Mobile Suit Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance

Episodes 1-6

Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance is a thoroughly middling experience that occasionally breaks into brief moments of greatness before settling back into being just so-so. Its most striking feature—the look of the animation—is a real mixed bag.

This series is another entry in a growing catalog of gritty war stories that attempt to carve their own niche in the dramatic events of the One Year War. We jump straight into the latter stages of the conflict with Zeon forces and the Federation clashing in hotspots across the globe. The Red Wolves act as our main cast members and serve as the point of view for the audience, relating their beliefs as spacenoids, citizens of the Principality of Zeon, and as soldiers. Most of the Federation soldiers are nameless—and often faceless—enemies that keep them running from place to place but seldom interact with our protagonists directly.

The main cast is written well enough. Most of the runtime is spent with Iria and Kneeland as the focal cast members. Iria Solari is the consummate professional who nevertheless fights for her principles. Kneeland LeSean is the capable, if somewhat brash, younger soldier in the unit. There are some other characters of note, such as Captain Zydos and Dr. Kasuga, but Iria and Kneeland are in the spotlight for most of the six-episode runtime. The voice cast for both the English and Japanese give fine performances, though they don't have the most gripping material to work with. As far as characterization goes, they are handled just fine but don't do much to go beyond typical archetypes found in military science fiction narratives. What's hard with this cast is settling in and finding them to be believable human characters when their facial expressions and lip movements are so unnatural.

This means this is as good a time as any to bring up the visuals. The animation was done using Unreal Engine 5, which, for those of you not in the know, is the latest version of the long-running video game engine. Unreal tends to do well with hyper-realism and that is certainly the tone that the team was going for here. The visual language of Requiem for Vengeance is firmly entrenched in the "real robot" side of the equation. We get realistic battle damage, considerations like ammunition and machine repair, soldiers fretting over supplies and maintenance, the whole nine yards.

It's hard to argue that the series doesn't achieve the aim of making the One Year War a believable conflict when everything clicks into place. HUDs, cockpits, and pilot suits are lovingly rendered in exacting detail. Zakus, covered in makeshift ablative armor built from tank parts, looks suitably field-ready and ramshackle. Transport ships exploding under the weight of anti-aircraft fire send off great blossoming fireballs of deadly beauty. It all has the look of a gritty conflict that never truly happened, but maybe, if you squint hard enough, it has just the right amount of verisimilitude to seem possible.

But for every area of visual strength, it feels like there are twice as many letdowns or missed opportunities. The machines may look photorealistic, but the characters are rubbery and doll-like. Their faces are too close to real to not compare them to the real thing and in that regard, they fall far too short. The characters' expressions, eye and mouth movements, and posture make them seem like… well, NPCs in a video game. There's a stiffness to the character's movement that makes them feel as robotic as the machines they pilot.

It also doesn't help that the visuals are not universally excellent for mobile suits or conflict. The battle scenes are fine enough when the action is more methodical. For example, seeing a Zaku crouch and fire its machine gun at a distant target looks and sounds as heavy as you would expect. The lighting is a particular area of strength, with the Gundam often lit by fires at night and appearing as menacing as the white demon moniker suggests. Yet there are many times when the show just doesn't look or sound convincing. Mobile suits running across the battlefield seem a bit too light and weightless. Sometimes, weapon fire seems downright anemic, such as the Gouf's chain gun fire looking like little more than a garden hose on a high-pressure setting. This is to say nothing of the on-foot battles with human soldiers, which look stiff, in addition to a lot of people standing at their full height and shooting rifles into the distance.

The Unreal Engine visuals look so utilitarian there is little room for wider artistic expression. The direction is competent, but the material doesn't give a lot of opportunities to take big risks. The most unique sequences are Iria's dreams, which impress you in all the ways you would hope. I think the dream with her playing a violin in a crowded theater is perhaps the best sequence in the series and fits well thematically to boot. But those moments are few and far between.

The pacing is similarly split. On the one hand, at only six episodes it's not a huge time investment. I knocked it out in a single sitting and felt it moved at a fine pace. Every episode has a pretty clear objective, and they move from one location to another without getting too bogged down. However, the fight scenes have a very repetitive tempo that cheapens a lot of the drama. Most battle scenes involve a tank rolling into the frame and everyone shouting, and then in three to five seconds, it explodes. Then a mobile suit will walk into the frame and make everyone shout, but a few seconds later it explodes or gets shoved out of the way. Occasionally, the shows-up-and-explodes vehicle is an aircraft or an artillery piece, but the setup is the same each time: vehicle appears, everyone scrambles, it explodes, lather, rinse, repeat. There isn't much in the way of meaningful landmarks, overviews of the battlefield, or methodical advancement either. Enemies appear from offscreen and explode, not unlike a video game—which does not dispel the general video game cutscene vibe that the visuals instill to begin with.

It also fails to do much that hasn't already been done in other Gundam series or war stories in general. The only real novelty here is seeing these mobile suits brought to life in a realistic video game engine. Other than that, you've probably seen a war story—likely even a Gundam story—that explores a lot of the same themes and does it better. That by no means makes this a failure, but that makes Requiem for Vengeance feel like one more gritty One Year War tie-in to toss in the pile rather than a must-watch story in its own right.

Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance fails to impress or do much to separate itself from the many other offerings in the franchise. If you simply must have more Gundam, then that's serviceable in that respect, but beyond iconic mobile suit recognition, it is a rather forgettable production.

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Mobile Suit Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance is currently streaming on Netflix.