FSU Student Life Cinema

G-Saviour is commonly known as “the terrible live action Gundam movie”. This is for good reason, because it is a terrible live action Gundam movie. For those who don’t know, Gundam is an enormously popular metaseries that started in Japan in 1979 with the television anime “Mobile Suit Gundam”. This series spawned literally dozens of tv spin offs, toys, video games, comic books and models. It is a multigenerational international cultural phenomenon. So in 1999, in celebration of the franchise’s 20^th anniversary, two projects were released: a series called Turn A Gundam and a live-action made for tv movie called G-Saviour. Turn A was beloved and universally acclaimed to be one of the greatest entries in the series, and G-Saviour was hated and quickly forgotten.

The main reason that G-Saviour was shunned was the lack of anything “Gundamy” in it. The story feels more like a sci-fi channel original movie than a Gundam story. The plot revolves around a middle aged man named Mark Curran on the run from a fascist government called CONSENT that controls the planet earth and most of its space colonies and his efforts to safely deliver a sample of genetically modified kelp that he hopes will serve as a stable food crop. There is more to the story, but it is all very stupid and not worth thinking too hard about. Notice the distinct lack of giant robots in that plot summery. That’s because there are barely any in it at all. The one thing that remains constant through every Gundam installment is that the main plot revolves around giant robots flying around and blowing up other giant robots. Through the first hour there are maybe 30 seconds of mobile suit footage all together. The only time we get to see a mobile suit battle, is at the very end of the film when CONSENT corners Mark at the independent space colony “Side 8” and their forces massacre the obsolete mobile suit milita there. Horrified, Mark is forced to use the Illuminati’s prototype mobile suit called G-Saviour to fight them off.  This battle looks atrocious. It is all done in awful late 90s CGI that does not hold up at all these days.

All in all, G-Saviour feels like a mediocre made for tv sci-fi adventure that got hastily turned into a Gundam movie at the last minute. The word “Gundam” isn’t even spoken once throughout the entire movie. It is pretty astounding thinking how horribly they handled this. For the 10 million dollars they wasted on this tripe, they could have made a short film that tied up the loose ends left behind by Gundam F91. Or maybe they could have made an OVA for Crossbone Gundam. But instead, they went with this crap. I would only recommend seeing this if you are a Gundam fan and morbidly curious about the lowest depths of the franchise.

-Max Foster-