Looking less like a soda pop and more like a wrestler @ BLAST INC.

While on a business trip last week, I had the pleasure of catching an exclusive market screening of BRAVE STORM, a 2017 Tokusatsu film produced by Japan-based BLAST Inc. A familiar-looking robot on the film’s poster caught my eye, and I soon found out that it was a loose remake of the 1973 Senkosha-produced series Super Robot Red Baron.

The film features contemporary versions of the characters from the Red Baron series, and probably due to the Senkosha connection, adds another forgotten hero from their library, Silver Kamen, into the film, as the futuristic hero Silver. BRAVE STORM is the first feature effort from writer/director Junya Okabe, whose Tokusatsu credentials include visual effects supervision on the 2009 Ultraman epic Ultra Galaxy Legends.

With no narrative connection to any of the shows that inspired it, BRAVE STORM opens in the Year 2050, a dystopian future where the Kyrgyz race of aliens have brought humanity to near extinction with an army of Black Baron robots, each fitted with an atmosphere transformation device that emits smog that is poisonous to humans.

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