by Dai » Sun Mar 26, 2017 11:03 am
I watched this again for the first time in a few years, and it never disappoints. Where G3 was a natural extention of the film-making style and themes of GOTU, G2 has always felt like a stylistic tangent for Kaneko. Normally, characters are the driving force of his stories, but Gamera 2 is essentially a docu-drama, making it somewhat unique among kaiju movies. The characters are imbued with Kaneko's usual eye for charming detail, but this is never their story, but rather the story of the situation they find themselves in, and how both humanity and Gamera work to understand and resolve it. This is taken to startling extremes in places. Unless I missed it, we aren't told the names of many of the main characters until at least 40 minutes into the movie, and they're rarely repeated. I don't think we're ever told what Science Chick's job is at the Science Centre, or where Soldier Guys fit into the structure of the military, since they're in the field long before the prime minister mobilises the SDF. Normally skipping these kinds of basic details would bother me, but here it just doesn't matter. By using shorthand for the characters, Kaneko is able to maintain a fast-paced bombardment of mysteries, problems, and the frantic search for solutions: meteorites, weird atmospheric phenomena, disappearing glass and fibre optics, murders, monsters, a giant flower growing out of a building, impending city-leveling explosions, and that's just in the first half hour!
Also, to weigh in on the much-laboured mana beam, I don't see that as deus ex machina. To me, the moment Asagi's magatama broke, that was Kaneko telling us visually, "Something has changed. The situation has escalated. The old rules no longer apply." It obeys the basic rules for one-shot final attacks, in that it takes time to charge, requires the user to remain still, and therefore requires the enemy to have been beaten down sufficiently to keep them in one place for a moment. Also, lets not forget that it causes Gamera's chest to crack open. That alone should tell you that it was an act of desperation, and not something he would use to dry his laundry.
Oh, and this was the first time I noticed that the train driver who gets murdered was Tomoro Taguchi, who played the main character in Tetsuo: The Iron Man. How did I watch this movie so many times and not recognise his trademark elastic expressions of horror?