Rating: 3 Stars
The following review contains spoilers.
Overview:
It’s been a year since Sean Barker bonded with the Guyver unit, and since then he’s been going out as a vigilante at night and killing criminals, feeding the Guyver’s insatiable need for combat and death. Sean doesn’t consider himself a killer, and the experience has worn him down. One day he sees a tabloid TV show talking about a werewolf attack in Utah, also showing some related cave paintings discovered nearby. These paintings perfectly match images Sean has been seeing in his dreams, so he concludes the werewolf marks the return of the Zoanoids from the last movie and hitchhikes his way to the scene.
There, Sean meets Cori Edwards, an archeologist investigating the cave paintings. She takes an instant liking to this clearly deranged person and brings Sean down to the site and puts him on the team. Unusually, their dig has heavy security and is funded by a mysterious corporation (gee, I wonder who that could be?). Despite a brief tangle with a Zoanoid in the woods, and a confrontation with an on-edge (and vaguely described) “government agent” Atkins who has also infiltrated the team, Sean mostly focuses on working on the dig and his budding romance with Cori.
Soon, one of the workers finds what they were all secretly hoping to find: an intact alien spacecraft. Inside, Sean pleads with it to tell him why he’s here and how he can go back to normal, while Cori stumbles upon a second Guyver unit, which is quickly seized by Crane, the on-site rep of their corporate backers. Things escalate quickly from there, with Cronos (dang, so it was them!) ordering the workers eliminated now that they have a Guyver unit, and Agent Atkins bringing in more “government agents” to defend the workers and seize the Guyver for themselves. Cori is, of course, kidnapped by Zoanoids, and there’s a big fight in a small pond.
In the end, Sean convinces Cori they must destroy the spaceship, as despite how amazing a find it is and its implications for humanity and our entire world view, Cronos and the government will only see it as a source for more weapons. More Zoanoids converge on their location, there’s another big fight, and Cori’s father (also a Zoanoid!) is killed defending her. Crane merges himself with the second Guyver unit, but it was damaged somehow making him unstable, and giving Sean and Cori the edge they need to defeat him. Finally, Sean realizes that, as the Guyver, he really can talk to the spaceship, and so instead of destroying it, he tells it to fly on home. It seems our boy Sean has finally come to terms with being the Guyver, and he and Cori drive away together in her truck, off into the sunset.
Best Parts:
I liked placing the story at an archeological dig site in Utah. It felt like something different, and I just enjoy archeology plot lines in movies generally. It also felt like a relatively genuine setting, and so while maybe it isn’t exactly how a real site like this would be run, it was close enough to it for movie purposes.
The costuming continues to be very strong, especially for this type of low-budget-ish production. The way some of the faces of the Zoanoids, especially Crane’s “Creature from the Black Lagoon”-looking one, were animated was impressive. Good set design in the caves and the alien ship, too. An overall nice-looking film. At one point my attention was starting to flag, and then suddenly we had an extended flashback to Guyvers in cavemen times, which was so visually weird and interesting that it woke me right up.
Some good fight scenes. It’s all very Power Rangers, but not in a bad way. They were entertaining and inventive. In the final scene Atkins has to kill a Zoanoid on his own, while Sean is busy fighting the rest of them, and they found an effective way for him to survive and do it without making the Zoanoids seem weak.
Worst Parts:
The acting is not great, and keeps the whole thing really feeling like a low-budget movie, despite its other qualities. At one point Sean gets emotional talking with Cori and has to turn away and lean his elbow against a tree and emote directly into a waiting camera, and it’s all very silly.
I think I would’ve liked it not to have just been Cronos again as the baddies, though the reveal that the Cronos Sean thought he destroyed was just “Cronos L.A.” and that of course they have other branches was a funny one.
Sean sure is good at compartmentalizing. He realizes early on that one of the members of the dig team must be the Zoanoid that has already killed a few people in the woods, and then he takes no follow-up action. Immediately back to business as usual, waiting for them to kill again I guess.
Why are the Zoanoids so obsessed with getting the Guyver unit anyway? They say it’s the ultimate weapon, and yet also seem to believe they could easily take one out if they had to, as they never shy away from attacking Sean in his Guyver form. It feels like with all their resources they could come up with an even ultimate-r weapon than the Guyver.
If Cori’s father was a Zoanoid, does that mean she’s a Zoanoid? Is that how Zoanoids work?
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