Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999)
Okay, seriously... enough with the po-faced kaiju, alright? Your job, Mister Director-san, is to stick two big rubber monsters in the middle of a model cityscape and have them stomp everything to pieces while they tear each other apart. Profundity and social commentary simply will not work if you're making a movie about a giant turtle with fire breath and ass rockets battling a squid-bird thing. Something about a twenty-story flying turtle just drains the metaphor out of narrative, ya dig? So what we have here is a monster movie with as little monster as possible -- the city-leveling battles appear to have been tacked on after the filmmakers realized they'd made a movie with more talk than a Rohmer film. And even the scant whupass we're given is unsatisfying, since, in an attempt to one-up the previous two films, the filmmakers dreamed up a villain monster so overelaborate that it couldn't properly be realized with puppetry. So they defaulted to CGI to make the thing believable, but then that of course meant that to properly interact with Iris, Gamera had to be mostly reimagined into CGI as well... which means that we have a big rubber-monster movie which includes almost no rubber monsters. And who wants to pay to see two shoddily animated CGI monsters duke it out? Where's the fun in that?
Grade: C-
Okay, seriously... enough with the po-faced kaiju, alright? Your job, Mister Director-san, is to stick two big rubber monsters in the middle of a model cityscape and have them stomp everything to pieces while they tear each other apart. Profundity and social commentary simply will not work if you're making a movie about a giant turtle with fire breath and ass rockets battling a squid-bird thing. Something about a twenty-story flying turtle just drains the metaphor out of narrative, ya dig? So what we have here is a monster movie with as little monster as possible -- the city-leveling battles appear to have been tacked on after the filmmakers realized they'd made a movie with more talk than a Rohmer film. And even the scant whupass we're given is unsatisfying, since, in an attempt to one-up the previous two films, the filmmakers dreamed up a villain monster so overelaborate that it couldn't properly be realized with puppetry. So they defaulted to CGI to make the thing believable, but then that of course meant that to properly interact with Iris, Gamera had to be mostly reimagined into CGI as well... which means that we have a big rubber-monster movie which includes almost no rubber monsters. And who wants to pay to see two shoddily animated CGI monsters duke it out? Where's the fun in that?
Grade: C-
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