Mobile Suit Gundam:
Char’s Counterattack (1998)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written and Directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino
Character Design by Hiroyuki Kitazume
Mobile Suit Design by Yutaka Izubuchi

Features

• Trailer
  
• Gundam model promo
  
• Creator filmography
  
• Reversible jacket art
  

Rating: 13+

Anamorphic: Yep

My advice: Skip it.

The original trilogy of Mobile Suit Gundam movies singlehandedly established an entire genre of military adventure anime complete with teenage pilots and gigantic mecha. Spawning a handful of television series and a huge line of toys and models, it is a benchmark of anime, and the movies set the bar for all that followed in its footsteps. Char’s Counterattack is the fourth feature-length installment in the venerable series of movies, filmed a decade after the originals and at the height of Gundam’s renewed popularity (thanks in no small part to Cartoon Network’s Toonami).

Unfortunately, this fourth effort falls well short of the original trilogy in nearly every respect. The story finds Amuro Ray and his archnemesis Char Aznable at odds yet again, over a decade after their initial engagements in the One Year War. It’s Universal Century 0093, and tensions are on the rise yet again. Char, never content after his defeat and that of the Zeon forces during the war, has hatched yet another plan. This time, he’s going to blast Earth until it’s uninhabitable, forcing humanity to move into space for good and (at least in theory) uniting them all under the guidance of Zeon, which has been managing nicely in space for some time. Enter Amuro again, ready to foil the dangerously insane Char’s plans.

Sounds decent so far, yeah? Here endeth the goodness. Rather than giving us this conflict in its pure grudge-match glory, we are introduced to a handful of new young characters, including a brainless girl who thinks Char is just dreamy, and Amuro tries pointlessly to sway her back into the fold of the sane and unannoying. Endless sequences get wasted on this goofy love triangle and the incredibly annoying girl’s giggly cluelessness about the real state of the world and what’s going on. It’s as if someone imported a character from a completely different franchise and dropped her into the middle of another Gundam war crisis. The distraction factor is tremendous and the suck factor is high.

If one can overcome the complete trainwreck of a story, the animation is absolutely phenomenal. As good as the original trilogy is, the art is starting to look a little long in the tooth, and this installment provides a much-needed injection of new life into the Gundam universe of films. The combat sequences are fast-paced, and informed strongly by two decades of development in both anime and the action film genres. The result is fast, slick, stylish mecha goodness, and if that’s all you're after, the film will give it to you in bushels.

The DVD presents clean video and crisp audio, and excepting the annoying character, the voice acting is top-rate. Extras are a little thin, but the creator filmography is at least informative if you want to go looking for more work by Tomino. A Gundam timeline would have been cool, to track the developments from the original trilogy to this film for those that haven’t watched all the various series obsessively. Also, this is one of the first Gundam discs that hasn’t included a technical data section for the mechas seen in the action, which was a bit surprising.

The brainless action is great, but it doesn’t do enough to make up for the sheer grating hassle of dealing with an unnecessary love triangle introduced basically to create additional conflict. But when your basic plot involves a brewing war to destroy the Earth, I think you’ve got conflict aplenty without dragging in a brainless character that apparently forms her opinions on everything by flipping a coin each morning when she gets out of bed. Too silly for words. Those dying for some mecha death goodness might rent it, but I’d recommend rewatching the originals.