Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance

I'm a major gundam fan and this show was a honestly a disappointment. The concept of showing these events from the regular soldiers point of view was a great idea in my opinion. I like that it shows the struggles of war in a more dark tone than gundam normally does.

This is definitely not a children's Gundam side story, it's rated MA for a reason. Just putting this here incase a parent didn't realize.

As far as the bad goes: I really did not like the animation style. It's one of those weird attempts at trying to make animation look more like live action and it just doesn't work. I don't like how the MC contradicts her morals for the writers to try and make her look like a beacon of morality. This is kind of a theme throughout, you can tell it was written for western audiences. I also don't like the heavy plot armor to keep the show going. I would rather have seen some of the main characters fall. It would have made the story more realistic. It's hard to explain well without spoilers, but there's many situations where atleast one of them should have either made a sacrifice for the team or fell heroically, etc. Not doing so took all the weight of the decisions away and makes everything feel pretty pointless. Most good war movies show this because it's important to make the characters actions feel important. I feel like MC should have been like the only one to survive the horror which could have fundamentally altered her view of humanity.

Overall I like the base idea, but the executive was pretty bad imo.

The first 2 episodes are incredible. The action is superb and ruthless. The depiction of the Gundam was like an unstoppable entity of warfare horror and I loved it. I found it difficult not to root for it. What helped this was that no identity of the pilot was given until the second to last episode; and the voice acting in this movie is a bit cringe, the characterizations even more so, exacerbated by the subpar CGI of faces. Whereas the effects excelled in the suits and combat, they failed with the people. I found this passable though; for episodes 1, 2, and 4. Episode 3 was a yawnfest and the last 2 episodes, while having some good action, were crippled by awful plot twists and revelations. Barring spoilers, I won't get into it, but...laughably bad. Nonetheless, a fun series to enjoy parts of if you like mecha.

I'm seeing a lot of reviewers panning this show due to their preconceived notions of what it should have been. I fornone like having the perspective of Zeon troops being hunted by the Gundam. You get glimpses of what it's like to go against a hero character, and what it takes to overcome just one.

It was done in Unreal Engine 5, which means a lot of the environmental CGI can look photo realistic at times. On the other hand, they did not take the time to really work on the human character models skin and facial expressions, so it sometimes is a stark contrast to the environmental scenery. Overall, it wasn't a deal breaker for me and it was nice to see a more realistic Gundam work than a traditional animation.

I am a huge Gundam fan, so it's sad to see how bad this one is, but again it's Netflix so wasn't expect much.

The CGI is really bad, like we had better CGI movies 5 or 7 years ago, this looks more like cut scenes from a PS3 game. It's not helped along by the bad lipsync or that it was made with English mouth movement in mind instead of Japanese, as only a tourist would choose the English option.

It's also got all the modern DEI thinks to check of, which is something you will notice really fast, and given it's something that means lower quality in the story and work in generel I would say they don't break that mold here. They even use the classic "touch girl" hair style we are seeing every time now, so when ever people I know and myself sees the half bold haircut we tend to write the show of then and there as they all go the same way anyway.

The sounds the Zaku used seems off when you are used to them sounding in pretty unique way. I don't know why they changed it here.

The ending is... well it's bad, I don't know why they don't focus test their shows, or at least hire fans to make them. We have seen with One Piece that it can be done, if they listen to the creator and have fans working on it without change everything to please the modern none existing audience.

I can't really give it more than 2 stars, as I see many trying to pump up the scor, and because it's not really that good even if you could look past the nightmare inducing CGI.

I have not finished watching this series yet, but the animation of the characters is distractingly bad, so bad I felt like expressing my displeasure here. This is really just related to the expressions of the characters. The rendering looks very decent otherwise, but, I swear, ReBoot, a 3D animated series exactly 30 years old, the second such ever, has much better facial expressions and mouth movements. How can that be the case in 2024? Otherwise from that, the voice acting, action and pacing is pretty good, but I hope the production company fixes the glaring weakness in subsequent iterations.