Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway (Sunrise Animation)
“I knew it. You do scary things.”
The Gundam franchise is a prolific, long-lived and many-headed hydra, with
myriad feature films, video games and television series. It can be viewed as
Japan’s Star Trek in that there are alternate dimensions, different timelines and
different time periods within those disparate timelines. The Universal Century is
particularly dense as it is Tomino’s baby and he’s been shepherding his
creation since 1979 through quite a few shows and movies, including some of the
genre’s most iconic. Newer fans often find it easier to get into the Gundam 00’s Anno Domini timeline, the
Cosmic Era of the popular Gundam Seed,
or Iron-Blooded Orphans’
Post-Disaster setting.
The one thing the timelines all have in common is the ubiquitous use of Mobile
Suits, which are largely disposable, piloted, humanoid fighting mechs and the
prototype testbeds known as Gundams.
What made Tomino’s Real-Robot creation unique from everything that came before
it was that his Mobile Suits and the people who drove them were expendable,
like a typical grunt in a combat theatre. They were ‘real’. The Suits could run
out of ammo, run out of power, break down or simply be overwhelmed and
destroyed. This set Tomino’s show apart from, and instantly rendered obsolete,
the Super-Robot genre which was the trend at the time.
The film is an adaptation of part one of the novel, Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash, published in three volumes
from 1989-1990. That story is the sequel to 1988’s highly-lauded feature, Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack, making
a 33 year lag between the films. This is apparently a trend now after Tron: Legacy waited 28 years and Bladerunner: 2049 35 years for a follow
up.
Twelve years after Char’s Counterattack, Hathaway Noa (Kenshô Ono/Caleb Yen), the son of the renowned Captain, Bright Noa, has crafted a new identity for himself as Mafty Navue Erin. Erin is a feared terrorist who is trying to accomplish what Char Aznable could not: getting humanity off of the Earth and into space colonies so more Newtypes can emerge and Earth’s ecosystem can heal from mankind’s depredations. Gathering intelligence while de-orbiting aboard an Earth Federation VIP shuttle, he meets the unusually perceptive Gigi Andalusia (Reina Ueda/Megan Shipman) and Kenneth Sleg (Jun’ichi Suwabe/Aaron Phillips), an Earth Federation Forces commander. The shuttle comes under attack by a group of hijackers led by a man wearing a pumpkin-head mask who claims HE is Mafty Navue Erin, but is merely here to rob the passengers of their wealth. Gigi distracts the terrorists and Hathaway springs into action unthinkingly. Backed up by Sleg, the two are able to retake the shuttle and capture or kill all of the hijackers.
Now under the scrutiny of the police and the military, Hathaway is forced to
stay with Gigi as they make multiple statements to various government
agencies. Gigi knows that the Mafty from
the shuttle was a fake and that Hathaway is the true Erin. Intrigued, she tries
to put the moves on him but when he rebuffs her, she decides to prod and
provoke him further by turning her attentions to Kenneth, who has no compunctions
about spending time with the beautiful girl.
Haunted by his past and determined to discover the identities of the rogue
Mafty groups, Hathaway plans an escape out from under the aegis of his
inquisitors with the help of the real team Mafty. His Mafty group is well supplied by the
sinister Moon-based corporation, Anaheim Electronics, who are continuing their
practice of selling arms and Mobile Suits to both sides of the conflict, a
tradition born in the first Gryps War of the masterful 1985 series, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam.
To distract the EFF during one of the more visually spectacular sequences in the film, members of his team attack several beachfront hotels with Mobile Suits and beam weapons. They cause appalling amounts of collateral damage, resulting in the deaths of scores of civilians and the complete collapse of several skyscrapers. Primed to make his break, Hathaway sees a terrified Gigi cowering in the rubble. In another snap decision, he abandons his plans and his team so that he can comfort her. Will he remember his duty? Can he get out of the shadow of his famous father and make good on his own promise? Can he truly fulfill Char’s ambitions and save both humanity and the planet that nurtured us all, or will keen-eyed Gigi reveal everything she thinks she knows to Sleg and render all his plans moot?
Mobile Suit Gundam:
Hathaway is a gorgeous movie. The backgrounds and color palate are
stupendous. Sunrise Studios’ artists have really mastered the art of blending
CG and hand-drawn animation. The characters are done traditionally and the CG
Mobile Suits and background plates are seamlessly integrated together. The soundtrack
is provided by Hiroyuki Sawano, another UC Gundam veteran, who worked on both
2009’s Mobile Suit Gundam: Unicorn
and 2018’s Mobile Suit Gundam: Narrative.
There are really two main problems with this movie: how it’s constructed, and
what it’s constructed around. As part of a pre-planned trilogy, MSG: Hathaway makes the mistake that
many ersatz, wanna-be-MCU, failed franchises make; Movies need to have a
beginning, a middle and an end that are actually in the movie. You can’t use a
film solely for set up, because without cathartic conclusions, it will fail. You
get a sequel if you tell a great story and people want to see more of the world
you’re showing. Expecting that there
will be a sequel, that you’re entitled to a sequel where you can explain this
or that is a recipe for failure. You need to make a structurally complete movie
and resolve your conflicts to truly satisfy an audience. MSG: Hathaway is a very good beginning and a very long middle.
Literally nothing is resolved when the credits roll. We’re told to wait for
Part II, though it seems obvious that nothing will come to a conclusion there
either, and that part III will hopefully tie everything together. Perhaps it
would’ve been better to make two films instead of three. It is very difficult
to evaluate this movie as a standalone feature, and this reviewer will have to
reserve my judgment until all of the films are available to binge-watch in a
row.
The other problem is that the movie is constructed around Hathaway Noa, and Hathaway
Noa is a fuckup. During Char’s Axis drop, he murdered Chan Agni, a Londo Bell
officer who was ostensibly on his side. He thought she was cock-blocking him.
Enraged, he shot up her Jegan and killed her. He was led around by the nose by Quess Paraya,
(Anne Yatco) one of the main antagonists of Char’s
Counterattack. Now, he’s leading a terrorist organization. Let me just
repeat that: Now he is leading a terrorist organization. It makes it hard to
sympathize with him at this point of the story both for his sorry history and
his indifference towards mass civilian casualties. Not only is he the leader of
a terrorist cell, which is more than a bit unpalatable in this day and age, but
he’s ultimately responsible for inspiring copycat groups who are causing mayhem
and committing murder in his name. We’re supposed to be on his side, yet when
he abandons his mission to comfort Gigi and insure her safety, it feels like
he’s fruitlessly following another Quess. Gigi is playing an enigmatic game
with him and Sleg that has so many parallels to the Char-Quess-Hathaway
triangle that even he recognizes and comments on it, but doesn’t change his
behavior. There are the beginnings of a turnaround towards the end of the film,
but as a redemption cycle, it leaves much to be desired. Mafty Navue Erin is a
hard-sell.
As someone with an intimate familiarity with the Gundam franchise, it is difficult
for this reviewer to put myself in the shoes of a person for whom MSG: Hathaway would be their first
exposure to the genre. I doubt that I would recommend this to that individual
without providing them with a great deal of background or at least showing them
the Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam show and/or
Char’s Counterattack, which I would
imagine would be vital towards understanding Hathaway’s motives. MSG:
Hathaway really doesn’t work in this reviewer’s eyes as a standalone
feature. Just when things get really going, credits roll. It is still a fun,
beautiful romp with giant robots and explosions, but like just about every
incarnation of Mobile Suit Gundam, it
wants you to think long and hard about all those lives snuffed out in each of
those pretty explosions and whether all those lost lives are ultimately worth
it.
Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway is currently streaming on Netflix.
Mobile Suit Gundam
was created by Yoshiyuki Tomino.
https://fanboyfactor.com/2021/07/tv-review-mobile-suit-gundam-hathaway-netflix/
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