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UNIVEEEEERSE!!! (-al Gundam idea and discussion thread)

HoratioVonBecker said:
More? I shudder to think what the originals must have been. Ships in The Origin have a defined 'top' and 'bottom', and the weapon turrets are almost never able to fire 'downwards'. They're absurd, and not even in the 'we slapped a tattered Jolly Rodger on a bunch of spiky metal things and called it a Space Ship' way.

I take it that G-Savior's main weakness is its plot?
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To quote myself...

The movie has a surprisingly quick pace that serves it well by giving the audience no time to dwell on its faults. It lacks focus on the mobile suit aspects, which is to its detriment; they're some of the best parts of the movie. The actor's performances are not perfect but they are far better than might be expected from the movie's reputation, with only the Big Bad (played by veteran character actor Kenneth Welsh) turning in a genuinely poor performance. Everyone else is at least mediocre to okay. At least part of that is simply because he's very badly explained, switching from seemingly-reasonable to Jamitov-is-my-role-model about midway through the movie for no adequately explained reason and to little purpose. It didn't add much. We could have just had the colonel be evil on his own. ...

So is this a good movie? Not really. It's got a lot of little flaws that collectively weight it down. I've only mentioned a few, but there are others: the main character comes off as a bit of an impulsive asshole, though more likable than most. The villain is decidedly one-note and spouts cliches at odd moments; the big bad is just bland and has issues I already noted. The lighting team decided they needed to add some effects to certain scenes they never should have. The movie is arguably too fast-paced, edited down, and could have benefited greatly from another thirty minutes both to get to know the characters and to more fully integrate the mobile suits. The mobile suit concept is badly integrated into the movie and has relatively little screentime. The technology is hard to place into any timeline, much less ultra-late UC.

Is it a good Gundam movie? My answer to that, to my surprise, is yes, this is a good Gundam movie. The mecha design is good, the main characters are likable enough and manage to avoid all the usual Gundam protagonist tropes that tend to infuriate people, the details it adds to the universe are coherent to what exists and seem positive additions. Despite the paucity of mecha combat, what we do get is of a relatively high caliber. I understand why people would wish to exile it from the canon; plotwise and tonally it has only Zeta for company, and a lot of the expected Gundam tropes are either not present or played very differently. But change is not necessarily a bad thing, and in the end, I don't think this movie entirely deserves the exile from canon it's been subjected to. I'm not sure where it would fit, but it's far from the abomination in the eyes of man and Tomino it's often made out to be.
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I mean, to clarify my own position I do love campy-ass Sci-Fi B Movies. Just because it's horrible doesn't mean it's bad, if that makes any sense. It's just, uh, 'of a quality' I believe the term is.
 
Lichte said:
I take it you've been looking into Crossbone, then? :V

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Half remembered Captain Harlock covers, actually. Who, as I think of it, might have been based on Captain Hook. I mean, he was a pirate in a children's story, and he had a flying ship...
Back on topic, is there any Gundam series that does spaceships fairly well? Schlock Mercenary is basically my gold standard for semi-plausible alt-techbase spacecraft.
 
HoratioVonBecker said:
Back on topic, is there any Gundam series that does spaceships fairly well? Schlock Mercenary is basically my gold standard for semi-plausible alt-techbase spacecraft.
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Hang on, you basically want to get into Gundam because of the plausibilities of their mothership designs? I'm not going to answer whether any Gundam series does ship design any justice, but I don't know enough about ship design to give a solid answer. But the thing is, Gundam doesn't necessarily focus on the designs. In fact, as far as I'm aware, they rarely focus on it at all.

They usually focus on two things: the effects of war on the protagonists on a psychological level, and warfare that mostly involves 20-meter tall humanoid combat vehicles.
 
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Ironically I think you may be looking at SEED/SEED Destiny for the series that do the best work in this department.
 
G2BattleConvoy said:
Hang on, you basically want to get into Gundam because of the plausibilities of their mothership designs? I'm not going to answer whether any Gundam series does ship design any justice, but I don't know enough about ship design to give a solid answer. But the thing is, Gundam doesn't necessarily focus on the designs. In fact, as far as I'm aware, they rarely focus on it at all.

They usually focus on two things: the effects of war on the protagonists on a psychological level, and warfare that mostly involves 20-meter tall humanoid combat vehicles.
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Actually, I want to get into it because it looks fun, but plausible tech bases is a secondary consideration, that I was sort of expecting because Gundam is the namesake of Minovsky Physics.
 
G2BattleConvoy said:
WE DON'T TALK ABOUT G-SAVIOUR. EVER.
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I'll talk about G-Savior whenever I damn well please! :D

Night said:
G-Savior has some of the best mook fight choreography in UC and pretty decent mecha design.

I mean, it's a terrible movie, but it's actually pretty good as a Gundam show.
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I would posit that it's actually an "okay" movie, but then again I'm reputed to have much looser standards than most for what makes acceptable entertainment.

HoratioVonBecker said:
I take it that G-Savior's main weakness is its plot?
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The plot's actually not that bad IMO, and the nature of why the two sides are fighting each other --

Basically, there's a colossal food/energy shortage that may or may not be totally engineered by certain Titan Earth-elite douchebags that intend to use famine as a weapon to punish dissident regions/Colonies, somebody manages to invent a hyper-bioluminescent algae or something that would make it possible to GROW FOOD UNDERWATER (and when you think about how much of the Earth's surface is covered with water, doesn't that sound totally kickass?!), the bad guys don't like that and want to destroy it and the people who created it, so then The Illuminati (no, that's seriously what the AEUG-equivalent call themselves) help out the good guys.

Also, the resident Char Clone (lacks the mask, and is thus arguably more of a Yazan or Scirocco clone) is the protag's sociopathic douchebag commander from when he was still in the military and subscribes to the "subordinates are expendable" line of thought, having actively ordered him not to rescue one of their teammates from burning up in re-entry during a training accident. As far as villains go, the dude's actually pretty hateable. I like that.

-- is a nice little change of pace from what we usually get in UC or CE.

Lunatic350 said:
G-Savior's main weakness is that it's an underbudgeted Sci-Fi channel B-Movie that didn't have any of the skill in modelling, puppetry, or any of the other tricks to properly do mechs in live-action even if it did have the budget (and shitty 2000 CGI, so... no). The acting's bad, the plot's bad, the special effects are bad, the costuming's bad, and the mech design is... not that bad, actually.
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Personally, I'm of the opinion that you can't really take the CGI as a flaw in the movie, because at the time it was made, that was more-or-less as good as CGI tended to get. AFAIK, anyway.
 
Ironically, while Zeon is rather bad at times (explainable as the boss wanting terror weapons), Federation ships in the original actually have some pretty decent lower-angle firing arcs. You just don't see it much. Of course, this is also stated to be the first time that man has really fought in space, and the weapons are being designed and built in a rush.
 
00Zy99 said:
Ironically, while Zeon is rather bad at times (explainable as the boss wanting terror weapons), Federation ships in the original actually have some pretty decent lower-angle firing arcs. You just don't see it much. Of course, this is also stated to be the first time that man has really fought in space, and the weapons are being designed and built in a rush.
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Ugh, i had to get pretty silly to explain why te earth centric organixation has much more "space is 3D" design than the space-based one.

My justification basically boiled down to meglomania and favored pet designers scoentists being allowed to run rampant over more sensible and thoughful people.

Because at cose range, a musai has an absurdly limited firing arc, which means the EF almost certainly pulled some ambushes on them using shoal zones (from the colonies that got nuked)
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
Ugh, i had to get pretty silly to explain why te earth centric organixation has much more "space is 3D" design than the space-based one.
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Which is kind of ironic when it seems Zeon puts more effort into developing Aquatic Suits than the Federation does.

Chloe Sullivan said:
My justification basically boiled down to meglomania and favored pet designers scoentists being allowed to run rampant over more sensible and thoughful people.
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Or they were betting on Mobile Suits being their primary offensive force so felt it better to design the Musai for concentrated firepower with supporting Mobile Suits in mind.
 
EvaUnit01 said:
I would posit that it's actually an "okay" movie, but then again I'm reputed to have much looser standards than most for what makes acceptable entertainment.
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A bit like the original Star Wars trilogy, then? As B-movies, they're world class, and if you can treat B-movies as their own genre with their own standards, actually very enjoyable.
EvaUnit01 said:
Basically, there's a colossal food/energy shortage that may or may not be totally engineered by certain Titan Earth-elite douchebags that intend to use famine as a weapon to punish dissident regions/Colonies, somebody manages to invent a hyper-bioluminescent algae or something that would make it possible to GROW FOOD UNDERWATER (and when you think about how much of the Earth's surface is covered with water, doesn't that sound totally kickass?!), the bad guys don't like that and want to destroy it and the people who created it, so then The Illuminati (no, that's seriously what the AEUG-equivalent call themselves) help out the good guys.
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This worries me, though. I doesn't look like a real person motivation, such as greed, vengeance, guilt, hunger, or existential worry on the bad guys' part. Unless the bosses were misblamed?
EvaUnit01 said:
I mean, hell, it was better CGI than what the original Power Rangers movie had to work with.
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Which looks better than Tron. You know what? Sold. I'll give it a chance if I have the option.
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
Of course the Doyalist answer is that MODELING KITS.

Seriously though, long range support is kinda an oxymoron in a minovsky heavy environment.
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Well that doesn't seem to stop both sides from trying in the OYW.

But really, I can of find it lame to just assume that 'lol, they were idiots' was the reason whenever something doesn't a hundred percent add up. Like, it's not possible they weren't using the same idea of effectiveness as you, or they were making a trade off for effectiveness in another area?
 
Long range supporting fire at up to several hundred kilometers in space is possible optically. No atmospheric extinction or curvature of the Earth issues. Minovsky doesn't come into it.
 
Night said:
Long range supporting fire at up to several hundred kilometers in space is possible optically. No atmospheric extinction or curvature of the Earth issues. Minovsky doesn't come into it.
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In other words, if you can't see them, you better hope you're shooting in the right direction.
 
HoratioVonBecker said:
A bit like the original Star Wars trilogy, then? As B-movies, they're world class, and if you can treat B-movies as their own genre with their own standards, actually very enjoyable.
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Something like that, although lacking much of the iconography.

This worries me, though. I doesn't look like a real person motivation, such as greed, vengeance, guilt, hunger, or existential worry on the bad guys' part. Unless the bosses were misblamed?
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Consolidation of political power and punishment/removal of one's enemies. Isn't that a semi-standard dictator thing?
 
HoratioVonBecker said:
Genocide is, genocide by food deprivation isn't. If the bad guys aren't trying to take it for themselves, and they're already the only racket in town, they're being really stupid.
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I noticed that as well, but it comes up within the last...five minutes of the movie, when spackling in a reason for the Big Bad.

There's a reason he's not a positive addition to the movie.
 
So, I've been working on some 'Resource and Tiberium Wars GDI gets the bluerock's Fires of Terra treatment' ideas and here is a snippet:


Kingdom of Azadistan; October 31st, 2307
Royal Palace​

"It is wonderful that you've come to our nation Ambassador Neumann," Princess Marina Ismail said in an incredibly chipper tone, "With everything that has happened, I thought there is no hope for Azadistan." Ever since GDI came into the global picture, the nations of the world have been seriously stepping up their game. The Sari Lanka 'peacekeeping' operation shook the world as GDI ruthlessly crushed all sides of the ethnic conflict. Marina hopped that it wouldn't happen here however.

"It is a pleasure Princess Ismail," Ambassador Neumann replied cheerfully, "It's better than the few times back in our world that I've been here." Ambassador Neumann was pretty relaxed for a diplomat and he lacked the 'holier than thou' attitude that the diplomats from the three blocks had. "Now, from what I was briefed upon, you've been globe-trotting around the world for a technical assistance package from the major power blocks. So far you've been unsuccessful," Ambassador Neumann stated before giving a massive grin, "I've come to tell you that your application for GDI's governmental and technical assistance has been approved by the Consuls themselves."

Marina Ismail's mind crashed as the words echoed in her mind and the implications soaked in. "That's..." Marina started to say as her mind rebooted, "... more than I ever hoped." Marina started to cry softly as her prayers were answered. All of her hard work and persistence paid off incredibly well.

"Don't mention it ma'am," Ambassador Neumann politely replied, "There is one last thing before it becomes official though, and that is breaking the news to your legislative body... which is going to be problematic due to the..."

"Traditionalists being themselves," Marina finished as she sighed, "It's never easy isn't it?"

"It isn't ma'am," Ambassador Neumann answered in understanding,"Nothing good in life is easy... only variable levels of hard." It was something of a comfort to Marina that the ambassador said like if that was from actual experience. Marina hopped that the Traditionalists would understand, but a dark voice in the back of her mind told her otherwise.

"If I may be so bold," Marina started, "What is the timetable going to be? I want to ensure that people have some forewarning about this." This -in Marina's mind- vital as she can not only give a timetable for when the assistance would come but also time to persuade the population to at least not start fighting and more or less brief the people on the details.

"The plan is to simply ease through with the program, for the next month it's going to be intensive surveying, setting up the initial peacekeeping headquarters, briefing the populous on what we're doing, and later setting up the site for the first station. Then, if all goes well, we can build up from there," Neumann answered, "This is more or less standard practice mind you. We'll be sending an MCV to build the foundation of the peacemaker branch HQ after the briefing... but given that stability is something of a rarity right now..." The ambassador left it hanging as both of them know about the current situation about Azadistan's instability due to the brewing sectarian tensions. If the current leader of the Traditionalists -one Al-Imam Rasa Mas'ud Rakhmadi- was to disappear or be killed... sectarian conflict -and, given Ambassador Neumann's knowladge of his own history, ideological genocide- would follow. Even with that hanging over Malina's head, she was having tears of joy...
 
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