After enjoying a number of my recent kaiju watches I have to say that this week hasn't been great. I watched this film, as well as one other that I am preparing to review for next week's schedule, and spent almost the entire runtime wishing that I was watching a better instalment in this series.
With a number of early scenes that are more reminiscent of Lassie than anything else, a bunch of people are trying to move a large statue when they are given some aggressive fly-by action from Gamera. Puzzled by Gamera's behaviour, they nevertheless keep going. Once moved, the statue is found to make a constant sound, and that sound ends up bringing Jiger, a large creature with an array of built-in weaponry, such as prohectile quills and a stinger in her tail. Oh, and this is all happening as Japan prepares for the Expo '70 about to be held in Osaka.
With Niisan Takahashi back on the writing duties and Noriaki Yuasa back in the director's chair, there's no reason for this to be as bad as it is. Maybe others love it, and there are one or two memorable moments (including a sequence that has some children going inside Gamera to help revive it), but the whole thing just felt a bit lazy and dull for me.
While human characters are usually the least important element of most kaiju movies, the entire cast here feels quite redundant. I could tell you about Tsutomu Takakuwa, Kelly Varis, Katherine Murphy, Kon Ohmura, and Junko Yashiro, but I'd be in trouble if you asked me about their main contributions to the film (aside from Takakuwa, who plays young Hiroshi). That would be fine if that kaiju acton was up to scratch, but it isn't. It all feels as if people are going through the motions while being restricted by that Expo '70 setting, which is basically what happened. Board members had forbidden any destruction of the Expo '70 buildings, and having monsters fight amongst buildings that can't be destroyed is a bit like having Rambo looking at a bunch of deadly weapons he cannot equip himself with in a tooling-up montage.
Maybe I'll revisit this one, and maybe I will enjoy it more if it catches me in a better mood. I don't know. I certainly wasn't in a bad mood when I pressed play on it, which makes me suspect that the film itself just soured me throughout most of the 83-minute runtime. It feels overlong, and is the wrong amount of silly without being the right amount of fun, but I'm happy to hear from anyone trying to convince me that I am not giving it enough credit. There's still just enough here for me to find individual moments I liked, but they're stuck in a feature that I really didn't care for.
4/10
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That one is pretty weak. I hope the Expo 70 people got their money's worth.
ReplyDeleteThey must have. Otherwise there's even less reason for this one to exist.
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