Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris

Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999)
Daiei Film Co, Ltd
Director: Kaneko Shūsuke, Higuchi Shinji (special effects)
Also known as: Gamera 3: Awakening of Iris, based on the Japanese title, but most sources go with Revenge.

The on-screen title caption offers neither of these – instead it gives us “The Absolute Guardian of The Universe / Gamera3 / incomplete struggle” in English beneath some other stuff. A pre-credits caption at the end of the film also suggests “Gamera: 1999 / The Absolute Guardian of The Universe” in English only. I don’t think anyone uses that title.

Let’s try to decipher that other stuff on the title caption. There are some fiery graphics that may or may not hint at the three-ness of the film – with three horizontal lines in parallel, they could arguably be read as the relevant Japanese numeral. There’s the name “GAMERA” spelled out in Anglo-Saxon runes, reinforcing the linguistic mistake made in Gamera’s origin story as laid out in the first film. Finally, there’s kanji for the Japanese subtitle, but only the subtitle – the main “Gamera 3” bit is tucked away in the middle of the English language section.

One final observation: the poster for Gamera 3 includes the katakana letters spelling out the name “Iris” (pronounced “Irris”, not “Eye-ris”) above the relevant kanji, while the title caption only has the kanji. Google Translate renders these as “Evil God” (ja-shin). Presumably this is the usual thing of kanji having several possible pronunciations in Japanese. It does raise the question of whether Ayana’s family knowingly named their cat “Evil God”. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Although Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995) and Gamera 2 (1996) had performed well financially and critically, there was a bit of a gap before Gamera 3 appeared. This wasn’t because the Daiei team were stepping back to give the TriStar Godzilla (1998) some space. Rather, they’d noticed a new appetite among Japanese audiences for horror, including among younger viewers. A 1995 TV adaptation of the novel Ringu (1991, “The Ring”) had gone over well, and the 1998 cinematic remake would spearhead the J-Horror boom. Early plans for the third Heisei Gamera movie were shelved and, with director Kaneko co-authoring the script, the tone of the movie shifted further away from child-friendliness and more towards horror. This worked well as far as the critics were concerned, but did nothing to help the movie’s box office performance. It was, after all, still only a kaiju movie.

It's 1999. Dr Nagamine Mayumi (whom we met in the first movie), an ornithologist and now the world’s foremost authority on the kaiju Gyaos, is investigating a new spate of Gyaos sightings in equatorial parts. Meanwhile, off the southernmost coast of Japan, a submersible discovers a stretch of the ocean floor paved with giant turtle shells – a Gamera graveyard.

Flashback to 1995. Hirasaka Ayana’s family are scrambling to evacuate their flat in Tokyo following the civil defence alerts about Gamera’s fight with the adult Gyaos. Ayana’s father has gone back into the apartment block to fetch her mother, who’s trying to coax the family cat, Iris, out of hiding. Waiting in the family car, Ayana watches in horror as Gamera crashes into the building and destroys it.

(Fun fact: this is not the rounded, more cuddly Gamera actually depicted in the first movie but the spinier, more nightmarish version as seen in the second movie.)

Four years later, Ayana and her little brother Satoru are living with relatives in Asuka, a village south of Kyoto. Ayana struggles with her aunt and uncle’s suggestion that she adopt their family name and with bullies at the provincial school. To protect her brother from the bullies, Ayana goes into the cave of a legendary monster the locals call Ryu-sei-cho and brings out the stone meant to seal it in place. According to Ayana’s cousin, the creature’s named after three Chinese constellations that roughly correspond to the Western constellation Hydra; ancient legends liken it to a red bird that’s opposed to a similarly legendary tortoise, which strongly implies it’s related to Gyaos.

In Tokyo, government secretary Asakura Mito and her sinister associate Kurata Shinya visit the marine insurance company from the first movie to view the ancient magatama they collected. (Kusanagi, the insurance investigator who collected them, is away in Washington, which is why we’ll be seeing his daughter Asagi again but not him.) All the magatama shattered after Gamera’s confrontation with Legion three years earlier. Asakura is keen to track Asagi down, and also makes contact with Nagamine at a meeting of the Monster Damage Control Committee, where she and the government minister she sparred with in the first movie are now consulted as experts.

Osako Tsutomu, former policeman and security guard and now a newspaper seller, is sleeping rough on the streets of Tokyo’s Shibuya district. He’s horrified to see two Gyaos and Gamera fly overhead one busy Friday night. Gamera pursues the two Gyaos ruthlessly and with no regard for collateral damage. The whole district is left ablaze and between 15,000 and 20,000 people are killed or injured. (Although Osako isn’t among them, as we’ll discover later.) The government mobilises the JSDF to eliminate Gamera.

Moribe Tatsunari – the son of the family who are purportedly the guardians of the cave and own the land it’s on, and a classmate of Ayana – has persuaded her to return the stone she moved, but the damage appears to be done. On a return visit, Ayana finds a metallic magatama, a bit like Gamera’s but dark blue, that glows in her hand. Tatsunari finds her still in the cave later that day, cradling a small, tentacled creature with a dragon-like head that’s hatched from a calcified egg. She’s named it Iris and plans to raise it, believing that they share a mutual hatred of Gamera and that Iris will be the instrument of her revenge for her parents’ death.

Kurata, who used to be known as a computer game designer, has sent Nagamine a copy of his latest work, a global environment simulation. One of the parameters of the program is mana, a reserve of mystical energy. The simulation shows that a global slump in mana coincided with the appearance of Gyaos in 1995, and a further slump is now underway. Meanwhile, the number of Gyaos sightings around the world increases, with Gamera variously reported as clashing with the kaiju and with the JSDF. Asagi, who’s returned to Japan from studying overseas, meets up with Nagamine and tells her about the importance of mana to cultures across the South Pacific. She believes that Gamera’s consumption of mana in order to defeat the unexpected threat of Legion has further upset an already unbalanced ecosystem, leading to the revival of more Gyaos. Despite this, she trusts Gamera to solve the problem.

As Iris grows, it ventures out of the cave and into the nearby woods, draining the life out of the creatures there. Ayana finds it and, apparently recognising its magatama around her neck, it attempts to absorb her. Alerted by a phone call from her cousin when she doesn’t return home that evening, Tatsunari goes to the cave and finds Ayana unconscious inside a cocoon. He cuts her free and she’s hospitalised. In her absence, Iris wrecks the village and dessicates half the inhabitants, including Ayana’s aunt, uncle and cousin. It’s soon grown into its full adult form, which looks more bipedal and armoured, but still has several tentacles with large barbs on the end. Bright lights shine from its torso and behind its spiny headpiece, where its eyes should be. It makes whale-like noises as it strides through the forest, impervious to the JSDF’s attempts to stop it. Eventually it takes flight, stretching its tentacles out and using membranes between them as wings.

Initially believing the reports of the attack to be another Gyaos sighting, Nagamine recruits Osako and goes to investigate. Analysis of the tissue samples she takes from the cave suggests Iris is genetically similar to Gyaos but something new. She sees Ayana sleeping in the hospital and calls Asagi to tell her about Ayana’s magatama. Asakura and Kurata also hear about Ayana’s magatama and, realising the similarity to the publicly known details of Asagi’s connection to Gamera, they arrange to have Ayana moved to their own facility in Kyoto. Kurata separately meets with Nagamine and leads her and Asagi to where Asakura is watching over Ayana. Kurata believes that the Gyaos are a necessary counterbalance to a decadent humanity and that Gamera, as a vessel for the planet’s mana but flawed by his connection to humanity, is only getting in the way. Iris, with its ability to fuse with Ayana and adapt, would be an even more effective opponent for both Gamera and humanity. Asakura, meanwhile, as a former shrine priestess, is motivated by her belief that she should be the one to fuse with and control Iris.

Iris flies towards Kyoto, where Ayana is, while the Japanese air force mistakenly fires on Gamera and prevents him from delaying it. The centre of Kyoto burns as Gamera belatedly catches up with Iris and attacks it with fireballs. Iris spears Gamera with its barbed tentacles and the two daikaiju crash into Kyoto’s main train station, where the protagonists have gathered. Asakura and Kurata are both killed by falling debris. Tatsunari, who has made his way to Kyoto with Osaka, is just in time to see Ayana unwillingly reabsorbed into Iris. Cocooned inside Iris’ torso, Ayana relives her memories and Iris’ and realises that the creature has only been reflecting and acting on her own trauma and bitterness all along.

Gamera tears Ayana out of Iris’ body, but Iris retaliates by impaling Gamera’s other hand and draining his energy through its tentacle. Gamera blasts his own hand off to stop the process. Iris launches a couple of fireballs at Gamera, but Gamera is able to use the energy to generate a phantom substitute for his severed hand, which he plunges into Iris’ chest, killing it at last.

Gamera hands Ayana to the others and seemingly revives her. (Nagamine spends a minute trying to resuscitate her, but she only wakes up when Gamera roars.) As reports come in of a swarm of Gyaos approaching Japan, the JSDF is ordered to switch its attention from Gamera to the Gyaos. The protagonists, Ayana included, watch admiringly as Gamera strides out across the apocalyptic ruins of Kyoto to fight the incoming Gyaos.

After the attempt at a more “realistic” take on giant monsters in Godzilla (1998), Gamera 3 delivers all the realism you actually need in a kaiju movie. It has its overtones of mysticism and pseudoscience and a sympathetic daikaiju with a personality, but it also takes the time to acknowledge that Gamera’s outsized acts of heroism cause thousands of incidental casualties, leave cities in ruins and may not please all the survivors. This is the kaiju not as a stern protector but as a well-intentioned (we hope) natural disaster.

It's also a pretty grim subversion of Gamera specifically, who used to be a friendly face to children everywhere. There’s a moment after the clash between Gamera and two Gyaos over Shibuya when we see a weeping mother hugging her child, who’s avoided being trampled on purely by chance but insists repeatedly that Gamera saved him; we pan out from there to see the city on fire. It’s probably the single darkest joke a kaiju movie’s ever made.

Having Gamera’s enemy this time be essentially payback for the accidental deaths he caused in an earlier movie is a great choice. It’s astonishing, unprecedented in a kaiju movie. Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994) toyed with this idea but threw it away on two secondary characters who changed their minds at the end of the movie with hardly any development. Gamera 3 puts its vengeful character front and centre. And Iris is an effective analogy for Ayana’s anger, causing plenty of destruction and collateral harm itself and threatening to consume Ayana entirely. The other thing Gamera 3 does that Toho never quite could is present a distorted mirror of a popular lead character (well, other than Godzilla himself). Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995) teased but didn’t follow through on the idea of the telepath Meru as a less moral counterpart to Saegusa Miki. But there’s no mistaking the parallels between Asagi and Ayana, and no denying the dramatic efficacy. Once again, Daiei has belatedly schooled Toho.

Ayana is certainly a better human villain than Asakura and Kurata, who are too cartoonish. The motives for their villainy are never really explained clearly enough. We only know that they both want to see Iris win and Gamera fail, and even then probably not for the same reasons – he’s a nihilist and she’s some kind of cultist. At least Tezuka Tōru, playing Kurata, is having fun chewing the scenery. He can be seen behaving himself in a much smaller role as a government minister in Shin Godzilla (2016). Maeda Ai (Ayana) went on to greater things, mostly on TV, and cameos extremely briefly in a Godzilla movie four years down the line.

Once again, the special effects are exemplary for the genre, with a nice fusion of street-level action and monster business. Iris is more obviously computer generated than other contemporary daikaiju – well, how else to realise those tentacles? – which, by contrast, might make the CGI Gyaos a little subtler. One SFX moment I’d pick out as a favourite is the one in which, during the Shibuya battle, a Gyaos cuts through a skyscraper with its sonic beam but we only see it collapse as a reflection in a neighbouring skyscraper. As far as the turn to horror is concerned, there’s plenty of special prop business with the dessicated victims of Iris’ early attacks and an excellent jump scare when Ayana’s aunt flops out of the ceiling right in front of Dr Nagamine.

The end of the film was meant to be hopeful but is often read by critics and fans as downbeat, and no wonder, with the world apparently doomed to burn as the battleground for daikaiju who only notice we exist when it’s dramatically important. I’ve previously mentioned the unsubtle ecological subtext to those Heisei era Toho movies that feature Mothra, and the Heisei Gamera trilogy has gone harder on that subtext. It’s not as if awareness of ecological issues originated in the 1990s – people were talking about polar ice melting at least as far back as King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) – but it’s become one of society’s foremost concerns since then. Here again, Gamera 3 outdoes its American contemporaries for grim realism: Gamera may be humanity’s best hope for survival, but people are still going to die and cities are still going to burn. We can only console ourselves that it’s better (for us, at least) than the alternative.