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There’s some very exciting casting news!
Sydney Sweeney, Jason Isaacs, Noah Centineo, and more have been cast in an exciting adaptation.
This beloved property already has many adaptations — and has raised eyebrows with controversial nude scenes.
There’s a lot to be excited about! We’ll explain.
Production has begun!
A live-action Gundam film has begun production in Queensland, Australia.
The cast includes Sweeney, Isaacs, Centineo, plus plenty of other names including Shioli Kutsuna, Gemma Chua-Tran, Jackson White, Oleksandr Rudynskyi, and more.
This project will be a Netflix release.
It’s being produced by Legendary Pictures, and in partnership with Bandi Namco Filmworks.
Gundam (in all of its many iterations) is one of the most iconic science fiction properties on the planet. It’s on par with Star Wars, and has been around for about the same amount of time.
At its core, Gundam is about war — and its horrors, its effect upon populations and young people, and the depravity of those who commit atrocities.
On a more superficial level, it’s about teens and young adults piloting mobile suits — massive spacefaring “robots” capable of fighting with guns, laser swords, “funnels” (long story), and other weapons, on space and on the ground.
The titular gundams tend to represent the pinnacle of mobile suit design. In some Gundam properties, highly evolved pilots are able to connect with their machines — and even with each other’s minds. Rarely, even from beyond the grave.
(Yes, it’s a little like The Force in Star Wars.)
The first Gundam anime premiered in 1979. It’s absolutely worth watching, even if you have to brace yourself for some oddities that are, at least in part, a product of its time.
This is where the ‘controversial’ scenes come into play
Launching in the 1970s meant that characters are sometimes portrayed doing things that are appalling — like striking each other — that were at the time meant to be dramatic, or to portray the tensions of war.
There are also controversial nude scenes. Even among people who generally like nudity in their media.
We’re not referring to when “Newtype” (one of several labels throughout the adaptations) pilots communicate with each other, appearing as a nude silhouette in space even in the heat of battle.
There are scenes of women and girls showering, often accompanied by children — which, at the time, was likely intended to make the scenes less voyeuristic. In a modern lens, the animation is more uncomfortable this way.
Even as the decades continued, adaptations like Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team featured moments of animated nudity that felt like fan service. But seldom as controversial as the first few series’ portrayal of women and teen girls.
During her career, Sweeney has gone back and forth when it comes to on-screen nudity.
Euphoria is an HBO series with a more than decent amount of nudity. Sweeney has not been an exception.
However, in the early years of her rising to fame, she deliberately avoided excessive sexualization, focusing instead upon her acting.
Only in very recent years, and particularly amidst her involuntary politicization, has she pivoted towards using her body to sell clothing.
That’s a very long way of saying that she’s done a pet play OnlyFans scene on Euphoria and is likely to appear in a horny role again in the future.
Does that mean that she’s likely to show skin for Netflix’s ‘Gundam’ film?
We hate to crush everyone’s dreams, but Netflix seems likely to shy away from any real nudity in this project.
Even if some Gundam properties and Netflix properties have shown full frontal, our culture’s puritanical crusade against core aspects of humanity makes even the “spiciest” streamers hesitant to lean into nudity.
Additionally, even though Gundam has been airing in one form or another since long before many of us were born, and even though it is fundamentally a story about war, the clueless dorks who ruin so much of television are likely to try to brand this as something for tweens to watch.
Hey, we’d love to be wrong! We’d love to be pleasantly surprised.
But we won’t hold our breath.
While we’re wishing for things in Gundam, something more important to hope to see is Sweeney playing, not a protagonist or a love interest, but Char Aznable or an analogue.
Char (and his various masked analogues in different iterations of Gundam) is a foil character to the lead pilot — usually, anyway.
He’s a war hero for the baddies, with a lot of skill and with more experience than the hapless teen who just fell into (or stole) a sophisticated mobile suit.
Sweeney would be amazing in the role.
We could picture her in a uniform and a conspicuous mask, piloting the Red Comet. Or the Tallgeese. We’d love to see it.