Mobile Suit Gundam, Vol. 9: NewTypes and the Future (1979)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written by Hiroyuki Hoshiyama, Yoshihisa Araki, Masaru Yamamoto, Kenichi Matsuzaki, and Yoshiyuki Tomino
Directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino
Character Design by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko
Mechanical Design by Kunio Ohkawara

Features:

• Mobile Suit Encyclopedia
  
• Trailers
  

Rating: 13+

Anamorphic: N/A

My advice: Movies, movies, movies. Skip the show.

With the Battle of Solomon raging, Amuro and the crew of the White Base move to infiltrate the space fortress. As the tide turns in favor of the Earth Federation forces, Zabi’s forces launch one last desperate assault. A new mobile suit, the Big-Zam, appears, annihilating great swaths of Federation troops, until Amuro appears and puts it down. Before he’s had a chance to truly rest and recover, though, he finds himself drawn into a clever trap.

While Char searches for him, Amuro battles another Zeon leader in suit-to-suit combat, amid the blasted landscape of the spaceport “Texas.” In a prolonged game of hide-and-seek, Char finally locates the Gundam, but despite his superior tactical skills, Char is no match for Amuro’s raw NewType talent. Narrowly escaping with his life, Char encounters his sister, Earth Federation soldier Sayla, herself out looking for Amuro and the Gundam following the duel.

The familial story of Char and Sayla gets laid out in more detail than has been previously presented. The logic of Char’s support for Zeon has never been particularly compelling (or even particularly well explained), and this version is no different. It makes the character of Char seem that much more arrogant and bull-headed, but perhaps that’s all it’s supposed to do. Sayla, typically a competent soldier who has already seen a number of her friends die, is reduced to weak-kneed weepiness by her brother’s stupidity, and that seems a bit out of keeping, even if he is her brother.

The discussion of NewTypes, a psychically-gifted evolution of humanity, continues from the last disc. Despite the existence of NewTypes on both sides of the conflict, Amuro Ray seems to be developing his abilities at an exponentially faster rate. The enigmatic Lalah accompanies Char into battle and begins to exhibit her potential NewType abilities, but the other notable Zeon NewType, Challia Bull, is shown to be phenomenally unprepared to go ten rounds with the Gundam.

The DVD is decent, with the same good audio and video transfer of all the other discs in the franchise. The only extra is the Mobile Suit Encyclopedia, providing tech specs for the featured craft from the accompanied episodes. There are trailers for a number of other Gundam-related shows, and that’s about that for bonus material.

I’m still of the opinion that, for this particular series at least, you’re better off just buying the movie trilogy and being done with it. The show is certainly interesting and plenty entertaining, but it just seems that the movies do a finer story of relating the One Year War that the show did.