctuation but without the first “the”.

Kusanagi Naoya, an insurance investigator, is assigned to look into a shipping company’s claim that one of their craft was damaged by a mysterious floating island somewhere east of the Philippines. The ship was carrying a cargo of plutonium to Japan, which happily wasn’t affected by the incident. One of the shipping company’s officers, Yonemori Yoshinari, persuades Kusanagi to take him along on the investigation.

Inspector Osako Tsutomu of the Nagasaki Police is investigating the disappearance of a university professor on Himegami Island (note: this island is fictional). Because the professor was drawn there by reports of an unknown bird species, Inspector Osako consults Dr Nagamine Mayumi, an ornithologist at Fukuoka Municipal Zoo the professor had been in contact with. The two go to the island with a police escort and find a ruined village and a very large pile of guano that contains the professor’s fountain pen and glasses. The “bird”, which has evidently eaten everyone on the island, is a large, dragon-like creature with a dark reddish hide, a long neck and a wedge-shaped head. Concerned about what might happen if it travels to mainland Japan, Osako and Nagamine follow it in the police helicopter and try to distract it from attacking a neighbouring island. Nagamine takes some photos of it and notices that it recoils from the flash on her camera. As it returns to Himegami, she sees another two circling above the island.

Kusanagi’s team finds the wandering island near the Ryūkyū Islands. The surface is studded with magatama, comma-shaped beads about the size of a squash ball, and they find and excavate a large upright stone in the middle of the island with ancient writing carved into it. Just as Yonemori is examining the inscription on the stone, the island begins to break up and something large emerges from the rock and moves through the water towards the mainland. Yonemori takes a helicopter to warn the Japanese authorities about the approaching object.

A delegate from the government, with instructions to capture the flying creatures alive for study, asks Nagamine to come up with a plan for him. She suggests baiting a baseball stadium in Fukuoka with a pallet of raw meat and using JSDF helicopters to herd the creatures there. Once they’re in the stadium, they can be trapped by closing the roof, dazzled with the floodlights and knocked out with tranquiliser guns. One of the creatures escapes the trap, but the other two are sedated and caged.

The creature that got away heads for the coast but is intercepted by the object from the island, which turns out to be a gigantic, bipedal turtle with tusks. (It’s very much the familiar Gamera but with better movement and a 1990s polish. It has the smooth, rounded look that tells us it’s friendly.) It kills the flying creature by swatting it into an oil refinery, then pushes its way through Fukuoka to get to the stadium, where it starts to tear the roof open. The JSDF are constitutionally powerless to intervene without the government’s explicit sign-off. The two creatures inside the stadium escape from their cages by producing some kind of sonic beam from their mouths that shears through the metal bars. They then fly straight past the turtle, which takes flight itself by withdrawing into its shell, firing rockets out of its limb-holes and whirling into the sky like a Catherine Wheel.

At Kusanagi’s house, he and Yonemori look over what they found at sea. Photographs of the stone show that the inscription was in a language similar to that of the ancient Etruscans. (Alas, what we see on-screen are Anglo-Saxon runes and not Etruscan lettering at all. The printed-out transcription and translation that Kusanagi hands to Yonemori, conversely, shows that it’s meant to be read as Icelandic, also not an ancient Mediterranean language. Still, Gamera the Giant Monster (1965) made the same hash of Mediterranean legend and countries in the Arctic Circle in its Gamera origin story.) It talks about Gamera, the last hope, rising to defeat Gyaos, the shadow of evil. The magatama are made of an unfamiliar coppery metal. Kusanagi wonders if it might be orichalcum, which his daughter Asagi recognises as a legendary metal used in Atlantis. (As described in Plato’s Critias. Asagi and one of her schoolfriends were seen chatting about mythical lost continents earlier in the movie, so we know she’ll have read up on this stuff. Apparently her dad has too.) Most of the magatama recovered from the island have been taken away for safekeeping, but Yonemori has retained one to give to Asagi. It gives off an orange glow in her hand. Kusanagi suggests that the turtle, with its unlikely capabilities, could have been created somehow by a vanished civilisation that gave rise to the story of Atlantis and similar legends around the world. Yonemori wonders if the turtle might have been drawn to his company’s cargo ship to feed somehow on radiation from the plutonium. He guesses that the stone tablet was naming the turtle, Gamera, and the flying creatures, Gyaos.

The government grants the JSDF permission to attack Gamera but still wants the Gyaos captured. Nagamine has made a return visit to Himegami Island and found the cannibalised remains of the Gyaos’ fellow hatchlings, which have provided genetic material for study. The creatures seem to have been conceived 10,000 years ago and are all born female. The possibility that the Gyaos might be unable to reproduce only makes Nagamine’s government contact keener to capture them because of their rarity. Later, investigating another sighting of the two remaining Gyaos, Nagamine and a local child are saved from being eaten when Gamera appears and blasts one of the creatures with a fireball from his mouth. The last Gyaos wounds Gamera with her sonic beam (and, as in the Shōwa era movies, Gamera’s blood is green) and the two kaiju fly off. Yonemori concludes that, contrary to what the government believes, Gamera is not hostile.

The JSDF shoots Gamera down with missiles over Mt Fuji while he’s pursuing the last Gyaos. Asagi, who is now wearing her magatama as a necklace, has a wound on her hand that matches Gamera’s and is concerned by a news report that they plan to send tanks in and finish him off. She finds a taxi driver reckless enough to take her close to Mt Fuji to watch the confrontation. Under attack from the tanks and Gyaos, Gamera seems to draw enough strength from Asagi to escape, but once again she develops spontaneous injuries that mirror his. She’s hospitalised and later taken home by Kusanagi, where she sleeps while Gamera recuperates.

Nagamine and Yonemori meet with the scientist who’s been analysing the Gyaos tissue sample. He tells them that Gyaos’ DNA includes male and female genetic information, which suggests that she could reproduce asexually. The economy of the DNA, with only one chromosome pair with the blended characteristics of several other animals and no functional waste, further suggests that Gyaos, like Gamera, is an artificial life form. Nagamine speculates that the “Atlantean” civilisation made a fatal mistake in creating Gyaos, then created Gamera to destroy Gyaos, but too late to save themselves. The Gyaos eggs might have lain dormant for thousands of years, then been revived by the rapid changes in the climate caused by human industry. Meanwhile, the adult Gyaos has grown substantially and made her way to Tokyo, where she seizes a train carriage and eats the occupants. The government reconsiders its stance on Gyaos.

The JSDF sets up a mobile HQ in an office block in Tokyo’s Minato Ward overlooking a park where Gyaos is sleeping. Nagamine suggesting attacking Gyaos during the day, since her activity so far has been nocturnal. But the creature has grown shield plates over her eyes that allow her to fly in daylight. She draws the JSDF’s missiles into colliding with the Tokyo Tower, then nests on the tower’s observation deck. Everyone within six miles of the tower is ordered to evacuate so that the military can attack with full force the next morning. The resulting exodus clogs the roads and rail network, while the airport is closed for fear that aircraft might attract Gyaos’ attention.

Asagi wakes up and she and her father join Nagamine and Yonemori at the JSDF’s mobile HQ. Gamera has recovered and burrowed his way to Minato Ward, where he bursts out of the ground and destroys Gyaos’ nest with a fireball. The eggs Gyaos has laid all fall to the ground and break. Gyaos and Gamera fight through the streets, then in the air as Gamera tries to slam Gyaos into the ground. Asagi and the others track the fight in a helicopter so that Asagi, connected supernaturally to Gamera through her magatama, can give him her support. All appears lost when Gamera crashes into an oil refinery which promptly explodes. But, drawing strength from Asagi, Gamera absorbs the flames and obliterates Gyaos with a fireball. He heals Asagi’s wounds and breaks off the connection between them before wading out to sea. Nagamine worries that other Gyaos eggs might hatch elsewhere in the world, but Asagi is confident that Gamera will return when he’s needed.

You’d hardly know this came from the same film company that produced Gamera Super Monster (1980). Much of the credit belongs to the directors.

Kaneko Shūsuke started out as a director of high-budget “pink” movies for Nikkatsu, but switched to making more mainstream films for other studios in the late 80s. Several of his films have a genre element – notably for Anglo audiences, he was one of the directors on Brian Yuzna’s horror anthology movie Necronomicon (1993). He brings a good pace and dynamic shooting to the non-effects scenes.

But what really sets Guardian apart from Toho’s contemporary output is the effects work directed by Higuchi Shinji. A fan turned pro, he worked in the modelling team on The Return of Godzilla (1984), then directed a feature-length kaiju parody the following year that brought him into the orbit of the student startup Daicon Film. Daicon reformed in 1985 as Gainax, with Higuchi as a key contributor to the breakthrough anime successes of co-founder Anno Hideaki. (Anno and Higuchi would much later collaborate on Shin Godzilla (2014) – but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) With this background, Higuchi not only had a fannish eye for what would appeal to the audience but already had practical experience of trying some of it.

And it puts the Heisei Godzilla movies to shame, with all of their wide, distant shots of kaiju battles and close-up shots at Godzilla’s own eye level. Guardian takes the camera down to street level, putting us right in the middle of the destruction and incidentally showing off the effects team’s finest miniature work. While it’s down there, the camera shoots up from underneath the kaiju, giving them a sense of scale the Toho movies have been lacking lately. The absolute masterstroke for me is the shot of Gyaos’ head slamming into an office block during the climactic fight, filmed from inside an immaculately furnished miniature office. All of this helps to tie the improbable fantasy action back to the viewer’s everyday experience and make it feel more real than the escapades of G-Force and Little Godzilla. And yet the directors have an eye for beauty too – just look at that shot of Gyaos nesting on the truncated Tokyo Tower at sunset.

On another note of (relative) realism, Guardian acknowledges that in a situation like this, the JSDF wouldn’t be able to simply wheel out the sci-fi weaponry and would have to file the paperwork asking for permission to do anything more than react. The idea of the Japanese government making the wrong call and only getting in the way of those better suited to handle the crisis is believable and a refreshing thing to see in kaiju eiga (and an early preview of Higuchi’s and Anno’s take on Godzilla 20 years later – but again, I’m getting ahead of myself).

Granted, in all their close-ups the Gyaos heads are very, very obviously hand puppets. I find this delightful rather than a deal-breaker. On the bright side, they’re not the rigid props familiar to us from the Shōwa era Gamera movies.

Guardian does make a few references back to Gamera vs Gyaos (1967), its most obvious forebear. We see Gyaos eating the commuters out of a train carriage, wounding Gamera’s forelimb in their first major confrontation, cutting off her own foot to evade Gamera. We see her sonic beam stuttering out after the final showdown, just as it cut off when Gyaos was dumped into a volcano in Gamera vs Gyaos, although it makes a bit less sense here given Gyaos’ head has just been blown off. Wisely, Guardian doesn’t pick up on the original Gyaos’ never-explained ability to incapacitate Gamera by producing a fire-retardant powder from its wings. Just to keep us guessing, the script plays on the young Gyaos’ photosensitivity, as in the 1967 movie, but surprises us by revealing that the fully-grown adult Gyaos isn’t vulnerable to sunlight.

The plot point of the protagonist having a glowing magatama that gives them mystical powers and a link to their larger-than-life protector looks like it’s been borrowed from Toho’s Yamato Takeru (1994). Then again, as there’s only eight months between the release dates of those films, I should probably give the benefit of the doubt.

It’s clear, mind you, that the makers of Guardian have been taking notes from Toho’s recent output. Strong female characters to appeal to the predominant cinema audience in 90s Japan? Asagi plays the obvious counterpart to Toho’s Saegusa Miki, as the young woman with a psychic link to the heroic kaiju. Unlike Miki, she’s not beholden to the political or military hierarchy of an anti-Gamera strike force, so can more plausibly be her own person, and a surrogate for the viewer, in between the big kaiju fights. (In classic Gamera terms, she’s standing in for all those smartarse kids who took centre stage in the Shōwa era movies. As the “Guardian of the Universe”, Gamera is no longer a “friend to all children” but rather a friend to all humanity. The nearest we get to a nod to the old era is when Gamera stalls Gyaos to let Yonemori and Nagamine get a small child off a bridge halfway through the film.) Dr Nagamine, meanwhile, is a professional, independent woman who becomes the national authority on Gyaos. She runs rings around Inspector Osako and stands her ground against her government liaison, even reprimanding him when he becomes too deplorable to bow to. Even today, this film stands up well in its presentation of its female characters.

For that matter, not only is this one of those rare kaiju eiga with an explicitly female monster, it’s the first movie to cast a female stunt actor as the monster. Kameyama Yūmi plays Gyaos in the fight against Gamera through the streets of central Tokyo. She even gets a non-kaiju cameo as a newsreader.

There’s a romantic subplot between Nagamine and Yonemori, and it at least feels more natural than anything in Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994) – the scene in which he heroically rushes in to help her and a small child get off an imperilled bridge goes some way towards setting it up. And pleasingly, it doesn’t end up defining either character’s involvement in the plot. It falls down, cheesy dialogue notwithstanding, simply because Ihara Tsuyoshi’s performance as Yonemori is so rigid – Nakayama Shinobu is doing all the heavy lifting as Nagamine. She absolutely carries her scenes in this movie. We’ll see Nakayama again later in this movie series. Hotaru Yukijirō turns in a solid performance as the comedic cop Osako – we’ll see him again too. (Interested parties can spot him in the recent (2024) adaptation of James Clavell’s Shōgun (1975), playing the late taikō Nakamura.) We won’t see Onodera Akira again, although he gives perhaps the most competent male performance as Asagi’s father. I suppose this is where I should repeat the one fact that most people who know about this movie are likely to already know, that Fujitani Ayako, who plays Asagi, is the daughter of former action movie hero and current Putin apologist Steven Seagal. She does a commendable job in her film debut.

In all respects, this film blows the Heisei Godzilla movies out of the water. I don’t know that it’s about anything particularly in the way the earlier Heisei Godzillas are. It’s also not a straight-up cash-in in the way the Shōwa Gamera series was. It’s more of a digestion of and response to four decades of kaiju eiga through the lens of a media savvy fan. Its purpose is simply to make Gamera – Gamera! of all characters! – believable and interesting for a 90s audience, and I think it succeeds admirably. It’s only a pity that Godzilla was about to take a break and wouldn’t stick around to rise to the challenge.