Gundam Requiem For Vengeance - The White Devil's Burden
If I was being cheeky, the title of this would be, "This is why we can't let white people write Gundam." More seriously, I think much of Gundam RFV's failures are at its core, failures of its creative team to adequately understand what Gundam represents, both as a mecha franchise and as a war story.
Purporting to follow the perspective of Zeon soldiers during the events of the One Year War, RFV intends to be a "boots on the ground" take on Gundam, reminiscent of the more military focused Gundam OVAs, like 08th MS Team and 0083 Stardust Memory. The gimmick here being that our protagonists are fighting for Zeon, the genocidal fascistic aggressors in the One Year War, who murdered somewhere between a third and half of the human population through a series of unspeakable war crimes. This is just the beginning of the very shaky ground RFV starts on.
To be clear, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with telling a story from this perspective. Gundam 0080 features Bernie Wiseman, a Zeon mobile suit pilot, as one of its major protagonists. Most would agree 0080 is one of the single best told stories in the UC setting. It examines Bernie's interiority. Here's a fundamentally good man in spite of the conflict he was born into. His humanity and compassion are the traits that make his story's conclusion all the more tragic.
Gundam RFV has none of that. We're introduced to Iria Solari, captain of the Red Wolf Squadron, along with the rest of her cadre of bland war story archetypes. There's a serious one, there's a funny one, etc. We learn of her background as a musician, her fractured family waiting for her back in space, and some vague notion that her obligation toward her fellow Spacenoids drives her to enlist in the military. Solari is a pretty terrible protagonist, and her supporting cast don't help much in beating the Zeon Did Nothing Wrong allegations.
In fact, one might argue that what Erasmus Brosdau and Gavin Hignight have created here is something truly anomalous. They've attempted to create an apolitical Gundam. But as we all know, making something apolitical is itself a deliberate act. By erasing the UC's unique fictional geopolitics and ideology, they've created something even worse in the void left behind. They've created propaganda.
None of the Zeon perspectives in RFV ever engage with the tangible politics of the setting they belong to. Zeon is here to fight for Good and to do that, we have to beat Them, The Federation. Why? How did the war start? What are their moral justifications for fighting on the side they belong to? What did the Federation do that convinced them committing the gravest war crime imaginable was a moral necessity to earn Spacenoid independence? What are their feelings on Ghiren Zabi's genocidal views of earthbound humanity?
RFV is a hollow work. Even the action heavy 0083 or Thunderbolt make some attempt at engaging with the political ideologies its characters carry with them into the narrative. RFV is almost proud of how little it engages with the world of the UC. RFV's political viewpoints are best represented by the literal children that attempt to console Alfred at the end of 0080. Don't worry about what these robots represent, there's always another cool war on the horizon.
Even if one were to look at RFV as a personification of the "wow cool robot" end of the Gundam spectrum. It arguably fails there too. The Armored Core CG intros left a deep impression on me growing up. I have a great deal of appreciation for a well directed CG mecha cutscene. RFV's action follows the worst and most archaic tropes of Western mecha fiction. Some unholy amalgamation of Gundam and Mechwarrior; RFV's mobile suits lumber around, rarely ever taking advantage of the unique qualities mecha combat can offer.
Mobile suits take cover behind improbably sized piles of rubble, as if they were soldiers at The Siege of Bastogne. Mobile suits regularly abandon their firearms in favor of melee combat for no reason. The story's actual Gundam repeatedly has our protagonists at its mercy, moments away from the killing blow, before being distracted by ultimately harmless small arms fire that takes its attention elsewhere. This narrative contrivance happens so often you could probably make a drinking game out of it. Even if you can appreciate the technical artistry and fidelity of these detailed CG models, the actual choreography and direction of the fights offer nothing of value to anyone who's watched more than a handful of mecha anime. But hey, the Gouf Custom sure put a lot of work in. As an 08th MS Team fan, that's gotta mean something I guess.
So in the end, does Requiem for Vengeance have anything to offer? Not really I think. It might serve as a decent tone piece for the Netflix audience it was so clearly made for. But I struggle to justify even that. It's a terrible introduction to the UC, it's a terrible representative of Gundam as a whole, and it's not even a particularly exciting showcase of high tech robot action. About the only thing I can really say is that RFV is not the worst thing Gundam has ever put out. It's such a longrunning franchise, Gundam has missed the mark so many times that RFV being bad isn't really anything new for your longtime fan.
What it probably represents, more pessimistically, is an insight into how Western creators will handle Gundam as it becomes an increasingly international franchise. If RFV is an indication of how Western sensibilities will portray the UC, I'm not left with much optimism for the unannounced Hollywood Gundam film.
It's not that a Western perspective can't comprehend Gundam, but I fear the inherent market forces of Western media creation will never allow a mainstream Gundam production to embrace its more jagged political edges or the more esoteric elements of its setting. A Gundam that is perfectly packaged for frictionless consumption is no Gundam at all.
The creative team that worked on Requiem for Vengeance looked at the vast history of the UC and walked away with a surface level understanding. They looked directly into the core of that setting, and found nothing of interest to it beyond some eyecatching mecha designs. It's a deeply unsettling conclusion, and if it's the best we can hope for from Western creators, I'm not sure they can be trusted with the White Devil.