Gamera 2: Attack of Legion

I really wasn't feeling this one, which sucks as this was hyped as the best thing since Gojira '54. The pacing is just awful, very little happens for a full hour apart from humans talking and a few scenes of Gamera pushing over flowers and getting fucked up. And what was with the fucking freeze frames? Still, it has a darker tone, Legion is a vast improvement on Gyaos and the final showdown is decent, but it doesn't justify the build-up.

Hm.

Again this has a very solid structure & is a major improvement on the already impressive effects of the first one. The big Legion creature is truly an amazing creation. The story however brings very little new to the table, the human characters feel universally underdeveloped & the subtext of faith (already pretty thin from the outset) is reduced to shallow bombastic imagery & sloppy writing. I found it hard to stay fully engaged between or even during the superbly crafted monster fights.

The GOOD: The Kaiju Action is awesome! The monster suits are fantastic, Gamera looks better than ever. The direction, cinematography and miniature work during the monster scenes is really spectacular. Seeing the monsters from ground level with so many foreground elements really works to create a sense of scale. The BAD: The human characters failed to capture my interest, and the film is overall thematically lacking.

Wow what a spectacular movie. The battle scenes are some of the coolest I have seen in a movie like this. The fights with the large Legion are just super stylish and cool. They seem to have either directly influenced or been influenced by anime at the time. Really cool stuff. Gamera has a new look and I think it's much better than the first of the trilogy.

I liked the Legion as villains because they really proved to be formidable against Gamera. Since most were human sized, I thought they would have used that so you have more Man vs. Monster instead of the same old Man vs. Monster vs. Other Monster. I also wished they had brought back more of the characters from the first movie instead of these new people I could care less about. Not the most worthy sequel, but I did love how they brought Gamera to his limit. Nice environmentalist touch.

Gamera gets hardcore with an edgier look, downpours of gore and total destruction of major cities. This one gets off to a quick start and doesn't stop moving till the end.

I prefer Gamera: Guardian of the universe, but still well worth seeing (IS there such a thing as a bad Gamera movie? Hell I even liked Supermonster!!!)