Guyver 2: Dark Hero

Review by Heckler King

In this extremely unlikely sequel Chronos is gone, leaving our hero Guyver with a lot of unanswered questions. Dreams prompt him to hitchhike to an archeological dig in Utah, only to learn (of course) that he isn’t the only one with a deeper interest in ancient history.

Sean Barker aka The Guyver (David Hayter)
Cori Edwards (Kathy Christopherson)
Marcus Edwards (Stuart Weiss)
Crane (Bruno Giannota)
Volker (Wes Deitrick)
Atkins (Christopher Michael)

Year: 1994
Censorship Rating: R (“for sci-fi violence and gore, and for language”)

Our film begins with some deep narration: “The Guyver unit. It’s been a year since the alien armor invaded my body and became a part of me. A year since I first became the Guyver and destroyed the Chronos Corporation and their shape-changing killers, the Zoanoids. Now Chronos is gone, but the Guyver stays in me, calling me to fight, to kill.”

So saying, for several minutes Guyver beats up a bunch of ethnically diverse drug dealers, but in the process an innocent security guard gets whacked by the leader. Hearing police sirens, he uses a laser beam from his forehead to write “Guyver” on the wall and take off (HK’s aside: I doubt anyone thought about this, but what kind of drug dealers need to rob the place where their shipments are dropped off in order to get their contraband goods?). He pauses behind a wall to switch back to his alter ego, which is good (because it reveals that Sean is now played by David Hayter, who does the “angst-ridden reluctant defender of humanity” schtick better than his predecessor), but also bad (because wouldn’t the cops be suspicious to see him wandering around the area where a drug shipment came in and several people were just killed by an apparently notorious vigilante? One of the cops remarks, “It’s him again” upon seeing his calling card on the wall).

Cut to Sean’s apartment where he wakes up from a nightmare of being trapped in a suit of half-formed Guyver armor. The next morning we see some news clippings pinned to his wall, “Mysterious Explosions at Kronos Corp. Downtown Headquarters; Fire officials suspect Arson,” and “So Called ‘Guyver’ Leaves His Trademark at Crime Scene.”

(HK’s Aside: Yes, it was spelled differently in the first movie. One of the chapter titles spells it “Chronos,” and the insert list of chapter titles spells it “Chronus”)

Sean watches a tabloid-style news show that talks about what might be a “werewolf attack” where two hunters in Utah were jumped by some kind of creature and one of them was killed. The other says their attacker was just like a cave painting found in a nearby archeological expedition. This grabs Sean’s attention because he’s been seeing images in his dreams just like the ones the hunter shows. Sean meets with Mizuki, who is distraught about all the people the Guyver kills. She can’t take all the weirdness anymore and they break up. Looking for answers, Sean hitchhikes to the dig site.

(HK’s Aside: You’d probably think that after taking this much time and effort to set it up, the “Guyver as an angel of death” business would be played up for the rest of the movie. It’s not)

One travel montage later, Sean is at a general store in the sticks. The gruff clerk refuses to give him directions to the dig, but a bespectacled woman asks what Sean wants at the dig, and he shows her the pictures he’s seen in his dreams. Like most people would, she leaves in a hurry. He follows her out--but not before taking the time to put his sunglasses back on (!!)--and pleads that he needs to know. She starts to drive away, then comes back and picks him up. “I’m a scientist,” she explains. “I know what it’s like to need to know.” She introduces herself as Cori Edwards (Kathy Christopherson).

At the dig, Sean questions Cori about all the security guards around, and she replies that they didn’t need them until the hunter broke in. Cori tells Sean to stay put while she looks at some new findings, but heeding a call only he can hear, Sean walks away once she’s out of sight. None of the people he passes react too much to someone they’ve never seen before wandering around their dig, even though it’s already been broken into once. He finds himself at a wall with three primitive pictures of Guyvers on it before Cori comes along and drags him back.

Cori introduces him to the big guys around the dig, her father Marcus (Stuart Weiss), who was arguing with operations director Arlon Crane (Bruno Giannota), about the money shutting them down if they can’t produce some remarkable findings soon, and Gus Volker (Wes Deitrick), the head of security. Cori passes Sean off as an archeologist “from state,” and he’s welcomed with open arms. Cori has a Bob show Sean around, and a thick-necked black guy watches meaningfully as they leave the room. Bob shows Sean a fossilized skull that Bob thinks is “some variety of pachycephalosaur.” Sean (and we, if we could stomach the first movie) recognizes it as a Zoanoid skull like his old enemy Lisker. Around here we learn that Cori and her dad are known among The Community for being mavericks when it comes to what they dig up. [UnSub's aside: Ahhh, antropologist's who live by their own rules and don't care what the Man thinks because they get results. Nice to know that it's not just law enforcement figures who behave like that!]

That night Sean and Cori have a bit of a clash over Sean not telling her his business at the dig, but are soon walking and joking. The hunter and a reporter are waiting around for the monster to show up again. Unsurprisingly, it does. Sean sends Cori to get help while he goes to “take care of the bear,” and is gone before she realizes what he just said. Naturally, it’s not a bear, but a Zoanoid. Cori gets Thick-Necked Black Guy, whose name we learn is Atkins (Christopher Michaels), and they round up a posse to help. The reporter gets killed, but Sean turns into Guyver and arrives in time to save the hunter. They fight for a while (with this annoying sound like a cat yowling whenever the Zoanoid throws a punch) until Atkins shows up and the Zoanoid retreats. Sean suits down (in plain view of the hunter!), and Atkins expresses some obvious suspicions about Sean. He puts a piece of hacked off Zoanoid flesh in his coat as they leave.

Later Sean follows Atkins out of camp and hears him reporting to someone via radio. Thing is, Atkins hears him sneaking around and confronts Sean. He tells Sean he knows “you got claws you ain’t showin’.” Sean realizes Atkins is with the government, but is saved from having his head blown off when Crane and Volker walk by. Somebody reports to a Chronos boss (who’s supposed be Guyot, a Chronos leader who was the main villain of the comic for a long time, but you’d have to read the credits and be a Guyver fan to figure that out) that although one of his men got out of hand, they learned the Guyver is nearby. Chronos Boss orders his flunky to bring Guyver to him.

While Sean sleeps the lumps on his back pulsate and a wall cracks somewhere nearby. At breakfast he asks Cori what kind of fossils they’re digging up, and notes her answer is word for word what Bob told him before. Cori tells him “everybody knows what we’re digging up,” but can’t let it get out until they have all the answers or someone’s bound to steal the results.

Elsewhere the workers find the crack and behind it find a wall that feels like leather but clangs like metal. Marcus orders everyone to assemble. He thinks this is the big find they’ve been looking for. One excavation montage later (which includes Marcus estimating the object’s size based on the cave paintings. Yeah, I bet cavemen drew to scale a lot), most of a bulbous shape has been revealed, Sean saying to himself, “It’s a ship!”

Later the crew is partying to celebrate the acquisition of the ship, but rather than get down, Cori is in her tent analyzing a sample of its coating. She goes looking for Sean, who’s still looking at the ship. She gets all swept up in the rapture of finding proof of alien visitation, but the biggest thing, she gushes, is that the ship is organic. “Imagine being able to grow a machine! No more dirty factories, no more pollution!” Sean replies with a smirk, “Now I know why they call you an outlaw. You haven’t even stepped inside and already you’re saving the world.”

Cori: “What can I say? I’m an optimist.”
Sean, suddenly all angst-ridden again: “I wish I could see the world like that.”
Cori: “We’re, um, missing the party.”
Sean: “I’m not missing anything.”

Gee, could they be Falling in Love? [UnSub's aside: Either that or he's starting to scare her with his emo-ness.]

Outside, some drunk security guards stumble past, and Sean (somehow) realizes that Volker was the Zoanoid he ran into the other night. Cori walks into the main party tent for a second, allowing Atkins to show up and again demand answers from Sean about what he knows about Chronos. Atkins tells him Chronos wasn’t destroyed in the last movie, only one branch of the worldwide outfit. “We found breeding tubes and blood samples, but never any bodies.” I know guvmint spOOks are far from the brightest greed of movie archetypes, but couldn’t he try to get these answers somewhere other than right outside the tent where the whole crew is right now? Sean explains to Atkins about the Zoanoids, but stops when Cori comes back (see what I mean?). Atkins threatens to arrest Sean if he doesn’t tell him the rest right then, but Sean flippantly asks “Here?” and walks away with his inamorata. “Kid, you gotta get your priorities straight,” Atkins says to his back.

The next day the crew tries to cut their way into the ship, but nothing works until Sean does his impression of drinking six bottles of Mountain Dew and a hole opens in the side. After some safety checks they go in to look around, with Cori and Sean naturally paired together. Cori observes, “it’s beautiful,” although I would’ve said it looks like the nest from “Alien”. Sean once again wanders off on his own and finds a room with a silver ball in the wall. He tries to talk to it, “You called me here, aren’t you gonna say something?” When it doesn’t, he gets frustrated, “I want my life back!” Cori finds a new dormant Guyver with a cracked Control Medal (the silver ball in the middle), but Crane takes it off her hands, and she doesn’t get it when her dad doesn’t try to stop him. Cori proceeds to get all whiny like her favorite toy’s been taken away, and I guess she doesn’t watch a lot of movies or she’d know that people with lots of money are always evil. A female flunky tells Crane what she overhead Sean saying to the ship (she probably had a name, but it was never given on camera, and everyone was acknowledged by character name in the credits, so I can’t tell you who played her).

Sean meets Cori and tells her all about Chronos and Zoanoids and Guyvers and how she’s in horrible danger, and Atkins listens in through a bug he planted. Cori does a 180 and rebukes him for bad-mouthing the only people who’d put up money for the dig, who two seconds ago she thought were evil incarnate just like he does. Cori, as most people would, thinks he’s nuts (“I trusted you not to be crazy!”) and stalks off. She goes to talk to Crane, but overhears him reporting to his boss who tells him to terminate all non-Chronos personnel and pull out. She realizes Sean was being square with her but is caught by Volker. She’s loaded into a jeep and driven off the site to be quietly killed.

Sean walks around looking for Cori, but hears a chattering noise coming from the cave and follows it. Crane meets him, tells him “we’re both its children,” and turns into a Zoanoid, but appeals to Sean for sympathy. He claims that he and the others just want to be normal again, and promises similar salvation for Sean with the technologly in the ship. “We can take the Guyver out of you. We can make you normal again!” Sean claims they’re killers, not him, and refuses, only to be knocked out by Female Flunky. Crane lets out a good ol’ Maniacal Laugh.

Elsewhere, the jeep with Cori and the guards is suddenly stopped by a bug-like Zoanoid who orders her to run. Bug Zoanoid flips the jeep over, but since this serves to put the guards off-camera, they emerge changed into their own Zoanoid forms, saying, “You shouldn’t have interfered, Marcus!” before they start mopping the forest floor with him. At the site, Atkins rescues Sean and tells him reinforcements are on the way. He tries to question Sean about the Guyver, but when he hears Cori’s been taken away Sean elbows him down and runs off. He hears Cori’s screams for help echoing out of a valley, so he Guyvers up and jumps down to help. Guyver has a pretty good fight with the two evil Zoanoids (although it never occurs to them that if Guyver keeps ducking underwater to evade them maybe they should move out of the pond they’re in) and cuts them to bits, but Cori manages to stop him before he kills Daddy Zoanoid.

At the site, Female Flunky tells Crane that Sean escaped, but Crane is sure he’ll be back. A security guard has the innocent crew members held at gunpoint (standing close enough to invoke Ken’s Rule of Guns) and preparing to terminate them when government troops storm the camp and take Crane, Female Flunky and a security guard captive. Sean and Cori have a heart-to-heart and confirm their love with a kiss. “It’s every woman’s dream to be rescued by a knight in shining armor,” she says, “even if he wears it on the inside.” Sean tells Cori to find some place to hide out while he goes back to the site and takes care of business, but she insists on coming. “My father’s back there, I’m not leaving him.” Huh? Wasn’t he just with them?

Atkins’ troops get the panicked workers out of the camp, but are unable to turn up the fourth Chronos mole, who naturally slaughters the three or four ineffectual government troops. Sean and Cori sneak into the cave to blow the ship to keep it out both Chronos and the government’s hands. Cori does the required bit about its scientific value, but changes her tune when she sees a dead worker nearby. Topside, a Lisker-type Zoanoid brings back the bodies of Atkins’ men, and Atkins himself is captured. Crane gets a call from his boss, who is upset that they haven’t brought him the Guyver yet. Given one last chance, Crane starts eying the Guyver unit they took out of the ship.

While they wire up dynamite, Sean hears another call from the ship and goes inside, and realizes that he needs to be the Guyver to hear what it has to say. He sees psychic visions of other ships landing on prehistoric Earth, cocoons holding Zoanoids, cavemen becoming the monsters, and the first Guyver. He sees a destroyed ship, and the others taking off. He leaves when he hears Cori calling for help, as the Zoanoids have found her. They’ve brought Atkins along, for whatever reason. Crane sends his boys into the ship to find Guyver, only for them to come flying right back out off his fists. Crane threatens to kill Cori if Sean doesn’t suit down, but Marcus shows up and, understandably piqued that Crane is willing to kill his child, changes into his Zoanoid form and attacks. Time for the final battle royal.

A bunch of things happen, but ultimately the bad guys are on the ropes; Atkins tries to shoot Female Flunky only to learn bullets and empty plastic buckets don’t work on Zoanoids, but zaps her back to human form by shoving her into the generator and THEN shoots her, Guyver kills Lisker-type Zoanoid and another nameless bad guy, Crane beats the juice out of Marcus, and Cori shows some (momentary spunk) by stabbing Crane with a pick axe. Crane kills Marcus by impaling him with a pipe, and Guyver turns his attention to Crane, but Atkins has bad news. He stumbles in with the case the confiscated Guyver was kept in, which is now empty. Crane yells “Bio Morph!” and changes into a Guyver-Zoanoid (the design obviously based on Guyver III).

Guyver warns Crane that the unit is damaged (he twitches and sputters), but attacks Guyver and with his combined powers owns the fight. At one point he does this weird thing where he runs toward Guyver on his hands for little apparent reason. In the course of the fight Guyver tells Crane that the Zoanoids are an experiment run out of control, a mistake the Guyver was created to fix. In spite of this Crane keeps winning until Cori gets Atkins’ gun and her spunk back, and shoots him right in the Control Medal. Without it he starts to melt until Guyver blows him away with a massive laser blast from his chest.

His enemies put to rest, Guyver mutters, “Out of control.” That’s what “Guyver” means in alien language. He reveals that the ship told him the opposite of what he said before; the Zoanoids were the aliens’ successful project, the Guyver was what didn’t work the way they expected. Humans were meant to use Guyvers to fight the aliens’ wars but couldn’t be controlled. Hence, “out of control.” This is in line with the original backstory, but makes you wonder what the point was of Sean telling it backwards before. “The Guyver’s nothing more than a weapon. I have no destiny.” Cori will have none of this from the man she loves, even if he wears his armor on the inside. “You made your own.”

Atkins congratulates Sean and says with relief that finally the weapons on the ship will be “safe with the government, where they belong.” “No, that’s not where it belongs,” Guyver replies. His Control Medal extends out, and the cave starts to shake. The three of them make it outside just as the ship shakes free of the mountain and blasts off.

Atkins is all mad at the loss of the ship, probably imagining the reaming he’ll get from his Evil Government Bosses. He asks for Sean’s help, but Our Hero is more interested in getting some action than bothering himself with stopping Chronos world domination and drives away with Cori. In spite of it, Atkins smiles with what might just be respect as they drive out of sight, and whispers, “See ya around, kid.” I’m not exactly sad to say that “Guyver 3” happened despite the implication here.

If you read my review of the first “Guyver” movie, you probably noticed that I was a bit dissatisfied with the results. It takes a rare kind of filmmaker to mix the contrary elements they tried to combine and produce a satisfactory product, and all those filmmakers were apparently busy with other projects. Much to my relief, the second time around they realized most people who would watch a movie about the Guyver might expect faithfulness to the source material (speaking of which, the first disc of a new “Guyver” anime has recently been released outside Japan. Please stop reading this review and go buy it. Thank you.).

Which isn’t to say just because they made the film dark and gritty like they should’ve in the first place, it’s any masterpiece. As I pointed out, the issue of the Guyver forcing Sean to kill is introduced and then all but forgotten, making the “Dark Hero” subtitle problematic. The pacing is also slow, since the whole first hour of the movie is mostly set-up for the action extravaganza that makes up the rest. Again, I’m not sure what the director was going for having Sean reverse his story about the aliens when he tells it to Crane. And finally, Sean seems perfectly happy to claim his Hero’s Reward and let the world look after itself in the end, even though he’s learned the enemy he thought was destroyed is bigger and more powerful than he ever imagined.

I don’t know what else I can say about this movie; David Hayter turns in a good performance and it helped take the bad taste of the first one out of my mouth, but at the same time I was sort of glad so few American live action versions of anime get made (especially ones with yet more messages about how we can’t trust the government). I cringe to think what the hyperbolic live version of “Dragonball Z” might have been like. “Guyver 2: Dark Hero” ends up being an adequate movie, and not much more.

Like I said, thematically the movie’s finally where it needs to be, and the backstory behind all the monsters running around is mostly correct. It even has Guyver 0 for a little bit, and draws pretty faithfully on a recognizable early battle from the comic for its climax. If I could believe the protagonist of “Guyver” would ever break up with Mizuki, this would be almost seamless.

Definite improvement over the original, but has enough problems of its own to keep it from being great.

Luckily, “Guyver 2” has no screwball moments, but there are a few pseudo-cool/actually bemusing things, like the role reversal of Guyvers and Zoanoids, so there’s still some cheese to be had.

Date of review: 08 January 2007