It was a bit confusing. I don't really understand where they are or what was going on or who is who initially. I suspect that more gets explained as it goes along.
Having watched as many mecha shows as I have by Tomino I suspect Cosmo is the main protagonist and the guy who gets slapped by the woman scientist is the "Ryu/Quattro/Roy Fokker" older mentor type character and will probably die.
Was a bit surprised to see the Ideon robot get formed so soon. I expected they might draw it out a bit ie. Voltron.
Sades pointed out that after watching the more modern Gundam shows it was nice to watch something with a style of animation that better allows you to tell characters faces apart.
Anxious to get to the next episodes but thought I'd give my initial thoughts after just the first episode.
It's pretty standard format in Japanese mech shows - rush through to the first mech appearance, work the rest in later - but some of the information is very slow coming, the Ideon specifically is a mystery Sheryl (hot scientist chick) is working on. After that the first ten-ish are slow but IMO it gives the characters space to grow. Early on Cosmo = Amuro and Bes = Bright but they go their own way a little bit after that.
Well, I'm getting through this a lot slower than I want to be. Watched episode 13 last night and I've got to say I'm struggling a bit.
Cosmo is a douchebag and so is the girl pilot and Sheryl needs to get told to shut the **** up.
I guess it's just that there aren't many likeable characters aside from Bes and Karala.
Plus the pacing is very slow, it's very monster of the week and the animation is pretty bad but I knew about all of that going in and that's not what's making it difficult to want to watch.
I think it's just that so many of the characters are just really unlikeable and that the overall plot isn't very well-defined at this point.
I'm going to keep at it though. I'm determined to like this.
Oh, Sheryl's fabulous, she's like something off Dallas. Did you involuntarily cheer when Giije winded her?
Yeh, Cosmo and Kasha are dicks to start off with. I find it nice though because they get called on it and shown to be wrong a lot more than Amuro did - everyone remembers Bright slapping Amuro but Amuro then got his own way most of the time regardless. Whereas there's always that lingering chance that Bes is just going to kill Cosmo for answering back.
But the series as a whole does not have a particularly high opinion of the human race, that much is true. Karala's probably about the only nice person in the whole show. Oh, and Lou.
IIRC about 17/18 are the nadir; after that it bounces back and gets a lot more drive. I think it helps in a way that the first half is so slow and the second so fast, but I won't go into that too much until you're there.
I think, and this is speculation, that ratings for the first half of the planned 52 episodes were a bit of a disaster considering there were high hopes after the belated success of Gundam so Tomino pulled his finger out a bit and compressed a lot of stuff down (very few of the later Buff Clan generals last as long as the early ones) to try and avoid cancellation.
The bit you're in now is roughly the parallel to the stuff in Gundam where the White Base is just pottering around Earth if that's any help as an analogy.
Yeh, I'm afraid you'll just have to stick at it - it genuinely is worth it (plus once you've done it once you've got the option of watching the first film instead of most of the poor episodes - that relatively little of 4 to about 20 makes it into the thing says it all). Cosmo and Kasha get more bearable sooner rather than later, though.
I watched 14 and 15 just a bit ago and they were superb. Cosmo almost gets killed before they go to some base where they meet this lady commander who takes a liking to Cosmo then dies. Next one had Sheryl kidnapping Karala and promptly falling into a Buff Clan trap and becoming hostages. Both very good.
While I thought A Contact did a decent job of telling the beginning part of the series I don't feel it's an adequate substitute for watching the actual show. There's just not enough there to make you really get a feel for the personalities and motivations behind the characters.
Granted it's a whole lot easier to watch than the series because let's face it, the series is really slow paced and repetitive and frankly the first 22 episodes are almost all really boring, but there are flashes of brilliance among all that and the last 17 episodes are some of the best of anything I've ever seen. Really there's a lot of really really good stuff that you don't get from watching A Contact, so while it's a fine movie to watch if you've already watched the show I'd recommend not ignoring the series in favor of just this movie.
Be Invoked however is one of the best anime movies I've ever seen. It is awesome. Truly.
It gives you a bit of recap of the last bits from the series and then it gives you the proper ending that the series wasn't able to provide. I'll admit that with all the death and destruction it's a bit of a downer, but what is remarkable is how much each death matters and the emotions it all evokes.
The ending is particularly good. So many characters to touch upon in those last minutes of the film and yet you don't feel that any of them were shortchanged.
I'm not going to pretend I didn't struggle through a great deal of this show but I really do feel that the last half of the series and Be Invoked were totally worth it. If you're at all interested in watching this show I think you should definitely give it a try.
A Contact's biggest sin is Gije - we get all the annoying Char clone stuff but none of the Ome Foundation (really) or his relationship with Sheryl. In the film it's (very close to literally) "this is Gije, he's on our side now."
The thing I really like about the later episodes (about from the moon onwards) is that sense that they're all helpless passengers - they try to make peace with the Earth forces and end up wiping them out; they try to blow up the Ideon and the Ide stops them; they try to find a planet to hide away and keep running into people (the way the Buff Clan's massive fleet is slowly built up is great); they try to stop the thing from forming the Ideon and it does it anyway and cuts a planet in half.
I always find Be Invoked to be very uplifting overall - the deaths are terrifying (Karala shot in the face, Ashura beheaded, Joliver just plain bleeding to death because no-one gets around to checking him out) as is the constant "there's some hope! Oh, it's gone" narrative (e.g. Messiah surviving Karala's death only for the whole universe to end anyway) but the spirits all making peace with each other and heading to ?Earth? reborn is rather cleansing even if it sounds cheesy as **** written down.
The animation and music for the films really steps up as well - it helps that both films are actually pretty exciting on top. Plus Bes gets shot something like five or six times (once in the back of the head) and only dies when the spaceship he's on is torn apart, which is more awesome than anything Bright ever managed...
I certainly think the whole thing deserves a Western release, especially as Shin Getter have done the hard work. But then I get quite evangelical about the whole thing.
(IIRC fanon has it that the Gundam universe is created by the events at the end of Ideon; a manga postulated that Judau from ZZ is Cosmo reincarnated; whether Tomino knew much about this is debatable but apparently Ideon was initially slated to be incorporated into Turn A).
Super-glad you liked it overall - like I say, the early ones are a slog (I tend to rewatch the first couple then skip forward to 21-ish whenever I put it on) but I do think it's really worth it in the end. Now you can help me hit people who say Zeta Gundam's bleak.
So that's where the "Look at the monitor to your right" with both characters proceeding to look left screenshot is from
I knew the protagonist looked familiar somehow. Only watched episode 1 so far but the animation makes it look even more like some kind of proto-Gundam while some of the uniforms make me think of VOTOMS.
The wikipedia article on the series is inaccurate in the sense that the meteorites falling onto both earth and the Buff Clan home planet only happen during the movie, but in the TV series it's clearly implied that this has been happening for quite some time and is only getting worse as the series progresses.
Since Ideon is apparently the source of these meteorites, and they're the reason Buff Clan themselves was looking for Ide in the first place, does this mean Ide was behind everything the whole time? Even as the excavation team on Solo was still restoring the giant machines, was Ide planning to destroy both sides from the beginning?
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