G-SAVIOUR
90-minute movie (2000)
U.C. 0223 - former Congress of Settlement Nations (CONSENT) MS pilot Mark Curran, now a underwater rig pilot, is thrusted into a conspiracy when he rescue a terrorist-wannabe scientist from his former commander. He, along with the scientist, are on the run for their lives... with the help of rebel groups, Mark will need all the help he can get, including the new MS G-Saviour...
Back in 1998, on the 20th anniversary for the first release of Mobile Suit Gundam, Bandai unveiled the "Big Bang Project", which created lots of buzz on the Interent. The end result of the project, 2 years later, is G-SAVIOUR, the first full-feature live-action movie in the Gundam franchise, with full CG animation for all MS.
What began as a highly anticipated project turned into the worst nightmare in the franchise history. When the reviews were in, it did not look good at all, especially within the hard-core fans everywhere. Perhaps the final knockout bunch was best delivered by none other than 富野 由悠季 (Tomino Yoshiyuki), who publicly denounced the movie at Anime Expo New York in 2002 (he was never involved with the project...). Since then, Bandai Entertainment stopped releasing the DVD in North America, and no traces of it can be found in the North America Gundam official site, gundamofficial.com. A PS2 game was released in Japan along with the movie (just don't ask me to try and find you a copy...).
I bought a pirate DVD copy on eBay and watched it. Yes I am deeply disappointed by the CG sequence (even the old RX-78 can deal with all of them no sweat), horrible script written by a Canadian (ouch) who had not done any homework whatsoever on Gundam, subpar performance with unknowns for a low budget production. It is simply a disaster. Unfortunately, it is also now part of the UC storyline...
Links: (they are still available in Japan)
G-SAVIOUR entry @ Sunrise (Japanese)
Dino's Rating: 0 (that's right, it is the first one and rightfully so)
Will Girls Like It: Ugh!