GLIMPSE

It's been roughly a decade since Godzilla's last substantial big screen sighting but the King of Monsters isn't above the odd cameo appearance. Back in 2007, this imaginary sequence from Takashi Yamazaki's Always: Sunset on Third Street 2 - itself a post-war nostalgia piece based on a best-selling manga - was rumoured to be a kind of backdoor pilot for a new Godzilla film. Yamazaki was keen to keep the monster rooted in the Showa period, using CG and miniatures to recreate the sights and sounds of 1950s Tokyo. Obviously a fan of Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, Yamazaki leans heavily on Shusuke Kaneko's kaiju mise-en-scene, utilising both his satanic Godzilla design and the director's ground level point of view.

Gamera 3: The Revenge of Iris

Gamera 3: The Revenge of Iris starts incredibly strong. Shusuke Kaneko and Kazunori Ito concoct a first act that functions like the last, confrontational, word on the entire kaiju genre. We're not in a fantasy land of last minute evacuations, Gamera doesn't pivot and contort during battle to shield puny humans like he did in Gamera: Guardian of the Universe. When the jet-propelled turtle faces a gang of winged Gyaos over Shibuya there is a human cost. Every step brings calamity. Subways cave in, commuters are vaporised. Even the bubbling mulch of Gamera's vanquished foes ends up flattening a gang of boozed up bystanders.

Gamera is given a makeover to better tally with this imperfection. He's no longer rounded and cute, instead he's spiky. His head is small and brutal like a snapping turtle, his neck ugly and elongated. We're primed for a dour, realistic take on fallibility of gigantic saviour Gods. Unfortunately these thematic ideas don't really inform the ebb and flow of the film. Instead they're consumed to serve the character arc of a sullen little girl. Ayana lost her parents and her cat when Gamera strode through the building they lived in. His actions aren't excused, he isn't thrown into the building by an enemy's attack, he's just, in that moment, oblivious.

Understandably, Ayana detests Gamera. When she discovers the egg of an ancient tentacled God, postulated to be Gamera's opposite, she forms a symbiotic relationship with the creature. This then becomes the film's focus - Gamera and his effect on the world is subordinated to concentrate on two characters whose motives are, at best, remote. Their hatred isn't a burning, maniacal drive, it's a simmering constant expressed through evasive eye contact, ultimately discarded when Ayana finds herself out of her depth. Compounding this disappointment are the numerous asides about Gamera being elsewhere, participating in a more exciting film about an apocalyptic extinction war with armies of prehistoric bats.

Gamera 2: Advent of Legion

Gamera's problem is that he doesn't have a pop. He lacks a memorable roar, a pounding, foreboding theme tune doesn't announce his every appearance. Gamera's appeal is a little less obvious. He isn't a show-off, he's a stocky mid-card scrapper that soaks up punishment and fights like hell. This humble approach to world saving informs the tone and reflects the slighter budget of Daiei's films. So while we don't get the sweeping majesty of a moving mountain bumbling through a minutely detailed recreation of the Tokyo skyline, we do get a screaming, bleeding turtle covered in tiny, razor sharp crustaceans.

The basic thrust of Kazunori Ito's script delivers on misleading American publicity for Godzilla vs The Thing, namely a heroic monster fighting an alien interloper that threatens to consume our world. Gamera 2: Advent of Legion matches the gigantic turtle against multiplying alien drones and their airborne crab queen. Both title creatures take a beating. Shinji Higuchi's team roll with the carnage, dreaming up majestic new modes for the shredded pugilists. Two films deep, it feels like the strength of the Heisei Gamera cycle has been a lack of expectation at a conception level. The Godzilla films of the period started off strong with new, vivid enemies, but got bogged down in repetition when the box office wasn't busted. Gamera succeeds through modesty. His films don't have to be the year's biggest earners, they just have to be solid monster movies. Toho was obviously taking notes, Gamera 2's influence is all over the Millennium Godzillas.

Gamera: Guardian of the Universe

Gamera: Guardian of the Universe lacks the pomp and circumstance of similar Godzilla cycles. For a start the title character isn't regarded with paralysing religious awe. Despite clearly acting in mankind's best interests, Gamera is treated as an irritant by Japan's political elite and their Self-Defense Force. When large reptilian birds named Gyaos are discovered on a remote island, the fleeting opportunity to trap them and make some theme park money is scuppered by the arrival of the titular jet-propelled turtle. It's not until the Gyaos begin cannibalising each other to create an alpha example that Japan gets on board with its half-shell hero.

Shusuke Kaneko keeps this Gamera clipped and crisp. Basic unstoppable force machinations are flavoured with short, shocking calamity. Aside from a mid-air action finale, the stand out sequence is the attempt to capture the infant Gyaos. Cattle carcasses are piled up to lure them to an empty baseball stadium. Once the birds begin their feast, the military plan to close the retractable roof and tranquillise them. It's an elegant solution to more modestly sized, and budgeted, monsters. Gamera doesn't need to fabricate fantastical sci-fi gun platforms to challenge these new threats, its world instead has a reasonable, but realistically fallible response. Shinji Higuchi's special effects landscapes are also scaled to monsters much smaller than those seen in contemporary Godzilla films, better able to stress the idea that something horrible and alien has infected this environment rather than simply trampled it.

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack

Not since 1954's Godzilla has The King of Monsters been such an irredeemable force of annihilation. Gamera: Guardian of the Universe director Shusuke Kaneko's sole contribution to the Godzilla series is an apocalyptic royal rumble tinged with world-shredding terror. People don't simply flee from this devil beast, they limp away to dark hospital corners to shiver and convulse at the sheer horror of his existence. Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack doesn't just contextualise Godzilla as an irradiated dinosaur, it presents the monster monarch as a physical manifestation of misery, powered by the tormented souls of the Pacific War dead. His enemies are a trio of Showa beasts, working together as the guardian spirits of Japan. That's Japan as a natural, physical space rather than a country. The landmarks and people that have sprung up all over the archipelago are of supreme irrelevance to these kaiju.

GMK features redesigns for all the major players by fellow Gamera alumni Makoto Kamiya. Undercard scrapper Baragon, inherited from Ishiro Honda's Frankenstein Conquers the World, is leaner and meaner, while Mothra is changed from a glittery butterfly into a cross between a camouflaged jet fighter and a wasp. Her personality is likewise adjusted. The passive peacekeeper becomes an aggressive irritant armed with an abdomen that can fire explosive flechette. Ghidorah is granted multiple physical forms, ranging from a stout, ground attack lug to a celestial gun platform. Godzilla himself is given the biggest overhaul. The coral spined slasher from the last two films is gone, replaced by a more obviously reptilian beast. In deference to his irradiated origins, this Godzilla also looks pained and swollen.

This Godzilla's chest appears smaller than usual, accentuating his neck and bloated undercarriage. His milky white eyes suggest both disease and a seething, satanic power. He's clever too. There's not an attack staged he doesn't anticipate, then counter. Disregarding the light continuity of the two previous eras, the Millennium series has instead riffed on the situations and themes of Ishiro Honda's original Godzilla, with each one approaching the idea of a definitive sequel differently. GMK is the most literate yet. Shusuke Kaneko plays with the prehistoric mysticism lightly stressed in the 1954 film, whilst also accounting for the Utopian spirit of the instalments that followed. Kaneko's command of the material is such that he is able to move seamlessly from scenes of absolute carnage to runtime swamping wrestling sequences without missing a beat.