Garuda



Garuda (2004) is a Thai monster movie that’s been getting some buzz among kaiju (giant monster) fans, mainly because of a trailer that’s been online for a while. I got the DVD from Thailand and watched the movie last night, and I was a little surprised that the title monster isn’t giant at all. It’s about 15 feet tall. My impression that the monster was larger came from some of the Thai promotional material, which apes the 1998 Godzilla’s posters, and from certain images in the trailer. By the end of the movie the monster does grow wings with a huge wingspan (about 70 feet, I’d guess) but the body remains about the same size.

In a prologue that isn’t really needed we see Dr. Pierre, a French archeologist, make some kind of discovery in a cave on the India/Pakistan border in 1975,  just as the Pakistani army comes rolling through and bombs the open desert for no reason. The cave collapses, killing Pierre’s assistant. Pierre escapes with just a small stone claw as evidence of his find.


"Either that, or the animal that killed these people was a chicken!"

Thirty years later Pierre’s half-Thai daughter, Leena (Sarah Leigh), tries to get permission to excavate in Thailand. She’s looking to prove her dead father’s theories that some ancient birds evolved into anthropomorphic forms. Her request is refused, mainly because she’s half-French and the Thai prefer their bird-people to be gods, not regular animals.

Later, Leena and her friend Tim (Canadian Dan Fraser) are recruited by some soldiers, led by Col. Toschai (Sornram Theppitak), to look at a large rock that was found while excavating a subway tunnel. Leena and Tim pretty much determine that it’s a rock, and then the soldiers blow it up and tell Leena and Tim they’re prisoners so they won’t see what’s on the other side, which really made me wonder why those two were brought in at all. They're locked up in some kind of abandoned room that I guess is left over from the construction work. Before long they escape, because we need some likable characters to be menaced by the monster.


"Polly wants a cracker... or else!"

On the other side of the rock is the last resting place of a mythical bird-man called Garuda. This particular team of soldiers is made up of experts on fighting supernatural creatures, though pretty much all they do is shoot in random directions when scared. An electrical mishap revives the creature and for most of the movie the soldiers are stalked through various corridors, caverns, and tunnels by the fast moving Garuda. At the end the monster breaks out to the surface and terrifies the city of Bangkok, mostly by picking up cars and dropping them.

The Garuda monster is a great design, and most of the shots where they who the monster are pretty good CGI. This was obviously low budget, so there are lots of repeated shots, and a lot of monster-vision is used to save money. Director Monthon Arayangkoon has obviously studied many monster movies -- maybe too many, because there's very little original in this movie. Perhaps the most amusing steal is a knife fight between one soldier and the monster that features effects and editing straight out of the The Matrix (1999).


"I'm the Thai Keanu Reeves!"

Beyond the monster, though, things get shaky. The acting is uniformly bad. Sarah Leigh is darned cute, but she can't act at all. She just bites off all her lines in the same whining tone, and when she actually starts whining late in the picture most viewers will begin bleeding from the ears. Dan Fraser is there strictly to be the white guy, suggesting that perhaps the makers of Garuda had an international audience in mind, but I'll get back to that. The main character and default love interest for Leena is Col. Toschai, but Sornram Theppitak projects no personality at all. Nobody is helped by the script, which is a melange of monster movie cliches, with a few arbitrary plot twists thrown in.

Will this movie get distribution in the United States? I kinda doubt it. It's surprisingly racist. Leena is constantly preaching tolerance towards other people. However, she is always wrong whenever she advances a theory about Garuda, and she's always wrong because she's trying to prove her French father's theories. In other words, being half-Thai is a disability. Meanwhile the only completely non-Thai character is Tim, who is cowardly and selfish throughout the film. It's also tough to shake the feeling that Toschai gets to be Leena's love interest solely because he's Thai, mostly due to Theppitak's failure to provide any characterization to explain why Leena might be interested in him. Beyond the main characters, supporting characters are constantly saying disparaging things about "farangs" (Caucasians) and "Yankees." It's generally a bleak view of Thai attitudes, and I doubt it would play well outside that country.

Posted: Fri - July 30, 2004 at      

©