[Obelisk ze Tormentor]

Originally Posted by Ragashingo

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...

Kenneth is a sharp & smart dude. But he never really suspected Hathaway before they took out Gawman coz there was no reason to really suspect him. But when Gawman was captured, Kenneth noticed a strange gesture from Hathaway. He deliberately look away when he saw Gawman being escorted out of his Messer and being arrested. That gesture is telling that Hathaway doesn't want to be associated with him. It's pretty subtle actually. And then when Kenneth interrogated Gawman, he noticed a reaction when Hathway's name was mentioned. After that, when Gigi mentioned that Hathaway was avoiding her, the lightbulb on Kenneth's head went off and then he straight up asked Gigi what she sensed from Hathaway and looks like she told Kenneth about Hathaway off-screen. The rest is history. Paired with all the evidence that Hathaway went aboard a suspiciously-private boat despite telling the authority that he will travel by ferry, now Kenneth realized that Hathaway is at least a member of Mafty if not Mafty himself.

Originally Posted by Ragashingo

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?

That's rather easy to explain. Now that Gigi knows who he is, Hathaway wants to stay close to Gigi during the questioning period to make sure that she's not a Fed spy.

Originally Posted by Ragashingo

Why did he arrange for the attack on the hotel and then not slip out during the chaos when he had multiple chances?

Have you seen Char's Counterattack movie? Hathaway has this deep trauma of losing a girl that he loved named Quess who ran away from him and went with Char's side. And then she died protecting Hathaway in the climactic battle in CCA. And in this movie, Hathaway saw a lot of Quess in Gigi after their interactions. So, it triggered his instinct to protect Gigi from harm during the hotel raid, but he also didn't want to get Gigi involved with Mafty coz that means the Fed will go after her and ruin her life. That's why Hathaway avoided Emeralda's extraction team during the chaos. You can say that his feelings for Gigi was Hathaway's Achilles heel until later in the movie when he finally cut ties with Gigi and everything that happened in Davao.

Originally Posted by Ragashingo

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.

Assassinating the corrupt Fed ministers were always the priority. Rescuing Hathaway was also important but it was a step below the assassination mission.

Originally Posted by Ragashingo

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.

This HF1 movie is like the 8th major entry in the UC timeline and not counting the many side-stories that it has. At this point, the previous UC entries have done all of the things that you wanted above multiple times. So, this HF1 movie intentionally went the other way by not focusing too much on the MS battles. To keep things fresh, it focuses more on the impact that MS battles have on the surroundings during the hotel raid because the MC that we're following is Hathaway who was runing around on the ground, not Gawman who was piloting the Messer.

Originally Posted by Ragashingo

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.

This is only an appetizer battle between Xi & Penelope. There will be more in next movies. You really don't need to know more about Lane aside from his humongous pride, arrogance & immaturity at this point. After all, the real antagonist of the movie is Kenneth. Lane is more like his henchmen.

Originally Posted by Ragashingo

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...

At 01:35:28 mark in the movie after Lane said "He's fast!" you can see a light blasting away to the right direction which Penelope then shot down and it exploded. That was the beam rifle distraction that Hathaway talked about. When Penelope closed in to inspect the debris, Xi came & attacked from the side.

Originally Posted by Ragashingo

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??

That's just Lane being arrogant and in denial. After all, there is a reason why Kenneth wanted to assign the Penelope to Hathaway instead of Lane early in the movie. Kenneth can read the gap in skills & experience.

Originally Posted by Ragashingo

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.

Well, this is something that we'll have to follow together in this trilogy. Also, Gigi didn't hang around for no apparent reason. She was confined in Davao for questioning after the hijacking, remember? She originally wanted to go to Hong Kong. You can see that she finally left at the end of this movie after all the bereucracy is done.

Originally Posted by Ragashingo

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...

I think this movie did great for a first part in a three-parter story. Enough plot to stand on its own, but also a lot of setup for next chapters in the story.