Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles
By Cory Peynado, Blockbuster.co.uk
“If we make it out of this alive, my wife's gonna kill me.”
Imagine it - boosting your thrusters into the dark vacuum of space and swooping down just low enough to make it under a huge chunky slab of meteor rock and then you level out your spacecraft again. Your fleet totally has your back and are awaiting orders but then it happens, oh yeah you guessed it, bus driver wakes you up and tells you to pay for the three seats your sprawled out on.
This didn’t faze me though; there is still one more avenue that can be used to blur the lines between realism and fantasy, between being called captain or weirdo… (but we all get called weirdo though, right……) I’m speaking of the long running anime franchise,
Robotech and the long awaited full-length feature movie, The Shadow Chronicles.
It began almost twenty years ago. Three animated series from Japan cleverly interweaved and became
Robotech the series. This movie picks up during the last two episodes of the original
Robotech saga, and shows us the ending of the show from an entirely new perspective. And of course to spoil us a little, they have improved the visuals and included some amazing new vocal talents.
“What can I say? I've always had a thing for machines.”
Set in the year 2004 AD, the planet Earth has been in the clutches of an alien invader called the Invid. Now the Invid are a bug-like race with a hive mind that feeds off a substance called protoculture which is a living energy source in the form of a plant. Small resistance groups have fought a gruelling and arduous war against the race for a very long time but have rarely made much headway. Admiral Rick Hunter, the hero of the original series, is off in another part of the galaxy and the forces of Earth have been preparing for a final assault.
Comparisons to
Starwars are inevitable (especially with
Mark Hamill voicing one of the main characters) but this is only to its credit. Anime and Sci-Fi regularly work in unison together and for fans of both, this is Christmas come early. Its
Firefly meets
Star Trek really or maybe
Starwars, bottled and in a cartoon form. I’m an avid anime fan myself so although I hadn’t seen much of the previous series of
Robotech I was still able to enjoy this as a standalone movie.