Gundam F-91

Publisher
Beez
Country of origin
Japan
Format
Film
Running time
120
Year
1991

Mobile Suit Gundam F-91

By Joseph (Joe) Wood
29th Sep 05

Mobile Suit Gundam F-91 takes place over 40 years after the original Mobile Suit Gundam; however, you don’t need to know anything about the previous Gundam titles to really enjoy F-91.

In Universal Century 0123, humankind has lived in relative peace for 30 years, where vast parts of its civilisation live in huge space colonies. The words “Newtype” and “Gundam” are no longer part of common day-to-day language, but “war” is. Seabook Arno is a young mechanic living on the space colony “Frontier IV”. When “Frontier IV” is attacked by an organisation called the Crossbone Vanguard, Seabook his sister, girlfriend and other friends try to escape, but not before the Crossbone Vanguard kidnap Seabook’s girlfriend Cecily who is really the granddaughter of the Crossbone’s leader. Seabook and the other’s mange to escape and run into a group of Earth Federation trainees who are equipped with a new mobile suit the F-91, which just happened to be designed by Seabook’s mother. Seabook takes the pilot seat of the F-91 as he and the trainees head to Frontier IV to stop the Crossbone Vanguard, and rescue Cecily. Meanwhile Cecily is being trained to take over the Crossbone Vanguard after her Grandfather, and Stepfather “Iron Mask”.

To watch F-91 as previously said you do not need any pervious knowledge of the Gundam universe, as it does not fit in with any of the pervious universal century stories, nor does it really affect any Gundam titles set after it. As a result, Gundam F-91 can stand on its own perfectly well, and can act as a nice, short, introduction into the Gundam universe. Of course knowing the Gundam history and what a “Newtype” is does help slightly in making sense of one or two comments some of the characters throw in.

Speaking of the characters, as this is only a two hour movie you might expect character development to suffer, this isn’t the case though as most of the main characters do undergo a lot of development in such a short space of time. This leads into one of the movies problems in that things happen rather quickly, there is very little time between battles (which are not too bad as they are extremely entertaining to watch) and sometimes it seems as if several days have passed in the space of ten minutes. I was watching the film must have blinked and someone had switched sides, and had no idea that the change had taken place until a few minutes later. It’s true that every Sci-fi movie since Star Wars has borrowed a little something from it (the first Gundam had “Beam” Sabers), but the character “Iron Mask” is a rather too obvious, inferior, Darth Vader clone, and at one point there’s a bit of music that sounds like a blatant rip-off the “Imperial March” and frankly there can be no excuse for that.

The animation levels could still hold up to some of today’s more recent stuff, and the music seamlessly blends with the animation to produce a rather slick and often beautiful view of the scene and the world in which it’s set. The English dub track is professionally done, but there are a few cringe worthy lines such as everyone’s instance to refer to the federation trainees leader as “Acting Captain” throughout the entire film, and it just sounds extremely forced.

Gundam F-91 is a great introduction for those who would like to see what all the fuss about the Gundam franchise is all about but don’t feel like committing themselves to a full ten volume Gundam series or multiple DVDs. Gundam fans may find that the things done in Gundam F-91 have been done far better in other titles, this is true but it doesn’t stop F-91 from being extremely enjoyable.

R2 DVD Notes

Features: English and Japanese 5.1, English and Japanese 2.0, English French Dutch German Subtitles.

Release information: Publisher: BEEZ Out: September 26, 2005 Classification: PG

Notes: No extras apart from a few trailers. Although this DVD did come with a small "BEEZ Catalouge" booklet featuring information on all of BEEZ's current titles avaliable. This looks set to be something BEEZ will be including with all their DVD's as standard.

-- Joseph (Joe) Wood 29th Sep 05