There will be spoilers for the first episode of gen:LOCK.

Rooster Teeth has been hyping up their new show gen:LOCK for quite some time. Not much was known about it when it was first announced back in 2017 at RTX Austin (Rooster Teeth's convention), except that it was the brain child of Gray Haddock. Hype slowly built up around it when it was revealed that Michael B. Jordan was cast in the main role for the show, voicing the character Julian Chase.





Since the show's announcement until now, the hype generated around the show gained more and more momentum as more and more A-list Hollywood stars were added to the cast. Stars like David Tennant of Doctor Who fame, Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones and Dakota Fanning, all set to play major roles in the show. This brought about significant expectations for the show. After watching the first episode on RTTV (Rooster Teeth's 24-hour broadcast, airing shows in their catalogue), I can safely say that the expectations were met and surpassed. But more on that later.





RT released snippets of the show, teasing characters that will be showing up with David Tennant's character, Dr Rufus Weller, requesting for potential recruits to be transferred under his command. Not much was revealed in these character teasers (Teasers 1 , 2 , 3 , and 4 ) except that the enemy will soon reach our protagonist's doorstep. We were then given another teaser where Dr Weller greeted four of his program's new recruits.





Now this teaser generated a bit of a debate. Many fans that watched the teaser felt that the animation was choppy due to the decision to animate the character's movements in 12FPS. Personally, I did not notice the choppiness one my first few watches. I only noticed it when I saw people complaining about it and I went looking for it, then it broke the "illusion" for me. I could not get over the choppiness of the animation for a while. Until now.





I don't know if RT's animation team decided to change the frame rate for the character animations or not but upon viewing the first episode, I did not notice it at all. If anything, I was wholly captivated by what was going on in the scenes to care about any choppiness that may have been there.





We start the episode with Julian Chase (Michael B. Jordan) and Miranda Worth (Dakota Fanning) visiting Julian's mother and sister. It is later revealed that our two main characters were there as holograms and they are actually in a base somewhere else. The action starts when Julian's mother sees what is presumably a UN Assembly analogue attacked.





The action. Oh boy, the action. RT's animation team did a bloody fantastic job, which I am not the least bit surprised at with many of the animators behind RWBY working on this show. They made use of the medium they chose, playing to its strengths. The fast-paced camera movement and focus helped to keep the action clear, allowing us to following a heart-pounding aerial battle with great ease.





The design of the jets were some of my favourite ones that I've seen in recent times. They reminded me at first of the Su-47 Berkut blended with the Banshees from StarCraft II. Later in the battle, they folded the wings into the fuselage, a la F/A-37 from the movie Stealth . While not exactly practical in real life, in my opinion, the design of the jets definitely drew from real life inspirations and where there for a purpose. The forward swept wings allowed for extreme manoeuvrability, something that was called upon multiple times in this battle, and the propeller sections of the fuselage allowed for VTOL capabilities, some really interesting tactics and augmented the jet's already extreme manoeuvrability. I also want to commend the animation team for a job well done in the dogfight and the stunts pulled by the pilots in the jets (I loved the insanely tight Kulbit loop when Julian dodged an incoming missile).





With professional A-list actors and actresses, needless to say, the voice acting was superb. The characters were all very expressive and I did not at any point feel that they were phoning it in at all. Even RT's own voice actors were great. Lindsay Jones (voice of Ruby Rose in RWBY) was the voice of Julian's wing commander and she did a bang up job doing so. The calmness of her voice did not lack any sense of urgency when she was dishing out orders to her wing.





I am honestly very excited to see the rest of gen:LOCK and cannot wait for January 29th to arrive sooner. Kudos to RT's animation team and the writers of gen:LOCK.

While I have you here, why not check out the gen:LOCK subreddit ? :D