"IT'S JUST FUCKING MANHATTAN!." - Friend of the show Milly
This was financed and executive produced by Sunrise as part of Gundam's 20th Anniversary, so it's part of the project.
I'm grading on the "cheap Canadian Sci-fi Channel production" curve here but it's actually pretty good!
There's the obvious, easy aspects to tear apart. The visual effects are embarrassingly poor for something made the same year as The Phantom Menace. The actors are mostly phoning it in and the ADR'd in lines are all extremely obvious. The audio mixing is so poor that a fan project to actually add closed captions to the DVD has to guess at what's being said far, far too many times. Yet, there's still enough of a real film production pipeline here that it still arguably looks better than the upcoming Hollywood Gundam project will. There's costuming made from real materials and some of the details in the cockpits are the sort of practical set construction which you truly don't get anymore. I watched every season of popcorn sci-fi television like Stargate. This is my home turf and it's nice to visit once in a while.
I think there's two aspects far more interesting to pay attention to: G-Saviour's place in the Universal Century and what a North American interpretation of Gundam's themes do to the sort of narrative it tells.
So, the Universal Century. Victory Gundam occurred in UC 0153. The Earth Federation was a crumbling disaster, rife with neglect and barely capable of keeping even its closest space colonies in line. As the UC ended its first, well, Century it seems a post-war baby boom never quite happened after Char tried to drop an asteroid the way it presumably had after the One Year War. Earth's slowly had time to heal. Not so by 0223! Increasing poverty and collapsing infrastructure are once again causing food issues which the very last vestiges of the Earth Federation are completely uninterested in resolving. Indeed, they're actively suppressing research on new agricultural techniques to allow a genocide by neglect.
If we assume the Universal Century began in the last 21st or early 22nd history of humanity, then the Principality of Zeon adopted the aesthetics of a brutal Monarchy (Prussia) which was 150-200 years old. In that light I think it's fitting that the CONSENT military has adopted the uniforms of The Titans 136 years after their own brutal terrorism. There's a whole new era of nostalgia for some of the biggest losers in political theory. It could probably be argued that whoever was in charge of costuming for this film saw a list of previous Gundam uniforms and picked the one they liked the most but art is about interpretation, damn it!
I remarked somewhere around F91 or Victory how the future of Universal Century fiction can't really continue to run bootleg Zeon-likes. The logical endpoints of the Federation's ongoing failure to meet humanity's needs mean it will inevitably either collapse into warring states or a revolution will occur. A North American perspective puts a fun spanner in the works here. Every breakaway state in prior works has been a nuisance (Side 6, put a pin here for when Gquuuuuux is finished), portrayed as worse off when isolated (Moon Moon) or actively dangerous to humanity (Zeon, Cosmo Babylonia, Zanscare). Now though? Isolationism makes you the land of the free! The home of the brave! We are meant to cheer on Side 8 (Side 8?!?) as noble underdog heroes for trying to be self sufficient! It's interesting to think about in the context of Hollywood working on a Gundam. G-saviour predates September 11 2001, the psychotic War on Terror and 25 years of fascist growth in the broader US culture. We may be on the cusp of witnessing a Gundam project grosser than SEED Freedom.
The general's death at the end is one of the greatest bits of campy violence in the franchise up to this point. If a Canadian made for TV production is too cowardly to recreate the deaths of Gihren or Kycilia, at least we can stare at the camera and yell "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" together.
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