Anyways, I watched G-Saviour and never commented on it. I should do that. G-Saviour was a 20th anniversary Gundam movie. Live-action, made in Canada. I can hear you screaming "NOOOOO" already. Hush, children, while I tell you about it via a fixed-up breakdown of my thoughts as I posted elsewhere.
The opening pan of the movie shows us...a colony cluster, in visual range, with individual colonies ACTUALLY ROTATING. And you know, I've waited my entire Gundam fan existence for this shot. It was ****ing worth it, late '90s CGI or not.
But then we get what I swear is a lost opening to a SeaQuest DSV episode, and honestly that's a crossover I could get behind. Nathan Bridger and Bright Noah teamup. Plasma torpdoes, 50% charge, let's bust some Z'Goks.
Apparently I shouldn't say that, as what I presume to be our main character is piloting what seems to be a cross between a Z'Gok and a JIM suit. Honestly it doesn't look bad, and I kind of like it. (Seriously though this whole underwater sequence I'm waiting for like the edge of the SeaQuest to poke in or a WHSKR to sneak through the background of a shot. This is so SeaQuest-like it hurts.) After our obligatory opening action scene the movie continues briskly through introducing who I presume will be our villain and also...
...****ing really? Those Starship Troopers armors? Those have been in everything. They were on Power Rangers for chrissakes. Also come on man, you're on Earth, don't tell me you don't know about the Antarctic Treaty and how it deals with surrender.
We get a flashback/nightmare to when our protagonist piloted mobile suits in combat presumably, but it doesn't last. Now they're on land, and a scene with his girlfriend, and a party, and then an interview, and then somebody kills a prison guard and blames it on our lead and then our people go down the chute from the morgue and land in a pile of bodyparts and medical waste and this scene should be way the hell bloodier and they should probably freak out a little more. Yes, he's a vet, but he's a mobile suit vet. That's a little cleaner than being line infantry, y'know?
Incidentally, this has more black people in it than probably the entirety of the rest of the Gundam franchise.
More people show up, resistance types I guess, also interns for the doctor. The uniforms of the faction in charge of Earth are a weird kind of half-Zeon half-Feddie thing, they've got the Zeon little "bib" part outlined in gold braid, but not actually separate, and the Federation's red collars, but they're navy blue or black overall because Nazi Germany I guess.
And now we get a mobile suit on the move again. Two of them. They're moving fairly slow, but it's not a bad scene if they're at a walk. It also demonstrates, contrary to the usual claims about this movie, that the suits involved are actually more advanced than Mobile Suit Victory Gundam-era ones. These suits may not have panoramic cockpits or Wings of Light or crap, but they ARE capable of atmospheric flight under thruster power alone AND can survive reentry without complex mode-changing systems. The former is something only a few UC suits, mainly modified Goufs, ever achieved. Even the Victory had to cheat with its Minovsky systems. The latter is something only expensive transformation system-equipped ones managed, but here the average mook suit can.
As for the suits themselves, they look surprisingly like a GINN from Gundam SEED, and as for the scene of them in motion I'm heavily reminded of the FMVs for MechWarrior 4 as well.
The shuttle design for the shuttle our characters hijack, on the other hand, looks awful and moves too slowly.
The colony shot of Side Four's New Manhattan makes up for it, and now we get...
IT'S A GUNDAM. They called it the G-C or something, though. And now our villains are putting on the Reich extra super special hard. Our protagonist got drummed out of the army for saving one of his buddies when their suit malfunctioned. Honestly the whole thing sounds pretty stupid, it was apparently an open-space rescue during an exercise, there was no logical reason to order him not to save the guy. It was apparently done out of sheer dickishness.
And now they call it G-Saviour. Okay movie, titular suit's first flight. Impress me.
...The cockpit impresses me as actually looking way more like I'd expect a cockpit to look than any other Gundam cockpit. He's got a beam rifle, plus a gun on the other arm. Beamsaber too, not sure where it's stored.
Side Eight, Gaea, interior of an Island Three, bloody gorgeous. The colony's been hacked, though, and it's the girlfriend's fault, so the colony's anti-debris defense systems are responding to a baddie destroyer as a valid target. Frankly that we've never seen a colony with these before doesn't bother me since it makes sense they'd have 'em. The destroyer is hit, but it doesn't look too bad on the surface. The bad guys are happy about it now since they've just got an excuse to send in the mobile suits.
Main character discovers girlfriend is pulling a Katejina and getting the whole colony killed just so she and him can go home and live happily ever after. Well, it was Gundam, I suppose it had to have SOME moment where a woman acts crazy and irrational.
Wait, is that Starbuck powering up a mobile suit? Holy crap, this movie's heavy on the crossovers. Okay, Gaea just launched mobile suits. They look...pretty GM-like, honestly. They don't look bad. And scratch several. They don't die like GMs though. They're completely ineffectual at first; outdated, not professional pilots; or at least not professional combat pilots. It's not as curbstompy as Gundam Unicorn could be, because despite their failure to score kills not too many of them are actually dying and a lot of them are still their dogfighting when the G-Savior deploys. Most of them that die, maybe all, seem to be the result of the primary villain's direct action. I should also note that very few people just take a hit and explode in this movie; it takes repeated hits to stop even mook suits a lot of the time.
And now we get the primary villain's suit. We're running a little Alpha Azieru, a little Jagd Doga, and a little Sazabi. It's not a bad look, really.
The G-Saviour finds your mass-production models crunchy, and good with ketchup. A couple of GINNs (not really but they look it) invade the colony and interpret their orders to "secure the settlement" as "shoot up random ****", while Betrayal Girlfriend continues to Betray.
I refrained from calling that a beam shield, it seemed ephemeral, but apparently it was. The bad guy definitely has one. So now we get down to it, and for one of the few times in Gundam history, we have a reason why the good guy accepts a beamsaber duel: bad guy cut his gun in half when he went for a "block with the shield, shoot him" technique.
And our climatic duel will, in fact, take place on a colony mirror. And the big bad's historical reference is incredibly stupid. (Caesar? Selective starvation? What?) One of the GM-alikes actually gets a kill here, in the background. Guess they're learning fast Bad guy has...shoulder vulcans? They seem very widely spaced, like they're on the shoulder tips. Okay that's new. Bad guy suit doesn't die, just gets cut up; multiple hostiles turn up only for friendly reinforcements to arrive as well.
The general big bad takes a Gaean ship because he's dumb, and doesn't tell anyone BECAUSE HE'S REALLY DUMB. We get a nice fight inside the colony with the G-Saviour having converted for atmospheric flight briefly, but it's over way too soon.
Big Bad does Big No, gets killed by own side BECAUSE HE IS ULTRA DUMB.
Trite wrapup.
So, that was G-Saviour. What's my opinion on it?
Within the confines of the budget, they made a good movie. The complaints I've usually heard about its mobile suit action are bluntly garbage; no, the suits aren't animated slowly, we simply see them move slowly in a few noncombat scenes early in the movie. When it comes to the actual combat later on, they move relatively quickly yet with enough weight to preserve the idea they're giant robots.
The movie has a surprisingly quick pace that serves it well by giving the audience no time to dwell on its faults. It lacks focus on the mobile suit aspects, which is to its detriment; they're some of the best parts of the movie. The actors' performances are not perfect but they are far better than might be expected from the movie's reputation, with only the Big Bad (played by veteran character actor Kenneth Welsh) turning in a genuinely poor performance. At least part of that is simply because he's very badly explained, switching from seemingly-reasonable to Jamitov-is-my-role-model about midway through the movie for no adequately explained reason and to little purpose. It didn't add much. We could have just had the colonel be evil on his own.
The effects were genuinely pretty good for a 2000 movie, and the mobile suit design is genuinely excellent; a good, solid gut-check towards mobile suits looking like giant war machines over the tendency to visually busy and durability-questionable designs more recent series have tended to drop at times. (Or all the time.) The battle scenes are actually much better realized mobile suit combat than many of the animated series were probably capable of, with a real sense of motion and plenty of maneuvering. Nobody stands still and gets shot; they take hits because they didn't evade, but at the same time they're not just sitting still and getting blasted either like in most of the anime series. They're moving around and firing and engaging targets, and one of this movie's crowning triumphs is the fact that most of the people who take hits and die do so for an immediately obvious reason besides "they're a complete moron and not moving"; they were staring into the sunglare and didn't see it coming, they were chasing another target and got bushwhacked by someone outside that fight, or they were just way too outclassed on every level.
So is this a good movie? Not really. It's got a lot of little flaws that collectively weight it down. I've only mentioned a few, but there are others: the main character comes off as a bit of an impulsive asshole, though more likable than most. The villain is decidedly one-note and spouts cliches at odd moments; the big bad is just bland and has issues I already noted. The lighting team decided they needed to add some effects to certain scenes they never should have. The movie is arguably too fast-paced, edited down, and could have benefited greatly from another thirty minutes both to get to know the characters and to more fully integrate the mobile suits. The mobile suit concept is badly integrated into the movie and has relatively little screentime. This is undoubtedly because CGI was expensive as balls, but still, this movie originally was fully backed by Sunrise Studios and god knows they probably could have afforded more.
Is it a good Gundam movie? My answer to that, to my surprise, is
yes, this is a good Gundam movie. The mecha design is good, the main characters are likable enough and manage to avoid all the usual Gundam protagonist tropes that tend to infuriate people, the details it adds to the universe are coherent to what exists and seem positive additions. Despite the paucity of mecha combat, what we do get is of a high caliber; the only other stuff with fights this good are
some of the combats from 0080 and 0083. I understand why people would wish to exile it from the canon; plotwise and tonally it has only Zeta for company, and a lot of the expected Gundam tropes are either not present or played very differently. But change is not necessarily a bad thing, and in the end, I don't think this movie deserves the exile from canon it's been subjected to. I'm not sure where it would fit, but it's far from the abomination in the eyes of man and God it's often made out to be.
