Finally got around to remembering to watch this. I'm not a big Gundam fan. I don't dislike Gundam. It just means... I just haven't seen a lot of Gundam. I'm super ok with giant robots and space politics and all that stuff. Just never really turned my attention to Gundam for whatever reason beyond somehow watching all of Gundam Wing back in the day. So I come to this movie with a fairly thin knowledge of Gundam's mainline history.
On one hand, I was fairly pleased. For a few reasons:
- The tone of the movie was great. The way it did a sort of intrigue-based almost spy thriller kind of thing was really interesting.
- The combat was very pretty, and the way they showcased it, especially the first big combat scene above / around the city, was really good. I really enjoyed the feeling of the mobile suits as giant flying tanks. I like the verticality and ability to hide among the trees they demonstrated. I also liked the sorta "less is more" approach they took where you often saw explosions in the distance or only got a glimpse of a beam saber being activated, or only got a close up or ground level shot of two mobile suits in combat.
- I like how they showed how the destruction a fracas between multiple giant flying tanks would impact the people on the ground. Spent magazines dropping out of the sky like busses. Bullets and energy beams missing and destroying buildings. Deflected shots dropping molten slag onto the environment and starting large fires. This movie maybe did the best I've ever seen at that kind of ground level depiction of destruction.
- I found all three main characters interesting in their own ways.
That said, overall, I was not impressed by the movie.
- Maybe the core reason I ended up not liking the movie was... despite its neat mistrusting spy-movie feel, I never understood why anyone suspected Hathaway of being Mafty. That he fought well on the plane could apply to a huge number of mobile suit pilots. And, yes, I get that Gigi probably had some extrasensory Newtype powers so it was much more than a random guess for her... but still...
- And that leads into my not understanding why Hathaway acted so stupidly throughout the movie. As far as anyone in charge knew, he was just a noteworthy oddity of a one time mobile suit pilot who was in the right place to foil a kidnapping. He would have been asked a few questions about the incident on the plane and been free to go on his way in a few days. So... why did he agree to stay in Gigi's hotel suite instead of the one provided for him? Why did he arrange for the attack on the hotel and then not slip out during the chaos when he had multiple chances?
- The only thing I might have maybe missed is... were the hotels targeted as a diversion to let Hathaway get away... or were all the leaders from the plane staying at those hotels? If that was more an assassination plot than a rescue Hathaway plot then maybe all the destruction was somewhat justified from a rebel's point of view. But if not, then the whole attack on the city made no sense.
- Beyond that... as pretty as the mobile suit battles were, they also felt... uninteresting. In the attack on the city... very few mobile suits were destroyed, I'm thinking one Mafty pilot was shot down and the other was captured. And there wasn't much of a... battle. Very little combat strategy or clever maneuvers, or special tricks to outwit the opponents... by either side. So, the whole city battle felt like a big, visually impressive, load of nothing.
- The battle between the two Gundams felt even worse. Like much, much worse. They traded some long range beam blasts. They exchanged a few missiles. Basically neither party got hit until the very end. And we barely knew anything about the Penelope's pilot, so I hardly cared about him.
- Even worser, the end of the battle between the Gundams was confusing! Hathaway told his crew that he got the drop on the Penelope by letting go of his beam rifle while firing it so the recoil shot it in a different direction as a distraction. I watched that scene a couple of times and... I don't believe that was actually shown! Sounds like a neat tactic... would have been neater if they'd animated it...
- The story from Lane Aim was even more bewildering... He fired a beam at what looked to be the enemy and saw what he thought was his target hit the water. If that was just Hathaway's beam rifle, that's cool... except then Hathaway was beside the Penelope and let loose a ton of missiles which Lane Aim countered with point defense machine-gun fire which was overwhelmed. His Gundam took a few missiles and crashed into the water. So far so good... except he escaped his cockpit and looked around for Hathaway's Gundam saying he was sure he got in a fatal hit. The hell was he thinking?! Did he not see the Hathaway's Gundam spit a good twenty or thirty missiles at him?! He never fired more than his close range guns at the missiles. When, exactly, did he think he got a fatal hit in?? Wasn't it obvious that Hathaway's Gundam hadn't crashed... because it was flying right there beside him shooting him with missiles??
- I didn't like the role Gigi played in the story. I kept waiting for her to be more interesting. To be something more than a beautiful woman hanging around for no apparent reason. Hathaway kinda wondered if she was a spy. I wish she had been! Or been someone on his side. Or been someone with power and influence who could be convinced to back one side or the other. Instead... all she ever was confirmed to be was a mistress to some old minister or something. Felt like a big waste of an alluring character. That she sorta flip-flopped between extremely insightful and extremely ditzy was annoying, as well.
Just, all in all, I thought there was a lot of good ideas and good scenes in isolation here, but also a whole lot of wasted opportunity to tell an actually good story or have actually compelling characters or show actually interesting battles. If I had to choose, I'd take Macross Zero over this in terms of story, character motivations, and combat. Heck, I'd take Aldnoah.Zero, and its notable flaws, over this. I didn't hate this movie... but it also didn't leave me with much more than a shrug...