The visuals are really the highlight of the movie. Thick lashes and shimmering eyes are abundant, and the Zentradi are back with an exceedingly squishy and organic look, which is pretty damn creepy. We get a much better variety of enemy mechs, as opposed to the cavalcade of leg pods in the series. The direction is generally pretty great. A lot of motion shots utilize fantastic perspectives, and the battle scenes are overwhelming with missile spam (a plus in my book). Dialogue scenes feel the least inspired, and some of the silent shots of characters regarding each other are a little hard to read. There are a lot of close ups of hands later in the movie, and they all look really lumpy and weird, but overall this a very pretty film.
The movie soundtrack is pretty much the same as the show. I'm not sure if they produced many/any new tracks for the background music, but the new Minmay song played at the climax is beyond beautiful. One benefit of condensing the series into a movie length is that we're not bombarded with "My Boyfriend is a Pilot" over and over again. Don't get me wrong, I love that song, but I appreciate that they play it once to get it out of the way and then let Minmay sing new stuff.
Now for the dub. What a magnificently awful dub! I wish it was bad enough to be enjoyable, but it starts to wear on you around half way through the run time. The delivery is flat across the board, but I'm going to chalk that up to direction rather than acting capability because this seems like it was produced in the early days of anime dubbing. The VHS rip that I watched didn't help with its grainy audio, but it did make for a supremely dank aesthetic. I can only assume that the Japanese audio is better, so I can't wholeheartedly suggest watching it in English.
In trying to compress the story of the original it removes a lot of things that annoyed me, but it also loses the exploration of themes that really captivated me. It cuts a lot of the fat to fast track the story and hit major plot points, opening a few episodes into the series and ending about 10 episodes shy of the series finale. One consequence of this is that it removes Minmay and Hikaru's first meeting, and makes it seem like their romance comes out of nowhere when they're stranded together. At one point Minmay does mention that she's loved Hikaru for a long time, but an uninitiated audience would have no idea how or why that is. This puts the emotional stakes in our love triangle a lot lower than in the series, because both of the girls just seem to be attracted to him because of his survival skills.
Something else omitted for time is any tension between the Macross and the Earth government, again diminishing the political themes that used to be present. There is also absolutely none of the humans and Zentradi trying to rebuild and live together, which is honestly a solid choice, because that segment of the story already felt rushed in the series. This next point could be attributed more to direction than writing, but keeping track of who is fighting whom gets really difficult in the final battle. Additionally, the closing shot of the film doesn't seem to bring any kind of closure to the story, which really just confused me. Lastly, there are a couple of changes to the lore of the universe in the movie, but I think it will be up to the viewer to decide if these improve the story or not.
I can't really get into discussions about how the characters are different without major spoilers, so suffice it to say that the character development pales in comparison to the series just due to the amount of time it has to work with. I think it does a pretty good job of choosing who to focus on most of the time, but for a more in depth evaluation I'll have a spoilerific paragraph at the end.
So, who should watch "Macross: Do You Remember Love?"? I really can't recommend it to people who haven't seen the series, because a lot of it will just seem pointless and hollow, but if you've seen the original then you've already seen the better version. So if you've got a major urge to revisit some of the characters and ideas in the series, this is a nice visual treat that can give you a taste of it, but it's a pretty shallow revisitation.
~~~SPOILERS~~~
I was most engaged by the exploration and development of Hikaru's character over the years that the original story covered, but there isn't a lot of time to develop him here. He basically has a couple dog fights, camps out with each of the girls for a while, and then has to make a choice between them at the end. We don't get to see him struggle to make the right choices as much, so there isn't much reason hope for him to. Totally MIA in thus movie are the Zentradi spy trio (Which saddens me), Kaifun as a named character (So we can avoid the assheadded, creepy cousin vibe), Qamjin, and any real development of Hikaru's friends or Pineapple-chan. Max and Kakizaki are somehow even less of characters than they were before, and are really only there to show that Hikaru has friends in a couple scenes and is a normal young man, and then Max gets to have an epic showdown with Millia (Who is also never named) without any payoff after that. Focker's death was not nearly as impactful, because there wasn't enough time to develop his mentor relationship with Hikaru. Kakizaki suffers a similar fate, where he just isn't developed enough for his death to have any weight. Minmay has fewer chances to be stupid and selfish here, so I actually like her a lot more. Misa, on the other hand, is a lot weaker in this iteration. She mostly whines and wants to play house with Hikaru, and then manages to translate an ancient alien language by plot convenience.
/rant
