Just like Akira, the Robotech franchise has had its share of Hollywood courters. From Tobey Maguire to Lawrence Kasdan the list is growing. Deadline is now reporting that Warner Bros-based producers Hollywood Gang have brought in Michael Gordon, scribe for 300 and G.I.Joe: Rise of Cobra, to tackle a live-action adaptation. Deadline`s source is also telling them that Hollywood Gang has their sights set on Mama director Andy Muschietti to helm the picture.
Tangent time.
Would we ever be happy with a live adaptation? No, probably not. Here we have a scribe who has written two films not known to have any depth of character. The Macross Saga was just that, a saga. So many individual story-lines dealt with relationships. There was the love triangle between Rick, Lisa and Lynn Minmay. There was the human-zentradi relationship between Max and Miriya. Roy and Claudia were probably the only normal relationship in that first series.
And really no slight against Muschietti but he has only done one film, a stretched and strained version of a really good short film that caught the eye of Guillermo Del Toro. Until then his career was in commercials. So here is a guy whose sole purpose for a few years was to convey the most amount of information in the shortest amount of time possible. Everything is going to probably look nice but I do not see the possibility of any real depth here.
All signs point towards a film which lacks any character. Hell, would we be surprised if they completely rewrote the whole thing and ignored all the characters from any of the original series? Just write their own damn story and just get the gist of what the original stories were about. What will we get? A bunch of young kids who want to be Valkyrie pilots get thrust into a war with the Zentradi?
Well, I'll write this for you Hollywood. Take the story from Verhoeven's Starship Troopers and drench it in Bayhem's Transformers. There you go. Adaptation done. Give me my money!
Am I asking for too much here? Man, Robotech was such a massive, massive part of my young geeky life. I watched all the anime after school. I played the role-playing games. Built a couple models. I probably loved this franchise more than anything else I latched on to in my young and geeky travels.