ANI-MOVIES, *Space Warrior Baldios

Movie compilations of an anime series are a seriously hard coin flip. Sometimes they can add to the existing story like Macross Plus: The Movie, while other times it's just one big theatrical clip show like Evangelion: Death. Space Warrior Baldos was a single-season giant robot show from 1980 that was cancelled before the last three episodes aired. In 1981, a movie recounting the series was released with a totally different ending which was picked up by an American distributor who added a dub to it, but with a few minutes cut from the final release, possibly for content. Baldios was one of those gritty anime shows of the 70s-80s where they weren't afraid to show entire masses of people being killed either in a spray of bullets, getting stepped on by a giant, or being absolutely done away with from a natural disaster, whereas in the American dub of it would show the victims escaping due to some convenient parachutes. The English release of the Baldios movie does keep most of this material in, although you can tell that there is some they left out. For a show about a huge space mecha, the titular robot doesn't play a big part in the story and is more focused on the feuding characters. There are even some parts during the few scenes with the robot where the pilots are speaking but there is no dialogue for it, which worked out okay for something like Power Ranger because you can't see their lips flapping, but this was just unprofessional considering most of the rest of the dub in the movie is acceptable for the time.

Starting out on a planet called S-1, the inhabitants are growing restless because the world's resources are running dry. The renegade General Gattler leads a revolt against the government and takes a portion of the population into a giant space ark to find a new planet to colonize. One S-1 citizen that escaped this was Marin, the son of a scientist whose Gattler's forces killed during their coup. Marin enters a space warp and ends up on Earth in the year 2100. The other S-1 remnants set their sights on conquering Earth as their promised land and have launched several attacks on the more heavily populated cities. Marin has been drafted into Earth's special Blue Strike Force that are using a giant robot comprised of fighter ships that merge into the colossal Baldios. For a brief montage, we see the Baldios wrecking the S-1's attempts to take over the world. From this point on, the movie becomes a stretched-out space opera with stereotypical drama cliches like Earth politicians not trusting Marin's loyalty, bickering officers in the S-1 ranks, and romantic subplots that go nowhere. The S-1 forces eventually melt the polar ice caps flooding most of the Earth and killing of billions, and then later use nuclear warheads they stole to cause a radioactive fallout. It is later discovered that the planet S-1 was in fact Earth itself from hundreds of years in the future and that all the S-1's attempts to conquer the Earth of the past lead to the planet's near extinction that they originally came from. Gattler doesn't care about this anyway as he plans to take over his old home world anyway. Marin takes the Baldios in to wreck the S-1 space arc reactor leading to a final conclusion between Marin and Gattler with a confused love interest caught in the middle.

Space Warrior Baldios is a decent enough 80s mecha anime, despite the large lack of actual mechas in it, or at least in the movie compilation version. As the whole feature is going over highlights of the plot, a bunch of the story gets left out with characters showing up for a single scene and then are never seen again. If you want the complete narrative, you are better off watching the TV series and then popping in the movie version during the last act. Discotek Media has both the series and movie available on DVD and Blu-Ray, as well as both being on Crunchyroll. Only the movie is dubbed, but you can watch the uncut Japanese language edition with the full intended runtime.