The video explains the history of the production and its impact on Japan's home video market better than I could. I will briefly outline the show itself, any way to help ground my thoughts. KaiserBeamz mentioned that the show was commissioned in part to compete with and enjoy the market share of the still young Gundam franchise. And over its four episode run I can see clear inspiration's. This is a world where the Earth is in a lot of trouble, and the way it resolves the crisis was to colonise the earth system. Though instead of floating colony cities, human has built settlements on the Moon. There is also an Earth Federation ruling humanity, and like in Gundam it is corrupt and is exploiting the people who live on the Moon, and their main enemy is a rebelling group of space born humans who want independence.
Dallos also has mechanised vehicles that are similar to Gundam's mobile suits. Though mostly construction and mining suits, and the police use transforming bipedal walkers.
The plot of the four episodes of Dallos are about class warfare. The conflict is between the representatives of the Earth Federation who use violence and armed force to maintain control, and the communities of Miners led by Dog (or Doug in the English release) McCoy. The people of the Moon are overwhelmingly discontented with their lot, but McCoy leads a small band willing to take violent action to end it. McCoy hopes to inspire the majority of the Moon's inhabitants to join the struggle. Interestingly, despite being science fiction and about insurrection, the combat doesn't overtake the story.
McCoy's main strategy is to rally the workers into staging a general strike that will cut off earth from the resources the Moon provides, this will force the Earth Federation to take notice and hopefully make concessions. The street battles and raids on police armouries are to show that resistance is possible and to build up the military strength to resist attacks by the police and the Earth army while the pressure builds. The response by the colonial government is brutal and heavy-handed, attempting to crush the growing rebellion with greater force. It's this violent reaction coupled with the authorities' inability to finish off the resistance that radicalises more of the Moon population.
One action in particular pushes the older generation who originally came from Earth and still have connections to it over to the side of resistance. And that is the attack on Dallos, the mysterious structure on the surface of the Moon. McCoy and his group shelter within it, and the police attack damages it. Many Moon citizens, especially the older ones, have come to worship Dallos as a sort of local deity, so they don't take kindly to the armed police firing missiles on it. This gives McCoy and the resistance the numbers they need to halt work at all the mines, which quickly depletes the ore processing and gets the attention of the Federation. Their response is to deploy a garrison to support the police and continue attacking rebel strongholds. During a battle, Dallos repairs itself and attacks and devastates both sides.
With Dallos restored miners start drifting back to work, and with both sides mauled a stalemate of sorts is created, and that's where the show stops. I get a strong sense that Dallos was supposed to be a pilot miniseries for a bigger franchise, either a full series or a movie or something. I don't know if that was the intention, but it would explain the last few minutes, both the main Colonial governor and McCoy predict future conflict and the tensions haven't been resolved.
Overall, I have some mixed feelings about Dallos. I'm impressed it didn't devolve liberation struggles into an action set piece with an impossibly skilled protagonist, and the battle scenes it did have were beautiful and took advantage of the setting, there are some excellent low gravity action scenes here. But there are a lot of shortcomings. For example, I have not mentioned the protagonist of Dallos, that's partly because I'm more interested in the depictions of class conflict than I was in its actual plot, but also because he left such little impression on me that I forgot his name. He's a young adolescent whose brother was killed in mysterious circumstances and has a sort of love triangle with his friend and the beautiful VIP from Earth who becomes a hostage of the rebels. Nothing ground breaking, though I did appreciate that he quickly makes a firm choice to support the rebellion instead of being conflicted and dragged around the conflict by plot convenience like some protagonists.
And Dallos itself is honestly more hindrance than asset here. At first, it's mysterious and intriguing, but we don't anything about it and its place as a deity despite its obvious alien and constructed nature is baffling. I suspect if a continuation was commissioned, the revelations of Dallos would've been key to the plot, but its potential is wasted.
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