Whoever you are, there’s a good chance you’re Godzilla Vs. Kong crazy. It’s the battle of titans, the two hugest monsters, literally and figuratively, doing battle in a new era. And if you’re all about that grudge match now, you were probably into Kong: Skull Island a few years ago.
And if you were into the movie Godzilla Vs. Kong and Kong: Skull Island before that, there are enough data points there to suggest that you already know and love the anime Gundam. And if you don’t know and love it now, you would given half a chance, most likely.
Why is this relevant or good? Well, it just so happens that Jordan Vogt-Roberts, director of Kong: Skull Island, is now set to make a live-action feature film based on Gundam in association with Netflix, who will be streaming the property everywhere but in china, where studio Legendary Entertainment will.
If you are unfamiliar with the Gundam franchise, it encompasses some 50 tv series, movies and other properties dating back over 40 years to the original show Mobile Suit Gundam. Without getting too much into detail, In its plot, the space colonies of a futuristic Earth wage a war of independence against Earth itself, the fighting in which is primarily conducted through the use of giant robot suits.
The complex storylines led to Mobile Gundam being regarded as something like Japan’s answer to Star Wars, and the show’s premise lent itself very handily to success in manga, video games, action figures and model kits. Overall Gundam did much to popularize the entire genre of mecha anime, which later came to include shows better known in the United States such as Transformers and its doppelganger Go-Bots.
Netflix is not saying much about what part of the saga the movie will be based on. The original series was set in what is called the Universal Century, a future far off enough to allow for the development of these fantastical robot armies, but it is unclear whether the movie version will follow suit, or whether it will skew closer to any of the subsequent shows, movies or comics.
What is sure is that the movie is likely to be chock full of enormous space battles between some formulation of Earth and its colonies, whether it be the Principality of Zeon and the Earth Federation as in the original show, the Titans and the Anti-Earth Union Group a la the succeeding series, Mobil Suit Zeta Gundam, or one of the numerous matchups following that.
If you haven’t seen Gundam as yet and you like the sound of what you’ve read so far- and who doesn’t like the sound of that- you can start to get your fix immediately by streaming the original series on either CrunchyRoll or Funimation, with other iterations also to be found on those sites as well.
By the time the movie hits and Gundam-Mania is in full force in the US, you might have tapped the vast wealth that is Gundam. And not only will its release bring you a desperately needed jolt of that sweet robot action, but you’ll be the well-versed authority on it in your circle of friends. And attempting to be the most knowledgeable friend on space robot battles is the space robot battle that we all can relate to.
