NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Nessieldwi Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

xamtaro Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles is the long awaited sequel to the Robotech franchise that started in the 80s. Its release was met with very mixed fan reaction and reviews ranging from amazingly awesome to downright terrible.I am a "late comer" to Robotech, having only discovered the classic series recently thanks to dvds and youtube. My first impression was not a good one and only season 3 of the original series made me not dismiss it as overly dramatic, hyped up anime trash. Robotech the Shadow Chronicles was entertaining but inconsistent. It is very obvious that there were different directors and writers working on different parts of the movie. Story - The good points of the story was that it was easy to follow. It lent itself well to the setting of the movie. However, the creators make the assumption that the viewer already has a level of knowledge concerning Robotech since little time is devoted to flesh out the backstory, and this would tend to alienate new viewers.Characters - A very varied bunch of characters with well defined personalities. Only the main cast gets any significant development though. Most of the characters are likable and the dialogue interplay between them fits very nicely. Their character redesigns are very attractive and still keep the essence of the originals. On the other hand, once again the creators assume that the viewer should have prior Robotech knowledge and thus character back stories are just glossed over.Animation - Inconsistent in both the 2D and 3D. For the most part, the 2D art is a good balance between detail and animation fluidity. Vibrant colours complement the attractive character designs and smooth character movements. However the few animation short cuts used can be quite obvious and jarring and the "zoom in to face close up" shot is slightly over used. In the 3D department, there are scenes of amazing quality, like The shot where Scott Bernard is flying is Alpha Fighter toward the invid Hive to look for Ariel. Another well done 3D scene was the Haydonite mecha invading Space Station Liberty. The quality in those is equal to that of high production value anime movies like Sky Crawlers. However, at the same time, you get really shoddy 3D work like the invid mecha and the human space cruisers.Choreography - I do not know if it was just inexperience, or that the directors were trying to be true to the original.......but the fight choreography of the space battles looked like they came straight out of the original 80s anime. This is not really a good thing since this is a 2007 production. In the original anime, to save on budget, mecha would zip across screen locked in a set pose, enemies would disappear in gaudy balls of flame and space cruisers exchange volleys of fire while making no attempts at evasive maneuvers, basically on screen movement of mecha and spaceships were kept to a minimum. Robotech the Shadow Chronicles continues that tradition. Mecha are locked in a set pose as they zip about screen, there is minimal mecha part movement, spaceships do disappear in gaudy out-of-place looking balls of flame. All in all, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles is a good effort by the creators. Especially since for most of them, especially the directors, this is their debut production. Perhaps their only mistake was continuing the mistakes of the original series. The sometimes campy dialogue, derivative music(the original robotech theme seemed ripped from Superman), limited mecha animation and inconsistent production standards were all carried over from the original series. Of course, this would spark the "keeping true to the original" debate again among fans.I look forward to seeing the next installment of the Robotech saga but I do hope that the creators learn from the mistakes of the original series and Shadow Chronicles.

barriosk There is a good reason why JK Rowling will never let anyone else write official Harry Potter stories and why the Tolkien family are even reluctant to let people adapt movies of their stories. Let fan boys and fan girls get into the kitchen and you undoubtebly get one big fat mess where the fanboys try to rewrite history to the way "they" think it should have gone. For example, Scott Bernard goes from angry, bitter duty bound sourpuss to mellow and easy going. Some fans complained that Dana Sterling was too annoying to be the daughter of favorites Max and Miriya, so they decided to create a "perfect" version of their daughter in Maia Sterling.Like Maia Sterling, characters here are two dimensional. They are either good guys we are supposed to root for or boo hiss bad guys. There are no flawed characters like Rick Hunter or Lisa Hayes who could drive you crazy but ultimately you want the best for them. There are also no "baddies" whose motivations you can sort of understand. It doesn't help that the creators don't exactly have rights to the Macross characters that everybody knows and loves. That's why we have a completely unrecognizable Rick Hunter and no Lisa, Max or Miriya (and don't be surprised if Miriya has been bumped off. Exedore and Breetai and their loyal crew were killed in prequel comics and as Zentraedi is a Macross term, the Yune brothers seem to be getting around this issue by committing fictional genocide).The plot is interesting although too derivative from Babylon 5 and Star Wars but hopefully in the sequel we get to see what Rick and co. have been up to. Because the SDF-3's been lost for some 20 years and I can't be the only fan who just wants someone to either find the damn vessel and move on or blow Rick and co. up and move on to other things.

nesonjacc I will keep it short. Honestly this is not even worthy of sitting in a chair for the whole 88 minutes....If there has been any possibility of rating it as a -(minus)10 i would do so without thinking. ]The not "low end" but "amateurish" CGI leaves a sore taste in an artists mouth.... This is a shamefull moment for Robotech. And after this as some people say.... It is on its way to the bottom of the well...When one succeeds to get over the awful "CGI" what one gets is :shalow character work, incoherent story, and "Ripped off" ( they say inspired)... soundtrack( this is a case of Star wars rip). Not a single glimp of originality egsists within this movie. It is a clishe after clishe.......Overall...Do yourself a favor...SKIP THIS......

squid_hills OK, first of all "Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles" isn't the Robotech you remember from your youth. Unfortunately, we will all just have to accept that the 80's phenomenon will never be fully recaptured. Too many of the original creators have moved on (or in one case died) for any new Robotech project to match the original.Now, that said, R:TSC does a pretty good job of updating Robotech (while taking a few... um... liberties with certain story elements) to meet the more mature sensibilities of the returning audience.Visually, the movie is a blend of 3D and 2D animation, with the 2D looking better than the 3D, but that may be down to the "Shadow Technology" effect on the REF ships that gave them a glossy sheen when a flat color would have looked a bit better (Scott's Alpha doesn't suffer from the glossy look, but it is only shown briefly). Glossy looks aside, its a visual delight to see Alpha fighters and Invid dogfighting in the space above Earth, with missile contrails and tracer rounds lighting up the screen. Robotech mecha battles haven't lost any of their visual appeal.The characters look slightly more American-styled than Anime-styled, but given that Robotech was cobbled together out of 3 different TV series with 3 different styles of animation, fans should be used to that by now. And at any rate, they are more pleasing to the eye than would be expected, with the female characters' eyes being particularly expressive.Returning characters are instantly recognizable, despite the copyright-induced makeover they have all received, with the exception of Rick Hunter, who is only recognizable (and only briefly shown) if you've seen The Sentinels. Admittedly, the breasts on Marlene/Ariel and Janice are rather larger than they should have been, but a buxom Maia is perfectly allowable in a character we have never seen before.A delight to hear is the voice track; almost every returning character has their original voice actor/actress providing their voice again, with the notable exceptions of Ariel/Marlene and General Reindhart (but he was a minor character anyway, so lets not quibble).Plot-wise things are a bit different... I don't mind visual re-designs, but some of the story elements that were altered grated on me a bit. Maia Sterling's existence is a bit of a shock, considering we've only heard of two Sterling children before. Given her advanced age, she feels shoehorned into the story to provide us with the obligatory Robotech female ace pilot. If her surname was different, she would'nt feel as out of place. The decision to completely disregard Ariel's status as a visual copy of Marlene Rush makes for a rather unbelievable sequence between her and Marcus. And Scott Bernard's decision to leave Earth is different than in the original series; then he was setting out to find Rick Hunter's lost SDF-3, here he is heading to REF HQ to tell them that humans and Invid can live in peace. He has also fully accepted his feelings for Marlene/Ariel, which is quite different from the original series, where he was still struggling with his love of Marlene/Ariel and his hatred of the Invid.The decision to introduce a new enemy for the REF to fight was a logical one, since the Invid situation was resolved at the end of the original series, and a new enemy means that one doesn't have to jump through copyright hoops before putting them in a movie. However, the identity of that new enemy is fairly implausible, considering their goals are totally not in keeping with their previous portrayal in the Sentinels novels.The tone of the movie is somewhat darker than the original series, with a little more than the usual Robotech death & destruction on hand, and a general feel of desperation that sets in about halfway through the film. Still, it does maintain the mature feel of what was always the most mature cartoon on American TV.The conclusion of the film is one thing that disappointed me at first. If you come in looking to see Scott Bernard's quest to find Admiral Hunter, as any fan of the original series would be expecting, you won't find that depicted here. The ending of the film suggests that said search will be the driving plot behind an upcoming series, or another movie, however. So there's still the hope we will finally see Robotech's loose ends tied up, we just might have to wait a while longer. Though hopefully not 20 more years...