SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

hugh_booth I've seen a fair bit of Macross, understand the back story, and was looking for some new stuff to watch. I was sorely disappointed. The bag guys they brought in were clichéd and unbelievable, and the central plot descends from a great Sci-Fi story into sub par fantasy.To understand why the bad guys don't work, you need to know a little about the original series. Alien ship crashes in 1999 ending a global war and uniting the world. Some anti-unification dissidents make a little trouble, and then in 2009 the aliens arrive. This takes place between 1999 and 2009.With little else to work with, the anti-unification guys get tasked as the main bad guys for this. While Macross is known for variable fighters, here we learn that it was these bad guys that came up with them first. Theirs also seem to be better than the United Earth versions which are just coming out. So without any access to the alien technology on the ship, they have better variable fighters first, that actually work. Right, and what they're not telling us in the real world is that Al Queda was really the first to deploy the F-22 Raptor.Otherwise the central story revolves around an island with remains of an alien culture that influenced our evolution. This is standard Macross fair, but they manage to take it to ludicrous ends. On this island, singing by the shrine maiden can induce spontaneous high level mutation in nearby life. I can just see the cautionary warnings now. Be sure not to teach the shrine maiden any Britney Spears, it causes cancer. Now music has always played an important part in Macross, but I'll buy it having an emotionally debilitating effect on a group of emotionally sheltered giants long before this makes any sense. In the end this is all to support an unnecessary claim that life on Earth evolved way faster than it should have. It's like the makers saw some of the more clichéd Disney fair of the princess dancing around and singing while the animals rally and decided they needed to throw it in.It's a real shame, but Macross sequels and spin-offs have been extremely hit and miss. If you want action this is okay, but if you want a logical storyline, stick to the original Super-Dimensional Fortress Macross, and Macross Plus.

mahatmarandy Don't get me wrong, I love anything Macross-related, and this isn't a total disaster: the animation is beautiful, particularly in the dogfights, there's some nice humor here and there, some pulse pounding action and so forth, though the musical score struck me as rather generic and bland, and there's much to praise in the beautifully-realized transforming mecha, that's all great stuff.Alas, the story is goofy and the conclusion is incoherent. Young Buck Pilot crash lands on a Polynesian island that's populated by Aztecs (Or maybe it was Mayans). Excuse me? Turns out the Aztecs were experimented on 10,000 years ago by aliens they called "The Birdmen," and the priestly bloodline in these Polynesian Aztecs (Or Mayans) have the ability to psychically control various Birdmen artifacts left behind, including a machine that will wipe out all of humanity if we haven't figured out how to control our more base instincts (Violence, hate) by the time it's activated. Well, despite what Thor Heyerdahl wrote, neither Mayans nor Aztecs were Polynesian, and Polynesians are no mesoamericans, and even if they were, Polynesia was only settled in the last two or three thousand years and neither Mayan nor Aztec civilization was anywhere near 10,000 years old. In essence, it's just ancient astronauts crap that would play well in the 70s, but is kind of dated and silly now. That notwithstanding, we have the UN fighting the aptly-but-unimaginatively-named "Anti-UN" over control of this island and it's artifacts. The Anti-UN are not given any great depth or motivation, and the characters are not exactly compelling. It's good to see Roy Fokker again, but he's more of a jerk than usual in this OVA, and we get a cameo of Captain Bruno Global towards the end, but aside from that, no one we know is here. All of this would be merely annoying, of course, if the story were good, but the story is not good. It's merely an excuse to show some admittedly amazing dogfights, some cool transforming robots, and a (Typically) hot naked chick. The story is something to string action pieces to, but doesn't really have any umph behind it. It's ending is utterly abrupt and incoherent, and in the end none of this has any real relevance to the rest of the Macross universe. (or, for that matter, the Robotech universe where I think it could probably fit in somewhat easier.) In the end, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened that no one ever bothers to talk about again afterwards, so it may as well have not happened.Many people complain about the hokey-jokey nature of Macross 7. (Occasionally for good reason) Macross Zero goes to the exact opposite extreme, and is positively grim, far far grimmer than the original Macross, and remember the original Macross involved the deaths of 6 billion 999 million human beings in the space of about ten minutes, so it's a pretty grim show on occasion by itself. Everybody in this miniseries is so dour and unlikeable and grim all the time, to the point that it was hard to get involved in the whisper-thin storyline.Also, I found the redesign of Fokker's character to be particularly distracting. Pilots in Macross generally had long hair, and Roy was no exception. In flashbacks in Macross we also saw that he had long hair years in the past, however in Zero he's got a more typical military buzz-cut in 2008. Unless he's wearing a wig or hair extensions (Unlikely), there's no way he could have grown his hair out to Macross lengths in a year or so. This creates a continuity error through the series, and I'm probably taking this too seriously, but it really distracted me.

heero_yuy2 I've been waiting for another Macross series or movie coming up to reinstate its own strong genre in the anime industry, but i found it disappointing in this new prequel.1999. The year when an alien craft from space fell on earth, nations tremble upon knowing they are not alone in the universe, and different factions wage war upon the search for the ultimate weapon related to alien technology. Shin Kudo, a Un-Spacey pilot of an F-14-like aircraft fell to an island after having being shot by anti-UN fighter plane/mecha. He met the ancestral villages of a certain island led by Sara Noome as a girl with mystical powers that enable to float organic rocks through a song. After Shin's discovery of the mysticism, certain UN-Spacey troops landed on the island for related underground research that led also to more attacks and casualties by the anti-UN...and an unearthing revelation of a massive organic weapon 10,000 years buried beneath the island that may wipe out the whole human civilization.There were some points on the need to expand the Macross saga (amidst the non-inclusion of Kawanori's Minmay-Hikaru-Misa trilogy due to the copyright restraints) but it still cannot save the fact about the more details pertaining to one of the most viable weapon used in the whole Macross saga...the SDF-1. There is still no conclusion as to where the detailed origin of the space fortress being inclusive and informed in the prequel, and how the whole world had united to form the defense attacks prior to the first encounters with the Zentraedi. Furthermore, the good points goes to the relation of Protoculture origin through relations with the Mayan Civilization, and to the adaptability of evolving designs that leads to the famous VF-1.The prequel answers the crave for wanting to watch a new Macross saga, but after watching it, it's still lacks relative detail to the original story.

Dan Henwood Once again Shoki Kawamori-San has given us something that rivals the complexity and sheer beauty of Macross Plus. Seeming to follow a Lucas-esque trend he has chosen to do a prequel instead of a sequel in an attempt to show us a key point of the Macross 7 series. Spiritia.This strange, mystical, yet apparently inherent part of us all all, force. Stirrings of the Force from Star Wars abound, but you won't be seeing people leaping 50 feet in to the air. Its more nature based. With episodes 1, 2, 3 & 4 out, and only 5 to go we are all still a little confused as to spiritia and more important the 'birdman' alien device, for which the head is running around whilst the body is sat on a Stealth Aircraft carrier. Hopefully all will be explained in the final episode as its set one year before the original series, (set in 2009, but released in 1984.)The artwork and action is amazing in some places, (during fight scenes mostly,) and a little lacking in some others, but overall is pretty good. Better even than Macross Plus. Unlike before however characters are not predominantly Japanese but American or European. An attempt to play to the large US and European fan bases that have had immense difficulty getting hold of Macross material due to legal constraints over distribution rights. Shin is an often confused character, much like Hikaru Ichyjo in the original series, (NOT Rick Hunter his americanised version in the stolen series.) The stories have progressed and are more mature, although still comprehensible and enjoyable by the kids.All in all an excellent buy, if you can find a copy outside of Japan.