Review: Robotech – Love Live Alive / Cert: 12 / Director: Gregory Snegoff / Screenplay: Various / Starring: Cam Clarke, Wendee Lee, Frank Catalano / Release Date: January 27th

The Robotech franchise has always been a bit of an odd fish, given that the bulk of its footage comes from three entirely unrelated anime TV series that have been skilfully stitched together. This long and epic tale of humanity’s struggle against hostile alien forces through the use of really cool transforming fighter jets has been with us since the mid-’80s. However, we’ve not seen anything new for quite a long time, which means that the latest offering, Robotech: Love Live Alive has a lot to live up to.

The movie is, in true Robotech style, a re-editing of another show, Mospaeda: Love, Live, Alive, as well as clips from Robotech: The New Generation. The original material has been heavily altered, with bridging sequences digitally added. The result is a very, very messy clip-show. The Robotech mythos is difficult to navigate at the best of times, being partially a very shouty soap opera and mostly a retro-science fiction adventure story with big explosions and not much else. Compressing a much larger story into 90-minute feature means that the entire affair is barely coherent, and it is difficult to care about these poorly dubbed, poorly animated characters and their cliché-ridden adventures.

The DVD extras only serve to highlight how poorly treated the Robotech franchise has been handled. In addition to deleted scenes and a “making of” documentary, a lot of the original Mospaeda footage is included, and we get a glimpse of how special a lot of this was back in it’s day. If you’re a hardcore Robotech fan, you know the story already and will find little of interest here. Casual fans will simply become bored and confused. Love Live Alive serves as a reminder that this franchise has long since gone past its sell-by-date and serious effort would be required to make it even half as good as the fans remember.

Extras: “Making of” documentary / Mospaeda / Animatics / Deleted scenes / Gallery