G-Saviour

What does it take to get a statue built for someone? Admiral Nelson helped England win the battle of Trafalgar and he got a five metre statue on top of a big phallic column. Voytek the soldier bear is having a two metre one built in Edinburgh. And they were war heroes. How much does it take to have a statue built at eighteen metres high?

It takes a Gundam mobile Suit that’s what!

“But Jack, you handsome man, what is a Gundam?” I hear my less geeky readers asking?

Gundam is a series from Japan about the horrors of war, the hardships of duty and the inevitable loss you experience when battle blazes around you…

With giant robots!

The series has been running since 1979 and by the looks of the 60 foot tall statue over there it’s still going strong after thirty years. When a young couple asked if they could get married under the statue, you’d think they were just a couple of geeks who wanted a special wedding, right?

They were the only couple out of five hundred applicants who got the chance.

Five hundred couples? That’s one thousand people about to be married who wanted to do it at the feet of a giant robot. And in case you hadn’t noticed… Five hundred of them were women!

So how is it that it’s so completely unknown outside Japan? How is it you haven’t heard of it? It can’t be possible for you to be really that boring… I mean, you’re reading this aren’t you!

Bandai tried to rectify this back in the year 2000 with their first attempt at a live action adaptation, and the result of that was called G-Saviour, you may notice the word Gundam doesn’t come up there… It’s almost as if they were trying to hide something, and I can really see why!

The film follows a guy called Mark Curran, a former robot pilot who finds himself dragged into the plot when a group of the worlds most pathetic rebels sneak on to his submarine… thing… to steal a bunch of apparently harmless chemicals that turn out to be the secret ingredient for… growing crops underwater!

Phew. And I was worried the plot was going to be driven by something absurdly over the top and dumbed down in favour of gratuitous fight scenes!

Thankfully, that’s not a problem, because it’s almost an hour into the film before we see our first fight involving a giant robot… against a giant piece of floating metal. Mark is piloting the titular G-saviour (a prototype robot that’s apparently better than the others.) and is escorting the rest of the cast in a ship in space while they make a getaway from the bad guys. In front of them is a collection of random space detritus. Mark flies his robot ahead and starts shooting random hunks of metal… before finally coming to his senses and just telling the guy to swerve around them.

“We can’t, Mark! There’s no way we can go around this!”

Wait a minute… YOU’RE IN SPACE! Up, down, left, right, take your pick! Don’t tell me your spaceship can’t steer! Or just stop! At the very least, show us why they can’t dodge around it, possibly involving some kind of super condense cloud of space-crap enveloping the ship… But no, it looks like they didn’t have the budget for that kind of thing! They didn’t have the budget for a lot of things by the looks of this film.

Everything in this film feels so cheap, so low budget. From the phoned in performances from the actors, to the awfully written script, to the utterly bad CGI robot fights, in a movie adaptation of a series all about robot fights and famed for its good writing and interesting characters.

The final battle involves Mark going toe to toe with his rival and former boss, Jack (god I love that name!) in their giant robots standing on the fin of a space colony, wailing on each other with laser swords. Sounds awesome right? Well, somehow, no. I can only assume the art studio making the CG sections hadn’t made enough film, so they just slowed it down to take up more space. And it only managed to last about twelve seconds in which both robots clumsily swung their lasers at each other before any death blows were dealt.

This was an enormous letdown. Not because I thought this was going to be good, but because I could see a film with so much potential to excite and engage hidden inside this bland, underfunded, poorly written mess.

If you think this film sounds even slightly cool, check out 0080 “War in the Pocket” or “The 8th MS team” to see how one of these things really should be done.

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