G-Saviour is, in a very literal sense, not a Gundam story. From what I can tell (when nobody seems to be citing an actual source) this was a test-case for making a live-action Gundam film. Due to that prototypical nature and a requirement to evade US rights issues, the name 'Gundam' was deliberately omitted, leaving things in a similar place to 'G-Self': an implied nod-and-a-wink that lacks any in-story explanation.
The obvious critical stance would be to lean on that distinction, to actively separate something created by an Canadian director and American screenwriters from the rest of the franchise. And look, if there's ever a case for doing that, it's here, in much the way Godzilla 1998 is fundamentally distinct from everything that came before it. G-Saviour belongs in the era and location of Babylon 5, Star Trek, Starship Troopers (from whom several costumes were reused, apparently) et al. If the Gaean Councillor's closing address liberally stealing from Abe Lincoln and Churchill didn't make that plain enough, the overall Americanness of the rest of the minute-by-minute plot beats should.
Gone are teen-protagonist analogies for intergenerational conflict. We follow a mature, retired mobile suit pilot turned deep-sea diver through a low-rent political thriller centred around 'super bioluminescence', which could revolutionise underwater farming and alleviate ongoing food shortages that are causing tension between Earth and the space colonies (here referred to as 'settlements' for I am sure well-intentioned reasons). It's all very 'grounded' and, yes, to continue the stereotype, there aren't any psychic shenanigans to trouble a presumed-US audience's low disbelief threshold.
The funny thing is, given how much I kept thinking of Babylon 5 while watching this, I'm not sure it would have mattered if they'd included newtype stuff. It might honestly have helped with the Stupid Love Triangle, which as it stands is a horrible case of 'male lead must obviously fall for Hot Lady Scientist Rebel, prompting Jealous Rage from his existing girlfriend and a subsequent Dramatic Betrayal'. Up to that point I was almost prepared to make a case that Mark Curran might actually work as a more grown-up version of your standard Disgruntled Teen Savant pilot. But no. He's just an off-the-shelf cardboard cut-out.
The Hot Lady Scientist Rebel's actor, Enuka Okuma, would later voice Lady Une in the Gundam Wing dub, which as promotions go is roughly equivalent to leaping from dish-washing at a Little Chef to eating at a Michelin Star restaurant; needless to say she is wasted in G-Saviour.
And actually, you know what, maybe my theory isn't so dead after all. It's not as if any of Tomino's protagonists ever learned to keep their eyes/mouths/brains to themselves, is it? Why should it be disqualifying for Mark to fall for Dr Graves during a stressful mission to end a famine being artificially maintained by a corrupt military in order to excuse seizing control of the agricultural space settlements?
At least, that's my rough understanding of the plot, which lands with all the weight of a steamed pudding but is, it has to be said, more or less in the same ball-park as the usual fare. They even have the bad guys dressed up as the Titans for about a third of the runtime, after which everyone swaps to very unsubtle Nazi uniforms for some reason. It's not like it wasn't dead obvious who we should be booing from the start. They sort of gesture towards General Garneaux being a surface-level affable sort of fellow, but it's almost immediately made clear that he's the main villain, leaving Jack Halle to Jerrid up the place as the main hench-person. It's a very loose approximation of something that might be a regular Gundam series' nominal A-plot. Not completely different, just rather low-effort.
Because look, the thing about G-Saviour is that it is bad. Not because they hold back the robot action. That's an obvious function of budget and they use them at dramatically appropriate moments. No, G-Saviour is bad because it is just plain not very good. The plot progresses on the barest of excuses, the characters are pathetically one-note, there's no sense of urgency or drama, every interesting aspect of the world remains thoroughly unexplored, and the aesthetics are abysmal. I do feel a little sorry for knocking turn-of-the-millennium CGI, and maybe this was down to the low quality version I watched, but absolutely nothing about these sequences holds the attention.
There's the skeleton of some good ideas: an opening sequence where Mark has to rescue a downed mobile suit after it and a chunk of space junk fall crash into the sea, the obligatory 'mecha stomping about near squishy humans' shots, a final showdown on a colony mirror. They don't manage to be anything more, though, and the mecha cannot yet be animated in ways that actually entertain. It's another sterling example of why this really isn't a subgenre that benefits much by live action adaptation. I kept thinking that if this had been a real anime, we might have at least gotten a feast for the eyes, if nothing else.
Instead what we get is a limp production subsisting on a second-hand memory of what goes into a Gundam show, as adapted by people who don't seem interested in declaring even such low-hanging fruit as 'the Earth is run by an entrenched uncaring bureaucracy and can't be trusted to the do the right thing'. Our guy Mark ends the film promising to return to Earth to stand trial for his part in events and specifically that murder he wasn't responsible for. Not quite sure how he intends to clear his name when he killed the guy who did do the murder and the Evil General got himself shot down by his own side. Glad we can trust the system though!
The thing is, in my heart of hearts, I can't say that's any less deep than a lot of Gundam's more derivative entries. The design-work puts me in mind of SEED for some reason (perhaps it very plainly being the UC in slightly higher definition) and there's something of that to the storytelling as well. A certain sheering off of inconvenient metaphysics, replacing them with straightforward literalism (and Illuminati references; that's in fact what the Big Good faction here is called). There's no sense of this being about something, which even SEED managed most of the time. We never get to see the scale of the famine or reckon with the injustice of using something like that for political gain. The super heat-producing bioluminescent enzyme (a usefully pocket-sized discovery) is nothing more than a bland McGuffin.
Again, it's not that there's nothing here, simply that what is here exists as trace elements. Which does make me wonder: how far can you strip down a Gundam story before it ceases to meaningfully be a Gundam story? For all that this is supposedly still in the Universal Century timeline, it's thinner than Stardust Memory (and less charismatic), suffers from SEED's predilection for pure character drama while leaving its characters as rough props, shares AGE's chronic lack of depth without ever straying into giving active offence... if this isn't the bottom of the barrel, it's got to be damn close.
Yet the G-Saviour is still a Gundam in design, sitting somewhere between the F-91 and the Alex. There are Zaku-alikes and knock-off GMs, O'Neil cylinders and Sides, a Fireball XL5 style launch roller-coaster -- the usual points of visual orientation. It's Gundam in all but name, without the name. The PS2 video game even introduces a flying aircraft carrier.
(Based on watching a play-through, G-Saviour the Game is 100% forgettable in every aspect except for the fact that they named a major antagonistic mobile suit unit 'The Gremly Sheep'.)
We cannot realistically claim this isn't part of the Gundam franchise. The effort to scrub the copyrightable elements does not disguise the film's origins. There was a HG kit and everything! Arguably, at the level of pure touchstones for the original run, this is more Gundam than Iron-Blooded Orphans or The Witch From Mercury. Only, very obviously, those are the kinds of things it's perfectly respectable to have in your franchise whereas this gets put on the naughty step beside that full-motion video MSG game, The Ring of Gundam and Requiem for Vengeance. A collection of dead-end tech demos, doomed to stand testament to the folly of stepping outside your native medium.
They're harmless in real terms. Gundam SEED launched a couple of years later, becoming the outstanding success story for AU profitability. Nothing was lost by testing the waters like this.
Which is perhaps the most damning thing to be said about G-Saviour, now I come to think of it.
May we be able to say the same about the next such attempt.
