Well, here it is. The big meme itself, who in their right mind would want to remake not just Mobile Suit Gundam, the mecha anime, but one of its most ‘controversial’ episodes? Controversial is in quotes, because anyone who called the original Cucuruz Doan’s Island bad was probably post-op from a lobotomy (or Tomino himself, I suppose), but the point still stands, out of everything one could do with the original Mobile Suit Gundam anime, why remake this seemingly innocuous episode not from its opening stretch, nor its climax, not an episode host to many an iconic scene, or even one with pivotal character turns- rather, we see our director, Yasuhiko Yoshikazu, return to an episode most people remember for looking off model.

The reasoning should be immediately clear given that name I just mentioned, as Yasuhiko was famously hospitalized during the production of the episode this film is based on, leading to it being ‘near completely outsourced’, and it was remade due to Yasuhiko thinking the concept would be great for a movie, according to uncited passages on the film’s wikipedia page.

But, the uncited commentary is not why I am writing this, if it was I would have attempted to find a citation. No, what I aim to do here is to assess this brief return to the days of 1979, where we get familiar faces, familiar voices, familiar music, and even familiar sound effects. It’s a nostalgic trip to the original anime, though released three years late for the 40th Anniversary. It likes to indulge in these characters, reanimate past events in a style reminiscent of Yasuhiko’s Gundam THE ORIGIN manga, upgrade notable side characters like Job John from background to supporting, and they even go out of their way to have later additions like Slegger appear. It makes the complete absence of one Char Aznable a fair bit amusing considering the fact that in the original anime, Slegger wouldn’t be joining the main crew for around twenty odd episodes.

This sense of familiarity is something the film loves to relish in, it dwells heavily on the downtime that the setting offers, whether it be comedic hijinks on the White Base, Bright annoying command comedically, rather than dramatically like in the original, or of course, Amuro working at a farm / orphanage / secret nuclear missile launch site for the bulk of the film’s runtime. Even of the four mobile suit battles across the film’s nearly two hour long run time, two are incredibly brief and occur in the opening twenty minutes, while the third is a one sided conflict far away from everything else set at the midpoint of the film. This is entirely about a desire to return to the past, albeit briefly, and without any of the dramatics or high tension that past once had.

These attitudes lead to a sense that the film wants to eat its cake and have it too. It wants to show all of Amuro’s past trauma, but also wants to have mostly clean mobile suit combat where people do in fact die. It wants to have the comedy of kids trying to milk a goat, but places that right next to the slaughtering of completely faceless soldiers, where not even a last pilot shot is spared. The antagonists are just the right amount of detached to crazy that you don’t really feel bad when they die, despite the original anime’s core trait being its humanization of these enemy soldiers. A scene that particularly stood out to me was this almost comical moment within the climax of the film, where Amuro steps on a Zeon soldier with his giant mobile suit foot, as if crushing a bug, the camera cutting to his disgusted and close to horrified face, but ultimately not dwelling on this brutal event that occurs not just in a film about discarding the shackles of war and moving on, but a film based on an episode adjacent to other episodes that explore the humanization of the enemy, and how much Amuro has changed. We even see a remake of the iconic scene where Amuro is confronted by his mother, and it’s then contrasted by a scene from far later in the original anime where his father tells Amuro to pilot his Gundam.

The film wants to bring up these ideas, these core structures that Gundam built its main character upon, yet it wants to pull on the comfort of nostalgia, ultimately getting to say very little that the original episode didn’t already say, yet it's done over a runtime nearly six times as long. There’s appreciation to be had, sure, the concluding mobile suit battle uses these mechanical Gods in a way that feels severely lacking in many other modern mecha anime. Doan is unable to conclude the battle because his Zaku is a symbol of his past, and how he uses that to push himself forward. Everything on his island and everything he does is built upon and done in response to his past, so when confronted with destroying it in the final battle, he falls. Amuro in the Gundam his father made is able to finish this battle for him though, as his Gundam is an extension of his hitherto unknown desire to communicate and truly love humanity, so he can step in to protect the humanity Doan has cultivated on this island. M’Quve is utilized as a background antagonist throughout the film, and he is in a similar contradictory state to his THE ORIGIN counterpart. He wants to push war to its limits, espousing that he has learned from the past, that where Hitler failed with Paris is Burning, he will succeed because he is aware of that past. Yet, when his plan fails, he laughs at the fact that someone among his men appreciates culture in a way similar to him.

These ideas and concepts are truly additive, ones that are interesting to witness in this film and make the project worth it for me, but they’re weighed down by other ambitions. Disgusting ambitions of nostalgia, depraved and fully on display throughout the runtime. I see Amuro’s shocking effeminate thighs, evoking eroticism that hadn’t been there before, but in a post-Z Gundam world is now commonplace, this imagery now paired with far too much admiration and fellation in regards to the content and characters on display in this film, and I think ‘So, this is what a remake of First Gundam would be like’.

And I breathe a sigh of relief that our culture has not created that.