Nowhere is this more apparent than in his decision to offer up yet another failed clone of Char as the antagonist. For all the lip service writer Harutoshi Fukui-the same writer responsible for the original Unicorn novels-pays to “rewriting the narrative,” it seems he viewed his own past work purely as a resource to crib from in order to cut down on the costs of labor and creativity. Too much time instead is paid to a back-and-forth chase of a plot that erupts again and again into overchoreographed and rote battles that feel as if they were copied directly from Unicorn.īut then everything feels copied directly from Unicorn: the few new mech designs are uninspired rehashes of older suits and armors from Unicorn the animation and computer graphics are reliant on the exact same effects and models and styles that were already ubiquitous in Unicorn even the structure and the pacing of the plot feel cribbed from the early episodes of Unicorn. There are too many characters crowding the limited screen time with too little devoted to all but Michele, whose own (admittedly strong, if rushed) development exists almost solely to spur the wildly underdeveloped Jona on to last-minute conviction. The emotions are hollow, a damning indictment in a story supposedly about the horror of death and the fear of loss.
MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM NT MOVIE
It’s as if Unicorn’s more ambitious aspirations have allowed NT to start interrogating topics that would before have seemed beyond the universe’s scope.īut beyond paying lip service to these higher ideas, the movie seems uninterested. There’s also a healthy dollop of psycho- and techno-babble about how the Phenex possesses a system that will allow users to transcend death in a franchise where spiritual manifestations have until now been used solely to represent the emotions and memories of the fallen more than literal ghosts, the acknowledgment of a literal soul is novel-if admittedly awkward-thematic territory. Some superficial narrative detail suggests better, at first: beyond allowing a handful of cameos from Unicorn’s protagonists, NT’s focus is on orphans Jona Basta and Michele Luio as they hunt down an offshoot of the Unicorn series of mobile suits, the Gundam Phenex, they believe to be piloted by their long lost friend, Rita. Sadly, ironically, Mobile Suit Gundam NT (Narrative) makes very little effort to live up to this lofty promise. The way forward was clear: the new century, we were told, could begin.
MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM NT SERIES
Newtypes have always symbolized the next step in mankind’s evolution, after all, an idea that Unicorn director Kazuhiro Furuhashi zeroed in on to such an extent that his own series investigated deeply what truly accepting such an existence would mean not just for the people of the Universal Century timeline but for viewers who had grown inured to the constant cycle of violence between Federation and space colonies that had defined the franchise’s mainline universe for decades.īy series end the ghost of Char Aznable had been exorcised literally and figuratively, Zeon had finally been declared a sovereign state, and the original sin of the Universal Century-burying the rights of Newtypes before they even had a chance to claim them-had been exposed.
It’s a gutsy thing to saddle any Gundam movie with the initials “NT” in clear allusion to the Newtypes at the core of the mythos, let alone a movie meant to serve as a direct sequel to Gundam Unicorn.