Gamera the Brave [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Rather than the usual deep as a puddle storylines in your monster movies, this one goes for something with a bit more heart to it and it works really well. Awesome set-pieces and use of practical effects. CGI used sparingly and effectively. A budget film, but beautifully shot. That's all there is to it, great family action film.

I loved it! Great fun and just the right amount of old school cheese in it.Don't expect it to win any Oscars, but on its own, great entertainment.D

The trilogy before this were all good, old-school Kiaju movies. But the first half of this is much more as if Disney had made a film about a young Japanese boy, his small gang of friends , and the adventures they have with his unusual pet. That pet being a magic turtle, that can fly and breath fire..Another way i can try to explain the difference between this and previous films is through their use of a specific cliche early on. In this, there hasn't been a monster attack in many years. So anyone who suggests that mysterious events might be caused by monsters is, of course, ridiculed for suggesting such things. Then surprise, surprise, it turns out they were right all along. Who'd have thought it? My point is that in the previous films, that tired old cliche would have been an extra laugh. But here it's just cringe-worthy. Even the effects here are different and a bit more Disney-ish somehow. Gameras flying was hysterically funny and "b-movie" before. Now even that looks like something straight off of a children's TV channel..There is also a bit too much of the young boys splashing each other with water, playfully trying to pull each others trunks off, and laying on the floor together damp and out of breath after physical exertion. If Disney didn't wish that they'd made this film, then Jimmy Saville or Johnathon King certainly would have liked too..That aside, this film is much less like Godzilla, and much more like The Goonies. Which i hate with a passion..It's not until a full half way through this that we get what we came for, big monsters fighting. But sadly, this only looks even more like it's made to be a film for little kids than the rest of it already has. And it only gets worse afterwards..So i have to admit that 55 minutes in i started just skimming through the rest of this film, looking for any bits that might be worth watching. I didn't find any..The three films before this were all great fun, and even classics in their own way (to me anyway). But this is the very worst, pandering, generic sack of **** possible. And if it is meant to be a film for little kids, then how are any of them going to understand any of the references to past events in films that were not child friendly, and are at least 8 to 10 years older than this is?!.

Opting to reboot the series completely rather than continue the more adult late 90s series directed by Shusuke Kaneko, 2006's family friendly Gamera the Brave incurred much fanboy anger and was a surprise box-office flop that killed off the series of planned followups, but in truth deserved a much better reception than it got. Rather than resolve the unsatisfying cliffhanger ending of 1999's Gamera: The Revenge of Iris, it goes straight back to the series' glory days both in tone and, initially, chronology, beginning as a sequel to the 70s films with Gamera self-destructing to save a Japanese coastal town from a flock of Gyaos back in 1973 while a young child watches. Moving forward 30 years, that grown-up boy now has a son of his own who finds and adopts a baby turtle that doubles its size every night and can fly...It's very much a classic boy and his dog story, or in this case boy and his flying fire-breathing turtle story, and that may have been part of the problem at the box-office. Rather than questioning the nature of the genre or taking the odd political sideswipe along the way between big setpieces, it's more of a well-crafted, old-fashioned approach: where Kaneko's trilogy ended with the bond between Gamera and humans mysteriously broken, this is a film where Gamera saves humanity and children save Gamera in a finale that's surprisingly much more affecting and stirring than schlocky. It's a long time before baby Gamera grows to anywhere near his full size and it's about halfway through the movie before we finally see his new opponent, the dragon-like sea monster Zedus. There's a lot less action or the big monster smackdowns than you might expect and which many kaiju audiences would have wanted, yet despite that the film doesn't disappoint. It's surprisingly well directed (by Ryuta Tasaki) and acted by both children and adults alike, and it's the kind of children's film that's made with enough sense of everyday reality for adults to get engrossed in as well. The film's reputation has been gradually rising over the years after the initially disappointed reception and it's not too surprising: the film never looks cheap, the special effects are for the most part exceptionally good, the baby turtle irresistibly cute, and it's easy to enjoy and hard to dislike.Tokyo Shock's US DVD release is a decent package, offering a very good 2.35:1 widescreen transfer with multiple subtitled Japanese and dubbed English language soundtrack options, a couple of TV spots, trailer and a 37-minute How to Make a Gamera Film lecture by the director.