A successful re-imagining of Daiei's Gamera franchise for all the right reasons
I have this film to thank for making me a fan of the tokusatsu daikaiju genre in Japanese cinema. If it wasn't for the 1990s Gamera reboot (or even 2013's Pacific Rim, for that matter), then I probably would've never discovered the joys of giant monster movies in general, with monsters destroying buildings, fending off military forces and, of course, fighting against other monsters.The film's plot goes as follows; our radioactive toxic waste dumping leads to the awakening of malicious vampiric-avian creatures known as the "Gyaos" from a millennia of hibernation, ancient villainous life-forms that now want to cause the total extinction of the entire human race. Lucky for us, a heroic Atlantean-made organism called "Gamera", a friendly airborne-terrapin monster whose sole purpose in life is to stop these bloodsucking birdie-brains dead in their tracks, is also reawakened from his centuries long slumber to help aid humanity.
In regards to the latex rubber suits and lavished miniature sets, the sophisticated quality of special-effects on display in this is vastly superior to any of Toho's efforts with their Godzilla films throughout the early '90s. I mean, the insane amount of attention to specific details on not just the elaborate monster suits but also the extravagant miniature locations as well is so staggeringly good that it's almost unbelievable. It's very clear to me that the talented team of effects artists really put a lot of time-consuming hard-work into making sure every single practical-effect looked and felt as tangible to the human eye as possible (for the time, that is), which is something I highly commend them for doing.
I'll admit, the human characters are never the best part of these kaiju movies, but the ones in this film aren't actually all the bad personality-wise and they were pretty relatable (some of them even had genuinely amusing comedic moments). There also seems to be a little influence taken from E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) when it comes to the young teenage girl character Asagi, as Gamera and her share a sort of spiritual connection with each other, which is almost identical to the mental link Elliot had with E. T..
Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) may have been the first Japanese monster film I ever watched, but Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995) was the one that showed me that a Japanese monster film could indeed be a competently well-made masterpiece and not a laughable guilty-pleasure (and by the way, I think we're all in agreement when I say the plot-structure to 2014's Godzilla was completely stolen from this much BETTER film).
score 8/10
walkingwithprimeval 7 November 2019
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5241306/35541
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