Gamera 2: Advent of Legion

Gamera 2: Advent of Legion (1996)
Daiei Film Co, Ltd
Director: Kaneko Shūsuke, Higuchi Shinji (special effects)
Also known as: Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, the US title. Once again, I’m going with the version helpfully included in the title caption. (Although it’s rendered with no punctuation as “GAMERA2 advent of legion”, which would look messy at the top of this page.)
Also discussed: the Rebirth of Mothra trilogy (1996, 1997, 1998)

NASA tracks a cluster of objects on a collision course with Earth. A group of amateur meteor watchers sees one passing low overhead and striking the ground near a lake in Hokkaido. The JSDF scrambles to inspect the scene of the crash; although there are no signs of radioactivity or chemical fallout, it looks as though the meteor was braking on impact. A strange green aurora appears in the night sky over the site, accompanied by localised electrical interference. The meteorite itself can’t be found, as if it melted or moved away of its own accord. Honami Midori, a curator at the Sapporo Science Centre, and her boss compare notes with Colonel Watarase and Lieutenant Hanatani, two of the JSDF soldiers at the scene.

A couple of days later, two security guards at a Kirin brewery (hooray, product placement!) investigate a disturbance in the warehouse. One of the guards is Osako Tsutomu, formerly of the Nagasaki Police Department. He quit the force after his terrifying experiences in the previous film and became a security guard at the opposite end of the country because he thought it would be an easier job. He isn’t best pleased when he and his colleague find a large, spiny, silvery, one-eyed creature, like an insect the size of a man, wandering among the beer crates. Watarase and Hanatani investigate this incident too, and call Honami in to ask if she has any theories. The contents of 10,000 crates of beer are spilled across the floor, but most of the glass has gone, leaving only a residue of powdered silicon. Honami has just learned that all the fibre-optic cable has mysteriously vanished from NTT’s Hokkaido network centre, which may explain the telecoms issues the Science Centre has been having lately. The strange incidents form a line from the meteorite impact site towards Sapporo.

The day after that, more of the alien creatures attack a Sapporo subway train. In addition to the glass from the train’s windows, they attack any passengers carrying electronic devices. Above ground, what looks like an enormous red flower bursts through the roof of a mall. Below ground, the creatures continue to relay silicon to the plant’s roots, which dramatically raise the atmospheric pressure and concentration of oxygen in the subway. Concerned that humans can’t survive alongside the aliens, the JSDF decides to destroy them by setting off explosives in the subway – the high concentration of oxygen should amplify the blast of a relatively small payload. Honami hypothesises that the plant is the aliens’ way of reproducing and spreading themselves to other worlds, by explosively launching seed pods into space. Obitsu, an NTT engineer who’s been liaising with Honami, runs a computer projection showing that if the plant launches its seed, everything within miles of the city will be flattened by the blast.

As the plant blossoms and prepares to seed, Gamera flies in from the coastal waters to the south. (He looks somewhat less rounded and cute and more sharp-edged than he did in the previous film. We see that he has retractable underarm flaps that he uses in flight, when he’s not spinning like a UFO.) He sucks in the hyper-oxygenated air around the plant and roasts it with a fireball, then just to be sure he pulls it up by the roots and gives it another flaming. The creatures from the subway respond by swarming up and covering Gamera, leaving him stumbling around blindly and discharging electricity across his skin. Seeing this, Hanatani quotes the Biblical Gospel of Mark (chapter 5, verse 9) and names the alien creatures Legion – the name is soon picked up and falls into common use. Gamera is able to take flight when some of the creatures are drawn from him to a nearby electrical transformer station, and he spins the rest off as he makes his escape. After he’s gone, a new, larger variant of the alien creatures, one resembling a gigantic mosquito, bursts up from the subway and flies off. The JSDF pursue it but, despite hitting it with missiles, are unable to bring it down.

The corpse of one of the insectoid Legion creatures is recovered from the beach after Gamera’s escape and dissected. It has pneumatic joints instead of muscles and its exoskeleton has the same molecular structure as a silicon semiconductor. (Although we’re not shown this, we’re told later that it also has wings powerful enough to carry it across the water from Hokkaidō to Honshū.) Discussing the findings at her home, Honami, Watarase and Obitsu speculate that the creatures might communicate electromagnetically, and that they might be deliberately targeting Japan’s cities as a source both of food and of “enemy” electromagnetism that disrupts their communication.

Watarase and Honami travel to Tokyo (where, delightfully, the Tokyo Tower hasn’t yet been rebuilt following the events of the previous film) to discuss strategy with a senior JSDF officer. The JSDF is stretched too thin to prepare for possible attacks on all Japan’s cities, but it seems likely that Legion will attack another city somewhere between Sapporo and Tokyo. Legion strikes again at Sendai, with the insectoid creatures neutralising a pachinko arcade and the plant erupting from the main train station. The JSDF moves in and evacuates the population, flying civilians out in tandem-rotor cargo helicopters. By chance, Honami, who’s among the evacuees, meets Kusanagi Asagi, who had a telepathic connection with Gamera in the previous movie and who has been holidaying with a friend in Sendai. The evacuation is disrupted when Gamera flies overhead and is attacked by the kaiju-sized mosquito creature, which appears from under the runway at Sendai Airport. Gamera fights to protect the last helicopter and allow it to get clear, while Legion fights to stall Gamera long enough for the plant to seed. The mosquito creature’s proboscis opens out sideways, allowing it to knock Gamera down with a powerful electrical discharge. By the time Gamera manages to get to the plant and knock it over, it’s already seeding. Sendai is obliterated in the explosion and Gamera is left comatose at the centre of the crater.

By comparing the electromagnetic output of the neon signs of the pachinko arcade with that of the transformer that attracted the small Legion creatures in Sapporo, Obitsu finds a common pattern. Honami suggests that this could be used like a pheromone to lure the creatures into a trap the next time they appear. The JSDF anticipates an attack on Tokyo and is mobilised on the government’s orders to defend the city. The large Legion creature surfaces in Ashikaga (roughly 50km inland from Tokyo); the JSDF’s artillery bounce off its metallic hide, and it makes short work of the tanks and jets with the electrical discharge from its proboscis. It fires a swarm of the smaller creatures from its abdomen which fly towards the city centre.

Honami plans to put Asagi onto a plane home at the airport, but Asagi insists that Gamera isn’t finished and the pair travel to the crater at Sendai instead. They find a crowd gathered around braziers, keeping vigil over Gamera, who is covered in an ashy crust. As they will Gamera to recover, the sparks from their braziers form a cloud of energy over him and he shakes off the ash and lifts off. Asagi’s magatama shatters in her hand. Gamera confronts the larger Legion first, but is again outmatched. As the Legion swarm flies back to assist, Obitsu persuades the duty manager of a local NTT relay station to broadcast his electromagnetic pheromone signal, and the swarm is distracted onto the station’s power lines where they’re easily picked off by JSDF helicopters. The JSDF is eventually persuaded to support Gamera and, with their help, Gamera is able to break off Legion’s proboscis. Unfortunately this doesn’t incapacitate Legion, which is still able to fire punishing beams of energy at Gamera. In a final bid to stop Legion, Gamera draws wave after wave of energy into himself from across the Earth. The abdominal plates of his shell hinge open and he releases the gathered energy, vaporising Legion at last. As the sun rises, he takes flight, saluted by several JSDF soldiers.

As they stroll through the centre of Sapporo some time later, Honami suggests to Obitsu that Gamera isn’t really protecting humanity but acting to preserve all terrestrial life. Obitsu wonders if humanity’s destructive behaviour might lead Gamera to consider us his enemy.

So, my first thought on rewatching this film is: Wow, the Kirin Brewery Company really emptied their marketing budget on this!

My second thought is: This looks suspiciously like a response to Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995). There’s a swarm of puppet-like human-scale kaiju; a scene of armed troopers fighting the monsters in a confined underground space, a bit like in Aliens (1986); a sort of daikaiju queen of the swarm portrayed by a stunt actor. As with Destoroyah, there’s a rare and satisfying “scienciness” to Legion – Honami likens the organism’s combination of hive creatures and plant to the symbiosis between leafcutter ants and the fungus that they farm, in a moment that feels very much like the scriptwriter indulgently showing off his research. Both films include scenes of atomic-bomb-esque destruction, but where Godzilla vs Destoroyah throws its scenes in without warning whenever characters start talking about Godzilla going into meltdown, essentially faking out the audience, Gamera 2 really delivers the scene and means it. (It might be a stretch too far to compare Gamera’s new trapdoor torso fireball attack, never seen before or since, with the fiery glow of the dying Godzilla’s chest in the Toho film.) Basically, at various points the makers of this film seem to be turning to the makers of that film and saying, “See, we can do that too”. (Or even – heresy! – “We can do that better”.) There’s a clear seven months between the release dates of the two films, so a direct response isn’t impossible given the fast production schedule of a 90s Japanese kaiju movie, but it would have been tight if so.

The effects overall are, once again, excellent. Like Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995), Gamera 2 makes good use of ground-level shots to give scale to the proceedings and to show off the miniature work. There’s a brilliant shot of a public phone box shattering as Gamera stomps towards the Legion plant in Sapporo, and a shot of the queen Legion bursting out of the ground with a phone box similarly foregrounded. On a slightly different scale, the inclusion of a large model of a cargo helicopter circling Gamera and Legion during the standoff at Sendai Airport really helps to sell that scene.

Some of the production’s other choices are peculiar. There are some weird freeze frame moments scattered across the film – of Honami and Watarase piecing together the clues at the meteorite site, the survivors being rescued from the subway train, and Obitsu and Watarase piecing together more clues later on in Honami’s home. These feel like perhaps an attempt to use the visual language of docudrama – perhaps they’re meant to make the movie feel less far removed from reality. There’s also a fair bit of religious, specifically Christian imagery. Aside from Hanatani naming the kaiju antagonist after a Biblical demon (and citing the chapter and verse to back it up!), there’s the way the “me” of Gamera’s name, メ, is presented in the opening title graphics as an upright cross on a fiery background before settling into its place in the film’s title, and the way the people gathered in Sendai raise Gamera from the dead by essentially praying him better. There was already a hint of this in Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe, in which Asagi, with her stigmata and the symbol of her saviour around her neck, declares her faith at the end of the film that he’ll return to save the world again. Lastly among the odd choices, an ecological message is clumsily tacked onto the final scene because apparently that’s just what we do in kaiju eiga now.

There are some good choices too, mostly in the use of comedy. There’s plenty of “realistic” news coverage of the events playing on TV screens in the characters’ home or in the background, some of which verges on the parodic. There’s also some comedy business of Honami’s mother stopping her father from eavesdropping when she has male visitors. Most noticeably, Hotaru Yukijirō is back as the cowardly ex-cop Osako, albeit briefly. He and Fujitani Ayako, as Asagi, are the only two returnees from the first film. The new main cast are fine, but for me they’re less memorable than the old main cast.

So what were Toho doing at this time? Obviously not making more Godzilla movies, but they weren’t going to let their visual effects team sit idle either. So, while everyone was waiting for the American Godzilla movie to arrive, Toho turned to their other superstar kaiju and produced a new trilogy of Mothra movies. These are known outside Japan as Rebirth of Mothra (1996), Rebirth of Mothra 2 (1997) and (...checks notes...) Rebirth of Mothra 3 (1998). As with the Heisei Gamera trilogy, the second and third instalments use Anglo (technically Arabic) numerals in their promotional materials and on screen, and these are pronounced in the trailers and interviews as if in English (“Tsū” and “Surī”). They were pitched at a younger audience than the Heisei Godzilla movies, with child protagonists throughout, cartoonish villains and simple, super-obvious environmental messaging.

It’s interesting, in the wake of two films in which Daiei modernised the children’s favourite Gamera with a grittier, more mature tone, to see Toho going in the other direction and presenting their modernised Mothra as a bit of light fantasy for kids. It’s also fascinating to watch the 90s generation of Toho kaiju filmmakers, over the course of the trilogy, essentially rediscover how to make a kids’ film. This surely wasn’t a lost art – it had only been 20 years since the studio’s live action output was headlining the children’s Toho Champion Festival. And yet, as slick as the movies are in their visual effects, thanks in no small part to an injection of CGI, they’re clunky as hell on the narrative level.

In the first film, an unlikeable, bickering brother and sister are drawn into a battle between titanic supernatural forces when their father’s logging company disturbs an ancient seal. The second film takes more of an Indiana Jones approach, with a trio of kids and a couple of fishermen racing to uncover the secrets of a vanished civilisation that’s connected to a pollution-loving aquatic daikaiju. (This second movie follows in the questionable footsteps of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974) by plundering the indigenous culture of Okinawa for the name of the civilisation whose ancient temple surfaces, Atlantis-like, off the Okinawan coast.) By the third film, the writers have just about got the hang of sympathetic child characters but make them subordinate to the fantasy characters in a story of kaiju battling across the present day and the Cretaceous Period.

As far as the kaiju antagonists go, Rebirth of Mothra 2 fares the best with an original creation that also comes with an entourage of toxic starfish to menace the human cast. The first and third films fall back on variations on the familiar old King Ghidorah.

The protagonists, meanwhile, get a significant makeover. Mothra’s fairies, formerly referred to as the Shobijin and more recently, in Godzilla vs Mothra (1992), as the Cosmos, are now called the Elias. Naturally, they’ve been recast. They used to be not so much characters in their own right, more a kind of weird interface between Mothra and the humans, but now they’re expected to carry large parts of the plot of this trilogy themselves, so they’ve been reimagined as individuals with distinct personalities and proper names. What’s more, there’s a third Elias, coded in her costume and performance as evil, who’s working against them and trying to use the antagonist kaiju to save Earth by destroying humanity. The good Elias have their own tiny version of Mothra to ride around on, which they call “Fairy” – if Toho weren’t making toys off the back of the illusory tiny Mothra that appeared in Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994), they surely would be now. The evil Elias, meanwhile, gets to fly about on a kind of miniature cybernetic dragon, which opens up a world of questions about the presumably extinct civilisation the Elias represent.

In further contrast with their rustic islander predecessors, the Elias appear in increasingly elaborate fairy princess costumes across the trilogy. And yes, they still sing the old Mothra song. The first movie screeches to a halt to showcase what looks like a pop video for the song, with the two good Elias matted incongruously onto the generic background of a roaring log fire. They also get a completely new song in the third movie, and very nice it is too.

The more disappointing change, perhaps, is that Mothra, traditionally one of the few explicitly female daikaiju, is replaced by a male version. I don’t if this was considered necessary to appeal to the target child audience or done for any other particular reason. The more familiar Mothra dies in the first movie and hands over to a male larva which quickly pupates to win the climactic fight. He’s referred to by secondary sources as Mothra Leo, but on-screen he’s just Mothra. In what looks like another strong bid for spin-off toys, during the trilogy he mutates into a succession of specialist forms that allow him to do plot-mandated things like dive underwater, grow plate armour and literally fly millions of years into the past.

I wouldn’t recommend the Rebirth of Mothra trilogy to anyone but kaiju completists. They’re not terrible enough to make the Tri-Star movie look good – I wouldn’t go that far, but more on that in the next blog post! – but they certainly make the Heisei Gamera trilogy look even better by comparison. That Daiei, after so quickly turning around Gamera 2, should have waited a few years before producing Gamera 3 (1999) makes it look cruelly as if they’re just hanging back and giving Toho more rope.