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Digital
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Monday, 03 November 2008 16:00 |
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Page 1 of 4
 Manga Entertainment jumps into bed with Apple, and the first result is the appearance in the UK iTunes Store of an anime classic in the form of Robotech: The Macross Saga. It's the fourth release of the series in the past few years, and once again it's gotten a price cut. Does that help the appeal any?
If you're looking for detailed episode summaries and copious screenshots, check out page two onwards of this review. On this page, we're more interested in the overview of what you're getting for your hardearned. Robotech: Macross Saga runs for 36 episodes, and is considered by many to be a classic of science-fiction anime, although Harmony Gold's fairly heavy-handed English adaptation has perhaps removed a bit of the charm of the original Macross series. On the plus side, it has received an extensive remastering, so the video quality is as good as you're likely to see for a show this age (with allowances made for putting it through the digital download ringer - this isn't full DVD quality, but it's still decent).
Robotech's story at first glance has a lot going for it. A giant alien spacecraft, nearly 3 miles in length, crash-lands on Macross island in the South Pacific, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Faced with the knowledge that aliens considerably more powerful than humanity are out there, humanity puts its full efforts into restoring the craft & learning from the advanced technology on board, which the scientists have dubbed "robotech". Eventually the alien ship, renamed the SDF-1, is fully restored and ready for launch, but no sooner is it ready to fly than a race of warriors known as the Zentraedi come looking for the downed ship, and a war that threatens the existence of life on Earth soon follows. That's about as epic a premise as you could hope to have, and in some points the series lives up to its promise, but there are two problems running through the series that threaten to throw a dampener on things, depending how badly they bother you.
First, there's a stretching of scientific reality to breaking point. I'm all for suspension of disbelief, especially in SF stories, but I found myself shaking my head in disbelief a few times at the way things kept going conveniently wrong for the SDF-1 - what with anti-gravity generators simply floating off and Fold drives magically disappearing, the whole setup around the ship's retreat from Earth just felt wrong. Add in the way the Macross City citizens simply picked themselves up, moved their buildings into the ship (intact and apparently in the same layout the city had back on Earth) before carrying on as if nothing had happened, and my suspension of disbelief was being stretched to its limits. Some of the battle scenes later in the series were similarly "yeah, right" in style - one shot from a ground-based cannon destroying hundreds of thousands of Zentraedi ships, and so on. It just didn't feel right.
The characters themselves weren't helping, either. Rick suffers from a bad dose of jealousy and has problems with priorities, Minmei is self-centred, Lisa really needs to lighten up, Captain Gloval seems to find it almost impossible to make decisions... You get the idea. The only really likeable character is Roy, who gets killed off before he can really make an impression anyway. The English dub is also quite poor and difficult to listen to in places, with lifeless delivery of lines being the main problem.
It's not all bad, though. There are some good mid-season character pieces, the Zentraedi characters really steal the show in some places as they attemp to come to terms with the human way of life, and the inability of some of them to give up the fighting life is a key plank of the later part of the series. "Inconsistent" is probably the best word for it - there are pieces of Macross Saga that fall into both the "truly bad" and "truly good" camps - and because the good moments are so good, the bad will have you screaming at the screen in frustration. It is worth watching, though - as much for its place in anime folklore as anything else, perhaps, but also because in its best moments it provides a really good look at what it means to be human. The DVD set of these episodes costs £25 retail, and that's a bit of a steal in itself - being able to get it all for £11.99, assuming that not having any physical media doesn't bother you, is even more of a steal. Well worth checking out.
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