Damning with Faint Praise - Watching G-Saviour

 

 I had two hours of free time and nothing to fill it, while contemplating nothing my mind dug up the film G-Saviour, so I tracked it down and watched it. Writing about G-Saviour (I'm calling Saviour) is going to do my analytics any favours, despite a big push at the time of its release it's falling into obscurity and the few who know of it have few nice words to say about it. The G stands for Gundam, though the word Gundam is never said in the film at all. Saviour is a 1999 Canadian TV movie set in the Gundam IP, the Universal Century(UC)* timeline to be precise. That's a very strange sentence, it failed to find an audience in North America on its release and I haven't been able to find evidence that it was released in Europe before its 2002 DVD release, and I'm not sure whether that was just fans importing American region DVDs. 

I first heard of it in 2019ish, when a several anime news blogs cause a mini-panic in the Gundam fanbase by reporting that there were feelers being put out to make a Gundam movie in Hollywood. 

*The UC is the continuity that the first Gundam shows and novels were set in, and is considered the default Gundam continuity among fans and Sunrise, the company that makes most of the animated shows. American movies based on Japanese source material have some hits, like Road to Perdition, but there are many more duds. The news did give some exposure to the existence of Saviour, with most mentions using it as a warning of what to expect if the deal went through. And it's been kicking around in the back of my mind ever since. What little I had heard about the project left me morbidly curious and expecting a terrible 90 minutes. Instead, I got a perfectly fine experience. Not great, not terrible.

It's a fairly competent and typical 90s film pilot to pitch a sci-fi series. None of the actors convince you they're space marines, scientists, political leaders etc. But none of the performers come across as miscast, I would liken the experience to watching a stage play dramatizing real events, you know you're watching actors on sets, they just do their jobs of telling a story. Among the cast no one stands out as bad or good, Blu Mankuma comes closest to living his role as the benevolent leader of his space colony, but he doesn't have enough screen time and material to work with. Everyone else is fine, the weakest in the main cast is Saviour's Char Aznable, Lieutenant Colonel Jack Halle played by David Longren. He's serviceable as a military bad guy, but he falls flat when he's supposed to be swaggering.

Had this been taken on as a full series, I can see the cast ironing out the wrinkles and improving with more screen time and plot development. With what we got, it's perfectly satisfactory. The effects do not wow, the film is live action except for vehicles and mobile suits (the mechas). The CG animation is on par with what a production like Saviour could expect in 1999. Babylon 5's CG effects were usually better, though I've seen many productions, some made a decade later, that look worse. The main flaw with the CG effects isn't the graphics or the animation, it's the editing. There is one battle segment in the film, it is impossible to follow.  The battle is outside a space colony, and all the shots are tight close-ups on one or two mobile suits and then a hard cut to an actor in a chair with an ill-fitting helmet shaking around trying to react appropriately to whatever was storyboarded for the CG bits. The whole sequence is confusing, you cannot follow the battle, and the few bits of action that are shown are slow and lack weight. 

There is one exception I would like to highlight. The film starts underwater, there the mobile suit sequence looked at its best. I think the water filter masked the 90s computer glow that plagued contemporary CG animation, and being set underwater did a lot to justify the ponderous movement of the mechs.

The plot is also serviceable, the setting is in the future, UC 0223 according to the opening credit voice over, which is in the future for most of Gundam as well. Mankind is still divided, the lines are roughly drawn between the Congressionals who control Earth and settlements in space, colonies including one called Gaea. The political situation is deteriorating due to a food crisis, the crisis is so severe that a radical plan to turn the seabed into agricultural zones. And agriculture and a scientific breakthrough are key to the conflict for the film. Scientists from the Congress and Gaea have cracked how to grow crops in the sea, and there's a conspiracy to control this key technology and resource.

Our Amuro Rey is Jack Curran (Brennan Elliot) can he rise above self-interest and fear and is what right? Will he successfully pilot the Gundam G-Saviour to save his friends and defeat the deadly Jack Halle? I won't spoil it, hell, chances are good you've already correctly guessed those answers. When the credits were rolling, I thought the Gundam connections were weak and could've easily been excised with original IP replacements. They don't even call the Gundam a Gundam, and it has no connection to any pre-existing Gundam storyline. I thought this was TV movie already in pre-production for a unique Sci-fi property, the genre was big business in the 90s, and Sunrise stepped in with some financial and technical assistance in exchange for using the film to promote its long-running franchise that still had trouble breaking into the North American market.

Everything seemed to fit that premise. The Canadian television production, the tacked on feel of the Gundam elements, the lack of connection or references to anything that came before, a setting so far away from the rest of the franchise there was no danger of it muddying the waters for other projects. The lack of follow up or push to include it or build upon it in following years. It ticked every box.

So, I was surprised when I went to the film's wikipages, both main and Gundam entries to double-check that my memory was accurate for Saviour, and discovered that I was completely wrong. The film had been in production for at least two years and was not only part of a multimedia project including a video game, novelisation and manga, but that it was part of Sunrise's 20th anniversary celebrations for the franchise, together with the anime series Turn-A Gundam. There went my theory, crashing into earth.

That was the last thing I expected. The film was released in cinemas in Japan, which didn't surprise me, Gundam is a massive property in that country. But all the rest of it, the tie-in video game, novels and manga were surprising, that meant Sunrise was heavily involved in this thing. Why make a multimedia project where the main property is made by another company, Canada's Polestar, and has little connection to greater franchise and all the rest of the project is Japan only? I do not understand the logic behind this at all, who was then was the target audience for Saviour? An international audience can't have been the main target, most of the products weren't available in their markets. And I can't imagine Japanese audiences already on board with Gundam got much out of the film. Making a Gundam film with little connective tissue to the wider franchise does make sense if the intent is to entice a new audience, and Sunrise had success with this before Saviour, creating new Gundam properties that could stand on their own, some that weren't even in the UC continuity. But apparently their main target was the audience they already had. 

Saviour is extremely obscure, it doesn't have many fans. My faint praise puts me in that small camp. And even though I grew up on sci-fi shows with the feel and sensibility of Saviour, I wouldn't have bothered tracking it down without the Gundam connection. I don't understand much about the G-Saviour project, but I do understand why the film failed to catch an audience, its ram shackle construction leaves little for anyone. If there was a target audience for G-Saviour, it was probably me, just me. And I didn't live in North America nor Japan. I was busy watching Babylon 5, Star Trek, Sea Quest DSV, Sliders, X-Files, repeats of Doctor Who and Anime movies on a German language channel broadcast from Frankfurt. I'm reminded of an old saying, "try to please everyone, and you'll disappoint everyone".