Back in April, Sydney Sweeney was attached to star in the live-action Gundam movie, and now Noah Centineo is in talks to be her co-star.
However, the biggest news comes from The Hollywood Reporter, which reveals the following about the story.
Now, this is not a new story for Gundam, as series like Gundam 0080 and especially Gundam 08th MS Team explored this idea of romance on both sides of the One Year War conflict. Even the original Mobile Suit Gundam had an element of this, with the complex relationship between Amuro, Lalah, and Char.
However, for the first two OVA series, they already existed alongside multiple long-running shows and a few movies thrown in for good measure.
The point being that Gundam’s main attraction is its complex, multifaceted core narrative, with which the characters interact. Even the original Mobile Suit Gundam series had to be done as a movie trilogy. Not to mention that one of the best Gundam movies in the saga, Char’s Counterattack, was in fact the finale to a three-series-long narrative.
Just turning that into a love story doesn’t work when much of the complex world-building will inevitably be absent for many non-Gundam fans who will see this for the first time.
I do genuinely feel sorry for writer Brian K. Vaughan here, as he has the unenviable task of somehow fitting ten pounds of flour into a one-pound jar.
This really should have been a live-action series first and then, maybe, a follow-on movie later if it was warranted.
While I am sure both Sweeney and Centineo will do their best, the real main character in Gundam is its setting and overarching narrative about a very complex conflict set on and around the Earth.
Obviously, this won’t be the first live-action adaptation of Gundam, as we already had the unfortunate G-Savior. However, that movie wasn’t able to do any real damage because it had a limited budget.
This new live-action Gundam movie clearly doesn’t have that budgetary limitation, and when this goes wrong, which it’s very likely to do, it will go wrong at scale and do long-term damage to the saga.
I’ve been saying this for the last decade: Hollywood needs to up its game if it wants to tackle anime and manga adaptations properly. While the new One Piece live-action series is actually decent, there is a far longer and more gruesome history of abject failure. I just hope, probably in vain, that Gundam won’t be the latest casualty.
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