#gamera 3 revenge of iris

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

[moviecinepelis]

[artblooger19moon]

Gamera Movie Marathon

Gamera the Giant Monster / The Invincible

Gamera vs Barugon

Gamera vs Jiger

Gamera vs Guiron

Gamera vs Zigra

Gamera vs Gyaos

Gamera vs Viras

Gamera Super Monster

Gamera Guardian of the Universe

Gamera 2 Attack of Legion

Gamera 3 Revenge of Iris

Gamera the Brave

[thezanyarthropleura]

March 6 (1999)

Happy 24 years to Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris, the third film in the Heisei trilogy.

And if you know anything at all about Gamera movies, I probably don’t need to tell you this one is good. Like, not just ‘I enjoy it’ good, but objectively good. Of course, like with anything, opinions will vary, but this film is generally regarded as one of the best Kaiju films of all time – and along with the rest of the Heisei trilogy, genuinely good movies without even considering a preference for ones with monsters in them.

But what I’m going to talk about is the fact the three most important human characters in this film are women.

No corner-cutting, no "Asagi is the most plot-important but these other two are the male leads” like we get with Guardian of the Universe, if you are looking for a male lead in Revenge of Iris, you’ll have to either pick the minor villain who gets crushed by a building, the comic relief guy who gets a serious arc but is absent for the climax, or the kid who gets tentacle-slapped out of the grand finale. Or Gamera, I guess.

Our main character here is villain protagonist of sorts Hirasaka Ayana, a dark mirror to the child-bonds-with-Gamera concept that has been explored in various ways throughout the films prior. Having lost her parents due to Gamera’s fight with Gyaos four years earlier, and having subsequently suffered abuse at the hands of her aunt and uncle, Ayana walks down a dark path of vengeance with the aid of a juvenile kaiju named Irys (Iris in the subtitles and some versions of the title) whose origins are… never really clear but we get a few options. Also never really clear is whose negative emotions are corrupting who, or if it’s a little of both, but the end result is a roaring rampage of revenge against Ayana’s abusers up-to-and-including Gamera himself, leaving a trail of destruction that Ayana can’t put a stop to even once she realizes she wants to.

Re-joining from previous entries in the trilogy are Nagamine Mayumi, the ornithologist whose experience with the first Gyaos aids in studying recent attacks by a new Gyaos subspecies, and Kusanagi Asagi, whose previous bond with Gamera draws her into the investigation of Ayana’s similar bond with Irys. Inspector Osako (aforementioned comic relief guy) also returns and completes his minor arc throughout the three films of overcoming his cowardice and returning to investigative work, and his reunion with Miss Nagamine is genuinely touching, both in the film itself and with the addition of several deleted scenes that expand on their conversations. The pair’s team-up is brief, however, and Osako’s purpose throughout the rest of the film is simply to get Moribe into the right place at the right time to get tentacle-slapped out of being able to do anything important.

Instead, the focus of the latter part of the film is the intergenerational team-up of both major female protagonists from the first movie in the trilogy, who never once said a single word to each other in that entire film but are now, four years later, actually getting to meet and bond and put their wits and resolve together to help save a young Ayana from both Irys’s ill effects on her mind and the efforts of a pair of human villains to use her to bring about the apocalypse. Gamera is, of course, the true hero in the end, but the two women’s concern for Ayana is made the driving force of the narrative, to the point that unlike in the previous films, the military and government take a backseat and a lot less time is spent going over the science of how to stop the monster of the year.

The one male character that even makes it to the final plot-important moments of the film (Moribe, after miraculously recovering from being tentacle-slapped out of his hero moment) feels like a complete afterthought and a shoddy attempt to imply a future romance. Right before he wakes up (long after the action is over) and rushes over to comfort Ayana, there’s a shot that lingers on Asagi and Miss Nagamine gently helping Ayana up by the shoulders after she’s been revived, and that really feels like what the core of this movie is.

…Oh, and there’s also giant monsters, I guess.

Gamera has a dark, spiky, edgy design that heralds his return to a destructive, semi-villainous entity like in the 1965 original, however this time it���s explicitly an ‘ends justify the means’ scenario wherein he’s laser-focused on destroying the Gyaos as quickly as possible to prevent even more death in the long run. Gyaos gets the cool, wyvern-like Hyper Gyaos redesign and there’s a neat special effects shot that’s unfortunately very easy to miss, wherein one of their sonic scalpel beams cuts the Shibuya 109 tower in half down the middle (on the first 3-4 watches I mistakenly thought it was a continuity error and the tower was destroyed twice). Irys has the single-glowing-eye-set-deep-inside-a-skull look for the head, and is certainly a subscriber to the wisdom that the best superpower of all time has already been invented, and it’s Doc Ock tentacles. There’s notably less overall monster action in this film than some others, but what’s there is a very impressive mix of suits and CGI that, except for maybe one or two broad daylight scenes, holds up well to this day.

This film’s ending is often a point of contention, giving us an apparent cliffhanger showing hundreds or perhaps thousands of Hyper Gyaos converging to attack Japan right before the credits roll. To clear it up, Gamera wins, according to authorial intent, and whatever reservations one might have about Shusuke Kaneko as a director, the film also implies this by its tone – we end on an announcement that the military will join forces with Gamera to fend off the attack, while Asagi and the others make clear his determination and that he won’t be alone in this fight. It’s a triumphant moment, not a bleak one, and IMO, a perfectly fine ending to a movie and a trilogy.

Jumpscare warning for some very brief but horrific scenes where we see the results of Irys killing people by draining them to withered, skeletal husks. Also, minor squick warning for one scene where it looks an awful lot like some consensual, but very non-platonic tentacle stuff is about to happen, although after seeing how the English dub handles this part and consulting other readings of the film, I’ve concluded that the scene where Ayana starts unbuttoning her shirt collar and says “Iris, I’m so hot…” right after Irys has evolved from juvenile to teenager form, is actually meant to imply her body is literally overheating from the bond and she is beginning to feel physically ill. Whatever the case, the scene cuts away and all we’re later told happened is that Irys attempted to merge with her, something a fully-grown Irys tries to do again later in the film.

Overall, it should be easy to guess that this film is extremely high on my list of favorites, although competition for the top spot is very fierce as you’ll see when we get to a few of the others. Only real drawback is that it is a tinge dark and loses out some on the ‘fun’ factor because of it. And just because it’s part of what I look for in a fandom, shippability takes a hit here because I just haven’t been inclined to seriously ship anything from this film alone, mostly because the age differences between the three main characters are all just right past the point where it starts being down to personal comfort zones. I’m not entirely opposed to Asagi/Nagamine since they’re both adults here and the film focuses on that as their dynamic, plus Nagamine is meant to be especially young in her field per a conversation in GoTU. Adding in villains and side characters, Nagamine/Asakura has potential since they’re set up as rivals early on, I wouldn’t say I’m quite on-board with the whole “redeem the religious zealot child kidnapper” angle but I can see an Asakura who survives the ending left directionless and with shattered faith. And I guess you could always add insult to injury and ship Ayana with Moribe’s sister instead of him, they seem like they could’ve been friends if Moribe wasn’t always getting in between them.

(I would also endorse the idea of some kind of AU/rewrite/reboot/remake that casts Asagi and Ayana as same-aged childhood friends, with a friends-enemies-lovers arc that leads to a direct Gamera-vs-Irys face-off with both of them bonded at the same time. Having them be true mirrors to one another, with a personal conflict over Ayana’s parents’ deaths and Asagi’s faith in Gamera, is really this big, obvious idea the film put on the table the moment it introduced Irys, but could never do anything with because Ayana wasn’t part of the original plan for the trilogy and had to be worked into a universe where Asagi was older and her bond with Gamera already broken.)

[as1llydino]

Another clip with improv roaring from the Gamera 3 documentary

[chernobog13]

Gamera during his final showdown with Iris in the Kyotō Station in Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999).

Like Atami Castle in King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962), the new Kyoto Station was only a couple of years old (it opened in 1997) before it was destroyed in the kaiju battle.

[jasonheichel]

Monster March 2024 29. Gamera (1999)

[madamshogunassassin]

Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999)

[rassilon-imprimatur]

Fun Gamera vs Gyaos and Gamera 3 references in Gamera Rebirth!

[eclecticpjf]

Now watching:

[seacavepuzzle]

Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999)

[indragonsaur]

Monster march 2023 day 20: Irys

[bens-things]

Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999) dir. Shusuke Kaneko

[thezanyarthropleura]

Some thoughts on Gamera, Noriaki Yuasa, and Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris, 25 years later.

(Final thoughts below the cut if you want to skip the fic)

So the story goes, in 1999, Noriaki Yuasa, the leading director and self-proclaimed father of Gamera throughout the Showa Era, attended a screening of Gamera 3: Revenge of Irys alongside Shusuke Kaneko, director of the Heisei trilogy. Despite Yuasa’s criticisms of the tone of the 90s films, the two got along well, until Gamera’s destruction of Shibuya halfway through the film, at which point Yuasa stood up and left the theater.

I don’t know if Yuasa ever saw the film’s ending before his death in 2004, nor could I speculate what his opinions of it would have been – and if there’s a film I wished he’d lived to see and judge, it would’ve surely been Ryuta Tasaki’s Gamera the Brave in 2006, which excised much of the dark tone of Kaneko’s films but continued and codified the idea of using Gamera to address real childhood trauma and grief, something Yuasa’s films hinted at only a few times and never seemed able to commit to.

But as a fan looking back 25 years later, I can’t help but wonder if Kaneko, who once described Gamera 3 as a film intended to answer the question Who is Gamera? had hoped Ayana’s rescue during the final confrontation might have swayed Yuasa’s stance on his films and his shepherdship of the character. In my mind, when seen in context Kaneko’s Gamera is not a rebuke, but a reiteration and perhaps an evolution of Yuasa’s. The Gamera that rose from his injuries to plunge a hand into Irys’s torso may as well have done so with googly eyes, a toothy grin, and the classic theme song blaring.

[as1llydino]

Watching the recently translated Gamera 3 documentary and omg there was improv roars during the filming

[chernobog13]

Gamera in the Kyoto Train Station for his final battle with Iris.