I was calling Macross Plus the movie edition “Top Gun in space” in my head long before I heard pretty much everyone else on the Sunday night of Scotland Loves Anime call it the same thing. Ergo, it makes it into the review.
However, the male idiots in Top Gun were at least a bit charismatic. There’s almost nothing to redeem the fools here.
Furthermore, at least the love triangles you’d expect with one girl and two competing fighter pilots make sense in Top Gun clones. Here the grim-faced idiot we’re supposed to dislike at least gives a toss, and the cocky hero seems pretty much aggressively disinterested.
There are a dozen Macross movies to watch before this one.
Macross Plus the movie edition plot
Two different aircraft trails are underway on the planet Eden in 2040. Space aircraft that turn into robots, although this is never important. One pilot, Isamu Dyson, transfers in because he’s broken too many rules, and no one else will take him. The other, Guld Bowman, looks weird and later, as an aside, turns out to be alien or something like that and presumably Macross fans knew. Whether Guld is an alien or not, too, is not important.
Music manager Myung Fang Lone gets herself involved. She has a history with both but is now managing Sharon Apple, and Sharon is a singing AI.
The pilots misbehave, seduce, race and otherwise refuse to compromise. Any attempt by other men, who are generally as foolish as these two, or women to be reasonable, makes matters worse.
If the audience knew it was a race against the clock for the two idiot pilots to sort themselves out before the AI goes HAL-the-ghost-from-the-Ring (Sadako Yamamura) might have helped.
Look and Feel
Studio Nue created, and Triangle Staff made the anime in the mid-1990s, and I think it’s held up fairly well. However, it does get to lean on many Macross legacy designs and styles.
It feels like a Top Gun story looking for heroes or a plot.
More importantly, for me, it just felt awkward. The plot lurches around in spits and spurts, surprising us when foreshadowing would have been better, foreshadowing when we don’t care.
We could see a bit of the world and escape off to that, but sadly, our main visual treats are with the spacecraft. There is a towering Macross battle station that matters in the final moments, but we barely get to see that either.
Overall
As you can tell, I’m underwhelmed by Macross Plus, the movie edition. I don’t care about the two heroes, and I care a little more about Myung. If she’d only just walked away from the two idiots, though!
I actually missed how the big bad went from supervillain on the verge of victory to defeat. I don’t think I fell asleep. I think I blinked. It was a short scene. Like much of the anime, it doesn’t really matter; what matters was that we’d had some love triangle resolution and a long enough dogfight in space, and it was time to wrap things up.
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