Motra-Leo vs. Dagara: Battle at the bottom of the sea After the successful first film, it is not surprising that two more sequels were shot. Based on the plot ideas of the great producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, who died in April 1997, Masumi Suetani composed a family adventure story about the underwater city and its mad monster.
The second film, unlike the first, became too simplified, received a vector towards adventure and a much more childish plot, full of comic absurdities and all sorts of nonsense, distancing itself from the serious motives of the first film, concerning both personal relationships and environmental problems. The topic of water pollution is raised here with a conditional dashboard and does not carry any driving force, and the conflicts between the characters are too fresh and conditional.
Sometimes the creators allow themselves several atypical moves, trying to attribute it to the development of certain characters (in particular, sudden good deeds for the villains of the film), but there are no prerequisites or any logic of events, which only strengthens the general confusion of impressions.
The script is definitely the weakest part of the picture. With the heroes, it would seem, lucky - now there are three children - a pair of school hooligans and an excellent girl, the teacher's favorite, forced to interact together, as well as two greedy fishermen subordinated to the evil fairy Belvera - such as "Fat and Thin", also going for treasures.
The fairies Elias will return, but the blue one will turn green this time. By the way, playing the fairy Mall in the trilogy - Megumi Kobayashi in addition to the pictures about Motra will star in "Gamer" 2006. And Mizuho Yoshida, who played here in the costume of the monster Dagara, will even be Godzilla in 2001, and at the same time another monster in “Deep Sea Monster Reigo”.
Speaking of the monster! If with the plot and most of its moves the picture is very unlucky, then the special effects here are just on top! The main antagonist monster, the ancient sea monster Dagara is a kind of mixture of a stingray and a dragon. It lives in the sea and is even able to fly. The last time the director of special effects was the great Koichi Kawakita!
And although outwardly he, of course, is inferior to the incredibly masterpiece Des Gidore from the first picture of the Haisei trilogy of Motra, the monster is still flawless! It causes terror and awe, looks like a living giant monster, which you believe throughout the entire viewing of the picture. Kaiju even gets to the surface, destroying cities - which was so lacking in the last film as one of the key genre attributes (perhaps the only serious flaw of Motra 1996), and in the end also mutates, though not so significant.
Motra-Leo receives even more abilities and weapons in the picture, and thanks to the power of the treasure, Nirai-Canai turns into Aqua-Motra - a kind of specific hybrid of an insect with fish - after all, we will have underwater battles, and as we remember Mom-Motra just drowned in the first film, a significant upgrade was necessary.
Improvements befell Garugara - a stunning gray dragon-cyborg, which flies an evil fairy. Her kind sisters still move on the Fairy Motra, the cutest variation of the butterfly kaiju. Well, an adult is still able to break up into a bunch of small and come together again.
However, there was a disaster with the scriptwriters and we are literally told on the screen of “Star Wars” – X-Wings against Ty-Fighters on the way to the destruction of the core of the Death Star. Only the action takes place inside the body of Dagara, giving rise to monstrous poisonous starfish, threatening not only Motra, but all of humanity.
Human characters are waiting for an adventure in a lost city, something in the style of “Indiana Jones”, only much more primitive and family, accompanied by an eye-eyed furry lump of Gogo, able to heal any wounds. It all looks too secondary, and every year a lot of these films are made for children. This against their background is distinguished only by the presence of Motra and Kaiju Dagara. However, such family movies are not so rare to include various monsters such as dragons.
The kids in the sequel play even more naturally than the siblings in the first part. There was just an emphasis on adult characters and their conflicts, and the concept did not depend on childhood – the same amulet could give not a girl, but a girl, and absolutely nothing would change. The second film openly makes more conventions, focusing repeatedly on children's characters, motivating this approach by the fact that the future of the planet depends on the new generation.
The ruins of the underwater castle, as well as its interior, are truly impressive. The film has both scope and a well-spent budget. Of the special effects, I especially want to highlight various kinds of light rays in shootouts between monsters, Dagara has so much weapons, perhaps one of the best among most genre representatives of such films.
However, it is possible to scold a number of rather hulking scenes. For example, the episode with a tornado is generally disgusting and tasteless, and the tornado itself in fact served only one purpose - to dress Motra with sea parasites-stars, rather than a natural disaster. Although the fact that Dagara is able to arrange whirlpools and sea tornadoes cannot but impress, successfully complementing his image of a monster.
Surprisingly, the underwater scenes here are not so much. The film maintains a competent balance between the earth, underwater and air - the variety of action is indescribably pleasing, while the characters with their running seem altogether superfluous, given the plot denouement with the treasure - the whole adventure looks like a meaningless attempt to pull screen time between the fights of giant monsters.
But to find fault with the children's picture, of course, is not worth it. Just the first film was many times more serious, it could hardly be directly called a family fairy tale, and the sequel was not expected such a strong simplification, a lot of conventions and simply excessive stupidity such as scenes with an unhappy cat is unclear for which category of humor.
It still looks like a picture in one breath. Such a movie looks many times better than the most children's kaiju-movi about Godzilla and Gamer, as well as any even more focused on the young audience such as "Daigoro vs. Goliath" and most tokusatsu-television series. Sequels generally infrequently surpass the first pictures, so it is obvious that the second “Motra” Hasay is much weaker and worse than the magnificent past of the film, and this does not negate the beautiful effects, beautiful music and relatively smart directing for the debutant in the genre.
Motra 2 combines a variety of battlegrounds, releases a monster into the city, presenting Dagara as a really dangerous and cool monster, from time to time drowns in plagiarism and parasitism of Hollywood, but still remains a pleasant for watching an entertaining film about the search for a lost city, a powerful treasure and an ancient monster. Quite a good representative of the Kaiju genre with memorable monsters.
7 out of 10
Original