When Youtube proposed me a Gundam movie, I thought "bah what's the worse it could be? Gundam is awesome." And I put the movie on while I did something else (playing Shadowrun Online and editing Rhym).
The basic story deals with the Earth Government trying to hide a new discovery that could allow for undersea farming. From there, the plot takes us to space. This is very much in the feel of a Gundam story. One thing I like about the Universal Century Gundam story (which this claims to be) is that you can usually find that both sides are at once right and wrong. Many feel Zeon are the good guys in this. But the same can be said of the Earth government. In short, both sides are the villains. Not here, there is clearly a "good side" and a "bad side", although with a bit of thought, you could say that the main characters are acting as and helping terrorists, the manichean split is so obvious, the only wrong thing the "terrorists" do is attempt to steal the result of an experiment, unarmed, in secret, to use it for a positive result.
All the elements are present to make this a decent offering, it hits all the stereotypical Gundam scenes and tropes. So let's actually review this.
The movie was B A D, and not Sharknado bad (as in so bad, you can't help but chuckle), but just bad (as in you would never write a full review for this unless you promised yourself you would write one that says more than "it sucks"). The kind of horrible, bad stories where the movie takes itself seriously, with the crew thinking they are doing a good job of it.
They did not. For the longest time, the movie has the actors talking together about the issues of the world, which we do not really care about.
The infantry is dressed in outfits taken right out of the Starship Trooper franchise. I mean STRAIGHT out of the ST wardrobe.
I sat there waiting for some MS battles, holding against hope that they would at least redeem the movie a little and I could say "those battles were cool". They were not. The CGI was chunky and the MS moved in unnatural ways. It was just bad. Bad. Bad. The fighting did not feel like a video game... Which it could have... It should have, and it would have been significantly better.
Story: The story is bland and generic. Granted I watched it to see some MS battles, not see how scientists could create undersea agriculture. I will give this a 2/5. It hit the tropes and assured the basis but did not introduce any new element that would make us view the universe differently.
Characters: The characters just felt caricatured and poor copies of existing ones. The actors really wanted to feel as if they were in an action flick. The ruler of Side-8 felt real because his role was not to convince us that he was awesome. At no time did I ever believed that the leading lady was a scientist, she was eye candy (and good at it) but not a scientist. A 2/5 being generous.
Animation: Perhaps the biggest flaw of this movie. It would be a b-movie to Dino-crow vs. Sharktopus The model look the part, but they do not move right. Just horrible. 1/5
Overall: This movie is a 1/5. While it hits all the tropes, it is tired and reheated. I could not wait for the end.
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