That more or less sums up how I reacted to G-Saviour. While it's not really a good movie, it's not a bad one. And it's actually a good Gundam movie; it has excellent mobile suit design, it avoids the more painful tropes common to the Gundam metaseries, and the mobile suit combat inside the movie is actually very well-realized, better than that of most of the animated series, even the more recent ones. People move around and fire and die for reasons other than "inexplicably standing still in the middle of a fight" and even mook suits can take a surprising amount of beating to stop.
The CGI is pretty good for a 2000 movie, the acting isn't bad (with the exception of the Big Bad entirely phoning it in) and in the end G-Saviour's greatest sin isn't that it overstays its welcome, but that it probably could have used another thirty minutes for us to get to know the characters and to more fully incorporate the mobile suits into the story and world. Another editing pass at the script and few hundred thousand more to spend on the CGI, and this could have built up a following at the least.
As such, the exile-by-silence most Gundam fans and Sunrise have subjected this movie to isn't really something it deserves. The cast is more likeable than several of the OVAs or even a couple of the major series, the mobile suit combat is superlative, and if anything is wrong it's that it's not fleshed-out enough. It's far from being an abomination in the sight of man and God that it's often made out to be by Gundam fans.
Film G-Saviour, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the live-action.
"Everything went better than expected."
That more or less sums up how I reacted to G-Saviour. While it's not really a good movie, it's not a bad one. And it's actually a good Gundam movie; it has excellent mobile suit design, it avoids the more painful tropes common to the Gundam metaseries, and the mobile suit combat inside the movie is actually very well-realized, better than that of most of the animated series, even the more recent ones. People move around and fire and die for reasons other than "inexplicably standing still in the middle of a fight" and even mook suits can take a surprising amount of beating to stop.
The CGI is pretty good for a 2000 movie, the acting isn't bad (with the exception of the Big Bad entirely phoning it in) and in the end G-Saviour's greatest sin isn't that it overstays its welcome, but that it probably could have used another thirty minutes for us to get to know the characters and to more fully incorporate the mobile suits into the story and world. Another editing pass at the script and few hundred thousand more to spend on the CGI, and this could have built up a following at the least.
As such, the exile-by-silence most Gundam fans and Sunrise have subjected this movie to isn't really something it deserves. The cast is more likeable than several of the OVAs or even a couple of the major series, the mobile suit combat is superlative, and if anything is wrong it's that it's not fleshed-out enough. It's far from being an abomination in the sight of man and God that it's often made out to be by Gundam fans.