Incoming Colony Drop: Legendary Making a Live-Action Gundam Film

Not this shit again.

‘Gundam’ Anime Franchise Getting Live-Action Film Treatment From Legendary https://t.co/mj1a9kB0li

— Wario64 (@Wario64) July 5, 2018

For those who're late to the party, Legendary's PR guy included this summary:

The original Gundam series is set in the Universal Century, an era in which humanity’s growing population has led people to emigrate to space colonies. Eventually, the people living in the colonies seek their autonomy, and launch a war of independence against the people living on Earth. Through the tragedies and discord arising from this human conflict, not only the maturation of the main character, but also the intentions of enemies and the surrounding people are sensitively depicted.

The last franchise that needs adaptation to live-action feature films is Mobile Suit Gundam. Previously, we saw the production of a live-action version of Space Battleship Yamato, which you can find clips of freely on YouTube, and my God is that a trainrwreck- and that was by a Japanese studio with intimate familiarity with the source property. Prior to that we had the utterly disastrous G-Savior adaptation. The former did far better financially than the latter, but neither were needed nor wanted and are ignored by the franchise's audience. (Killing off most of the cast didn't help for Yamato.)

This stupid insistence upon making live-action adaptations of anime classics demonstrates the failure of the corporate stewards to comprehend what the hell they're stewards of, or how that property works. It's animated for a reason, and that reason is because you can do things in animation that are impractical or impossible to accomplish with live-action- like giant fucking robots.

Which inevitably means that the adaptation will fail to appeal to the core franchise audience. Either through incompetence or the proper playing to the medium you're adapting the property to, you cannot avoid deviating from the success strategy that made the source property popular and successful in the first place. In this case, there's no way you're not going to turn away from the giant robot action (and space opera action generally) that this franchise is famous for in favor of character melodrama. Why? Costumes and sets are far cheaper and easier to write and produce in live-action film and television; it's why soap operas, sit-coms, and procedurals are so commonplace.

The Gundam franchise is a world-famous and respected franchise because it exploits the animeation medium's strengths well, using the fact that animating character drama and massive fleet actions are the same expense of resources from a logistics perspective, so why not make the best damn science fiction adventures possible? It's not like you can't also have tense character drama, as both the classic and the recent successes demonstrate very well, and by doing so you create and sustain audiences that you cannot possibly maintain with live-action. (Proof of concept? Animated Star Wars does the property better than live-action does.)

I would rather that Legendary focus on acquiring/producing Chinese properties for export to the West, since it is owned by the Chinese and inevitably will be used to push their agenda anyway, so why not be honest about it and so that chauvanism openly? (Or did you think that movie about lizards attacking the Great Wall was Matt Damon's idea?) This announcement isn't just a warning of a shit film coming to theaters, it's very likely a shot across the bow that China's going to use cultural capital to reassert its influence across the region. (Since they can't do so militarily, and won't ever due to their own issues.)

So this film won't just suck, it'll be deliberately sabotaged to suck for effect. We in the West aren't the only ones engaged in a culture war, and Japan's going to learn the hard way that they're going to get it from both ends: the Chinese and the Western Left.

Let's hope this deal collapses before they can do any real damage to the property. You don't have to be the owners to do critical damage, if whom you license from is sufficiently inattentive to what you do with their toys until after you break them good and hard.