Mobile Suit Gundam F91 just made me sad. This is barely a film. It's a collection of scenes from an unfinished TV series hastily slapped together into the shape of a film. There's a chance I might have quite liked that series. It's really rather nicely animated, and the almost coherent first half hour is a pretty engaging depiction of an invasion of a space colony that's suitably brutal and gritty. Then it runs out of road, the wheels come off, and it overturns into a ditch. It feels almost pointless to discuss anything about it beyond how it looks. The mobile suit combat is fast and frenetic and beautiful, as you'd expect from Yoshiyuki Tomino with a good bit of money behind him (except not actually enough to finish the thing), and the new mobile suits are rendered with lovely intricate animation. I like the look of the F91 itself, it's a good solid basic Gundam design, and I appreciate the foldaway beam rifles as a distinctive flourish that sets it apart. However the look of it is the only bright spot because the plot is so hacked to pieces that it's fairly difficult to follow in parts and everything is the worst possible version of what it might have been. There's characters you don't get to spend much meaningful time with, characters that appear and disappear with minimal fanfare, arcs that get compressed into nothing or left unfinished, and constant jarring transitions from one scene or location to the next because either there wasn't space to fit in the scenes that went between them or they simply weren't finished in the first place. Most of the cast end up feeling barely defined because the screentime they were meant to have has been robbed from them, including the protagonist Seabrook. The deuteragonist Cecilia gets more development but since she's the one with the most complex story, one involving a hidden heritage and switching sides multiple times, it's a complete mess. The whole thing feels rushed to an inch of its life, because it is. The main antagonist's plan seems fairly silly and has to be executed with some fairly silly looking devices. I'm not sure that would have worked even in in the extended form of a TV series. As far as I can tell within the confines of the mess that's been served up, I think Tomino seems to have managed to have gotten a slightly better grasp of how normal human beings interact compared to some of his prior entries in the franchise. However that may simply be because I am attributing some of the weirdness to F91 fundamentally not being a finished piece of work, and if it was actually finished it would actually be just as bad as always. Watching the twelve episodes that had been planned with literally just the screenplay to fill in the gaps would be a better experience than this. It is only worth watching for the sake of completion and to imagine what could have been. Just buy the Gunpla of the F91 and do not think about the work it came from any further.