"I boarded the Haunzen with my privileges as Hathaway Noa because I couldn't resist the temptation of seeing the cabinet ministers one last time...

...before I killed them."

There's a joke I've seen a couple of times now that goes something along the lines of "Gundam fans be like 'no char's counterattack is actually amazing you just have to watch it seven times" and, well...it's kind of on the money, right? CCA is now one of my favorite movies, but I left my first viewing of it bemused, confused, and largely unamused. It's an undoubtedly difficult film, both in terms of just trying to parse what is happening, and accepting and understanding the worldview it is presenting.

So much of big tentpole media is so determined to defend the inherent contradictions of the status quo we all live under (how many times have you seen a superhero or action movie where a villain makes Correct and True observations of the nature of the world but Goes Too Far and Must Be Stopped) that when a film like CCA comes along, that makes no attempt to defend any of the fascistic inclinations of capitalist society while at the same time being unwilling to sugarcoat the nature of the response being a wildly destructive act of violent liberation, we often don't have the ethical or ideological framework needed to deal with it. I certainly didn't on my first watch. It took further viewings of prior UC material (particularly Double Zeta) as well as just Becoming More Leftist to not only understand CCA but to appreciate what it was saying about Our World.

This is one of the truly remarkable things about the Universal Century under the pen of Yoshiyuki Tomino, its unwillingness to accept the traditional moral structures present in other stories in this mold. Defeating Zeon in 0079 only allowed the Earth Federation to tighten its grip on the neck of spacenoids. Exposing the Titans in Zeta only allowed the Federation to cut formal ties with them and absolve themselves of culpability despite them being an arm of their state structure. In any other story, stopping the asteroid from destroying human civilization on earth would be the happy ending, but Char's Counterattack doesn't let us breathe a sigh of relief for even a moment before it reminds us of what exactly the world we have saved looks like.

This bold storytelling is why I love the Universal Century, but it's also why it can be difficult, and why people often come away with wildly different and contradictory reads on what the movies are saying. You need to decouple yourself from a certain degree of storytelling "programming" to fully appreciate what's happening here. Which is made difficult not just by the way stories are written generally to uncritically use the traditional assumptions we make about the world and our place in it, but also because later Gundam works really do not help.

Shows like Unicorn, Wing, 08th MS Team (three of the most popular entries in the franchise in the west, to the point that future Gundam movie director, total creep, and professional sword of damocles Jordan Vogt-Roberts cited 08th MS Team explicitly as The Gundam To Watch) are all things I enjoy on their own merits to varying degrees, but they all play into far more traditional assumptions about the world and offer far more comfortable stories for an audience conditioned to accept the capitalist/imperialist status quo as Basically Fine, and these assumptions end up warping perspectives on the Gundam shows that are struggling against those assumptions. The read on CCA that Char has just turned into a straightforward villain completely out of nowhere seems pretty convincingly influenced by Wing, the original Gundam show for the west, basically doing a riff on the same plot but with all the nuance stripped out.

Which brings me, finally, to Hathaway. Because if there's one thing that I think makes Hathaway a worthwhile endeavor, regardless of the direction the future installments of this trilogy go (my main complaint about the movie is that it doesn't end so much as it just...stops), is that I think it, in a more succinct, clear, and (maybe necessarily) heavy-handed fashion than any prior Gundam UC show, delivers to the viewer the essential framework they need to understand the Universal Century: the Federation is fucking evil, and the world it has built must be brought down.

This movie is almost unspeakably gorgeous, but its opulence is purposeful and cutting. I keep thinking about the scene where Hathaway stands in his penthouse suite in a gorgeous hotel overlooking the rapidly gentrifying city around him rising out of the ashes of the destruction of the One Year War, and says "This is bad."

I think about the incredible mobile suit battle in the city at night, the sheer carnage wrought by the mere presence of these machines of death, and the shot of a federation mobile suit standing triumphant on top of a building before it crushes the building below, killing everyone still inside. I think about the sparks flying, burning the flesh of the fleeing people around them.

I think about Captain Kenneth, the greasiest, slimiest fucker in the entire Earth Federation, a gross abusive cop who deploys his power in ways both subtle and overt to creep on Gigi.

I think about the fact that this movie overtly and unapologetically explores terrorism as, if not necessarily a heroic act, then certainly a necessary one, as well as stressing the violence done to communities by law enforcement through the Manhunters and the shot of the Federation mobile suits firing directly into the city, while at the same time refusing to indulge in a power fantasy of direct action, as Hathaway wrestles earnestly with what the people want from Mafty Navue Erin, as he navigates a space explicitly accessible to him because of the privilege of his birth.

There's so much about this movie that is genuinely remarkable, and some stuff that isn't (Women characters continue to be a struggle point for Gundam, and while I find Gigi Andalucia a compelling character with a great deal of nuance to be explored in her, she is also consciously slotting into a mode of Gundam Women that I'm pretty tired of. More Marbet Fingerhats, less Lalah Sunes, please) and others have explored those thoughts well in other reviews. But I'm just glad to see a Gundam thing, for the first time in a long while, that feels like it understands what Gundam is good at when it is at its best. I'm glad to have an entry in the Universal Century that feels like it's part of it. I'm glad for the existence of something that, I think, will provide for people the beginnings of a necessary framework to understand not only what the Universal Century is all about, but maybe the world around us.

I'm glad we're finally escaping Earth's Gravity.

(This review was originally posted to Letterboxd)