Review of Mobile Suit Gundam I

I was very impressed by the original Gundam trilogy. I haven’t seen the series, but these films managed to be much more coherent than I had expected, considering they had to condense something like 20 hours of footage into about 7. Even more surprising is that at least two of them - the first and last - manage to be totally functionable movies in their own right, both of them featuring something like a distinct beginning, middle, and end rather than the general homogeneous ‘this thing happened then that thing happened’ that can easily emerge from turning a tv series into a film. This makessense, because the first film couldn’t have not had a beginning nor could the last not have had an end, but beyond this both these films also display a clear conceptual movement across their runtime. The first film starts in something approximating peace and quiet and moves into the exploration and exposure of the horrific effects of the war (Amuro's mother telling him, upon their first encounter in over 10 years, that the war has made him a killer, standing out in particular from the last third); the second in the standard intensity of war that has been established thus far and ramping it up to critical intensities - weapons of mass destruction, senseless slaughter, patricide, fratricide (it is worth noting the film has no epilogue, we end right on the post-climax apprehension of the destructive consequences of the climactic battle. The period afterwards, of trying to pack the horror up and establish again a veneer of normality, the film does not concern itself with at all). The second film lacks any movement like this, and, at a not-even-that-high resolution, any point in it is much like any other. The result is something that, rather than something capable of standing on its own, feels very much like watching 15 episodes from the middle part of a tv show.

One of things Gundam made very clear to me is that Evangelion is excellent and remarkable for reasons other than the one that is often given - that it “subverts” its genre by taking seriously both the characters emotions and the traumas that would inevitably result from the events they’re forced to bear. That feature is in fact absolutely core to the ‘real robot’ genre itself, and it's right here at its genesis with these movies and the series. Evangelion even seems to be in direct communication with in Gundam at many points regarding which parts of this conceptual space it explores; compare the opening 15 minutes of both and you’ll see multiple points where Evangelion seems to have positioned itself as a complete inverse of Gundam - the relationship between the father, the protagonist, and the conflict being one particularly obvious example. In the few psychedelic sequences that pop up in the last film, Gundam even has something of the supremely confident weirdness that elevates Eva to the level of masterpiece, although admittedly to a much much lesser extent.

Other than this somewhat-lacking element of confident weirdness (which I really is necessary for the peaks of artistic greatness), the only other real weakness of the film is how much development of secondary characters that was presumably in the series had to be cut. You can really feel this in the third film, as characters who have spoken as little as 3 lines die or suffer in weighty moments. It’s testament to the success of the film that these moments still feel reasonably significant, even when you can barely remember the names of the characters involved.

Taken as a whole then, the trilogy is mostly very good and interesting, with a slight dip across the middle. Probably a must-watch for anyone who even vaguely thought Eva was good. Also - make sure to watch till the epigraph after the last film's credits. It might be even weirder than the telepathic psychedelic visions/communications/death-experiences that feature in the first half of the movie.