ver 20 years ago, the first animated Mobile Suit Gundam TV
series aired on Japanese TV, where it flopped and was canceled. Much like Star Trek, it rebounded in film form after fans mounted an enthusiastic write-in campaign, and it
eventually spawned a massive tree of spinoffs and tie-ins, including the popular series Gundam Wing, miniseries like Gundam 0080 and Gundam
0083, and many, many more. In 1999, Gundam production house Sunrise teamed up with American production company Polestar to create what they dubbed the "Gundam 20th Anniversary Project": G-Saviour: The Movie, the first live-action version of Gundam.
G-Saviour takes place in Universal Century 0223, after the ever-controlling Earth Federation has been broken up and replaced by the Congress of Settlement Nations (CONSENT). In spite of the changes, the conflict remains much the same: Earth still wants political and economic control over its space-borne satellite settlements, or Sides.
In G-Saviour, ex-CONSENT military pilot Mark Curran (Elliott) is unexpectedly caught up in the conflict when rebels from Side 8, a space settlement called Gaea, invade the undersea research center where he works. Mark is present when one of the unarmed rebels is gunned down by a team operating under his cartoonishly evil ex-commander, Jack Halle (Lovgren), and he intervenes to keep another rebel (Okuma) from being killed as well.
Later, he interrogates her in prison, and learns that her name is Cynthia Graves, and she's a Gaean scientist whose top-secret collaborative project has been threatened by CONSENT's interference.
From there, Mark is pulled into a conspiracy that involves repeatedly bucking the will of CONSENT, fighting his predictably mercenary girlfriend, Mimi (Conti), throwing his weight around among the Gaeans, and generally acting like every obnoxious yet sincere action-movie hero ever. And along the line, he also has to face his traumatic past, in the form of a career-crippling conflict with Jack, whose callousness in a critical situation made Mark unwilling to go back into space combat. Not that he'll have much choice, once things start getting dangerous and CONSENT shows its
hand.
More cartoony than the cartoons
Fans of the Gundam universe protested when G-Saviour first aired on TV in 1999; they noted that the movie had little to do with established Gundam history and chronology, and didn't even use the word "Gundam" to refer to its giant robot battle-suits. But at least non-Gundam fans won't find G-Saviour's plot hard to follow. Its central storyline is childishly simple, much like its unnuanced characters.
Jack Halle in particular is a cardboard Nazi who can be counted on to pick the most evil path at every crossroads. It's not clear whether he's motivated by personal hatred of Mark, the xenophobic pride that so often controls Gundam characters or just blind servile ambition. Nor does it really matter; he exists only to glare menacingly and make sure bad things happen to good people. Mimi, who goes from proprietary girlfriend to supervillain so quickly that she leaves burning rubber in her wake, is just as shallow, but much harder to swallow.
And Mark, as a standard-issue hero who plays both the Luke Skywalker and the Han Solo roles in Gaea's outnumbered-and-outgunned rebellion, isn't much better. Most of G-Saviour's characters are off-puttingly generic. Its themes and much of its execution are too reminiscent of Star Wars, and its production values make it look like a decent episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, with occasional odd technological throwbacks to the Battlestar Galactica era. The acting is generally unexceptional but not strikingly bad, although Elliott and Okuma both occasionally seem self-conscious and on the verge of turning to stare at the camera.
But one thing might draw Gundam fans and neophytes alike to G-Saviour: the CGI Gundam suits, which are brought in every 15 minutes or so to pique viewers' interest. (A scene in which a suddenly un-traumatized Mark hops back into the Gundam saddle to clear some space debris is very pretty, but notably gratuitous.) Inevitably, the suits clash in a pitched space battle, which includes fleet-on-fleet action as well as individual energy-sword fighting. The combats give Polestar's CGI division a lot to work with, and they respond with a number of too-brief, eye-catching scenes. But the robot suits are far more three-dimensional than the pilots operating them, which overall makes for a flat and unexceptional movie.
