Episodes 1-6 – Mobile Suit Gundam Revenge Requiem

Gundam: Revenge Requiem It’s a completely middling experience, punctuated by brief moments of greatness before reverting back to average. Its most striking feature – the look of animation – is a real hybrid.

This series is another entry in the growing catalog of gritty war stories that attempt to place their place within the dramatic events of the One Year’s War. We jump straight into the later stages of the conflict with the Zeon forces and the Federation clashing in hot spots across the globe. The Red Wolves serve as our main actors and as the audience’s point of view as they speak to their beliefs as spacers, citizens and soldiers of the Principality of Zeon. Most of the Union soldiers are nameless – and often faceless – enemies who run from place to place but rarely interact directly with our protagonists.

The main actors are well written. Most of the time is spent with Ilya and Nilan as the focal actors. Iria Solari is a consummate professional, but she still fights for her principles. Kneeland LeSean is the most capable but somewhat arrogant young soldier in the unit. There are a few other characters of note, such as Captain Zydos and Dr. Kasuga, but for most of the six episodes, Iria and Kneeland are the center of attention. Both the English and Japanese voice actors do a solid job, although they don’t have the most gripping material. As far as characterization goes, they’re well handled but don’t go beyond the typical archetypes found in military science fiction narratives. The difficulty with this cast is adapting and finding them to be believable human characters when their facial expressions and lip movements are so unnatural.

This means now is the perfect time to show off your visuals. The animation was done using Unreal Engine 5, which for those who don’t know, is the latest version of the long-running video game engine. Unreal tends to do a great job with the surreal, which was certainly the tone the team was going for. The visual language of “Revenge Requiem” is firmly rooted in the “real robot” aspect. We get realistic battle damage, considerations like ammunition and machine repairs, and soldiers fretting over supplies and maintenance throughout the nine yards.

It’s hard to argue that the series didn’t achieve its goal of making the One Year War a believable conflict when everything fell into place. The HUD, cockpit and pilot suit are all meticulously rendered with precise detail. Covered in makeshift ablative armor made from tank parts, Zakus looks field-ready and ramshackle. The transport ship exploded under the weight of anti-aircraft fire, sending out a huge fireball of deadly beauty. It all looks like a brutal conflict that never really happened, but maybe, if you look closely enough, it has just enough verisimilitude that it seems possible.

But for every area of ​​visual intensity, the chances of feeling let down or missing out are twice as high. The machines may look realistic, but the characters are stretchy and doll-like. Their faces are too close to the real thing to compare them to the real thing, and in that regard, they’re not even close. The characters’ expressions, eye and mouth movements, and postures make them look like… well, NPCs from a video game. The characters’ movements are somewhat stiff, making them feel as robotic as the machines they pilot.

It doesn’t help that the visuals aren’t universally great for Mobile Suit or Clash. The fight scenes are detailed enough when the action is more methodical. For example, seeing Zaku crouch and fire his machine gun at a distant target looks and sounds about as heavy-handed as you’d imagine. Lighting is a special area of ​​strength, Gundam Often ignited by flames at night and as threatening as the White Devil’s nickname suggests. Yet too often, the show doesn’t look or sound convincing. The mobile suit running around the battlefield seems a bit too light and has no weight. At times, weapon fire seems completely lacking in energy, such as Goof’s chaingun fire that looks like a garden hose under high pressure. Not to mention fighting with human soldiers on foot, which looked stiff, and there were a lot of them standing up straight and shooting in the distance with rifles.

Unreal Engine’s visuals look very utilitarian, leaving little room for broader artistic expression. The direction is competent, but the material doesn’t offer much opportunity to take big risks. The most unique scene is Arya’s dream, which leaves a lasting impression on you in the way you want it to. I think her dream of playing the violin in a crowded theater is perhaps the best sequence in the series, and fits the theme perfectly. But such moments are few and far between.

The rhythms are similarly separate. On the one hand, with only six episodes, it’s not a huge time commitment. I knocked it down in one fell swoop, it felt like it was moving very fast. Each episode has a very clear objective and they move from location to location without getting too deep into trouble. However, the beats of the fight scenes are very repetitive, which detracts from a lot of the drama. Most battle scenes involve a tank rolling into the frame, everyone yelling, and then exploding within three to five seconds. Then a mobile suit will walk into the frame, making everyone yell, but seconds later it will explode or be pushed away. Sometimes the vehicle that appears and explodes is a plane or a cannon, but the setup is the same every time: the vehicle appears, everyone scrambles to get to it, it explodes, foams, rinses, repeats. There aren’t many meaningful landmarks, battlefield overviews, or methodical progression either. Enemies appear from off-screen and explode like a video game, which doesn’t take away from the general video game cutscene vibe that the visuals instill from the get-go.

It also fails to do a lot that other things haven’t done yet Gundam series or war stories in general. The only real novelty here is seeing these mobile suits come to life in a realistic arcade engine. Apart from that, you may have seen war stories and maybe even Gundam Story – explores many of the same themes but does it better. That by no means means it’s a failure, but it makes “Requiem for a Vengeance” feel like a grittier tie-in to One Year’s War rather than a must-see story in its own right.

Gundam: Revenge Requiem It fails to impress and differentiate itself from the sea of ​​other products out there. franchise. if you simply must There are more Gundamthen it’s serviceable in that regard, but aside from the iconic mobile suit recognition, it’s a fairly forgettable piece.

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Mobile Suit Gundam Revenge Requiem Currently streaming on Netflix.