Char's Counterattack is a very distilled concentration of all the things that are right but also all of the things that are wrong with Yoshiyuki Tomino's first three series of Gundam.

Firstly, positives. It's beautiful to look at and nicely atmospheric. The mobile suit combat is fast and frenetic and full of momentum. The new technical design is superb too. The design of the Nu Gundam evokes the original RX-78 well while looking like a sleek update. There is a real feeling of grim finality as Char throws a last, desperate gambit to change the relationship between Earth and space and the Federation have to throw everything at the wall to stop him. War is hell and leads to unsentimental, unheroic deaths. The action trots along at a fair pace and it doesn't feel overlong at two hours. All this is good, all this works, all this is stuff Tomino has managed well before and is executed with a great degree of polish here. Also I think this is the closest Tomino's gotten to showing the newtype experience with any sense of real artistry, although the execution remains a tad overwrought.

On the downside, pretty much everything there is to dislike about the preceding TV series also makes it into the film, in forms that are all too recognisable. Characters once again make decisions that only make sense in Yoshiyuki Tomino's unfathomable understanding of human behaviour. I could have just about tolerated Char's turn to outright genocidal insanity that is the inciting incident, if there wasn't so much more weirdness ladled on top. The plot happening at all hinges on people assuming that Char will not do the thing that he has stated from the outset that he wants to do. There's also yet another incarnation of the "young female newtype working for the antagonists has a connection to one of the protagonists" which takes up a significant portion of the runtime, but also clearly can't be done justice to in that runtime, and offers very little that wasn't done before in any one of the five or six previous versions of it. Tomino remains incredibly interested in weird messy psychosexual relationships but remains almost incapable of rendering them with anything approximating believability. He is capable of showing naturally developing relationships, like he did with Mirai and Bright in Mobile Suit Gundam, and showing casual tenderness like with Amuro and Chan in this very film, but remains fixated on trying to grasp something stranger and less pleasant that remains just out of reach. As is tradition by this point it also ends fairly anticlimactically.

If you've already watched all the UC stuff and intend to continue onward you might as well watch this, but this is not a destination worth setting out for in and of itself.