The first few minutes are really really cool. Colonies are being rebuild, humanity is looking ahead for a brighter future. And then Nina's recap is a really good way to start the movie, skip the details of how we got here and head straight into pursuing Gato.

And then the movie ruins everything.

Actually the next thing is good, Gato's second introduction is pretty interesting, we haven't met any of the staff of higher-ups of the base, so that mysterious person might very well be one of them. Except the movie already introduced us to him. Here we have two really cool elements, which don't go together at all.

From here on the movie enters its worse part, it really feels like a bunch of badly strung-together scenes and there wasn't much thought put into the way they flow into each other. The flaws of the character relationships are really exacerbated in that half, Kou and Nina are all lovey-dovey after having talked together for a few minutes, South sorties while still injured while knowing Uraki barely more.

And the parts with effective character relationship are the one which don't rely on any of the traits which would have been developed in the OVA, Kou dumping his calculations in Nina's lunch, all the staff of the Albion in that bar on the moon, these are compelling character moments, but they're mere accidents in the movie.

In its second half the movie slides into mediocrity, it's less offensively bad as the first half, even if there are still major issues, but I don't think it needs to be developed any further.

Some elements are particularity questionable, like the need to stop at the La Vie en Rose, which doesn't make any sense since the movie cuts out its role in the story, or earlier in the movie with Kelly, which suffured the same fate, eating up precious screen time. It's honnestly one of the biggest flow of the movie, that it doesn't know how to use its 2 allocated hours of runtime, especally with how much it struggles to properly string scenes together and instead we have completely irrelvent scenes.

And the end actually pretty good, because it's basically just the last episode of the OVA.
Some might argue that the end of the OVA is bad, but the movie didn't make it any worse.
Well, aside from the romance which makes absolutely no sense in the context of the movie.

All in all Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Afterglow of Zeon has some good ideas here and there and a few strong elements, but it's all lost in a see in mediocre at best recap.