Macross: Do You Remember Love is a 2 hour movie that condenses about 10 hours of the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV show, and changes a lot along the way.
- Wow this movie is pretty. This is one of the prettiest movies. This is 1984? This makes Char's Counterattack look like baby stuff
- Some stuff benefits from being condensed! I was very impressed by how they still managed to establish the relationships so quickly, and then the love triangle benefits a lot from not being expanded out across more episodes than they originally planned?
- Some stuff is really hurt by being condensed. They ruined Roy and Claudia, who are amazing in the show. Sad we didn't get more of Millia. Or Exedol and Britai. Lots of things in here are made immensely better by having watched the show first and so actually caring about any characters beyond the central 3.
- Macross 7 reframing this as being a piece of in-universe fiction reflects weirdly here? I'm going to have to see what Macross after this is like, but it seems like the redesign of the Zentradi here is weird. In-universe: this seems racist against Zentradi. Out-of-universe: it's annoying to have their men and women fighting? The original Macross conceit that they're just, completely parallel and disconnected inside the same organization is more interesting than a sexism war.
- Why is this movie so much more sexist than the TV show is!
All in all: I do really recommend this movie, but you're going to be let down on more than half of the characters if you don't watch the TV show first. The TV show is also really good.
