By Chris Sawin
| Published
The Gundam franchise is weird, and that’s mostly due to the fact that it seems to distance itself from the very thing that would make it awesome. Trained humans pilot skyscraper-sized giant mobile suits called Gundams, so naturally, what you’d want to see in a new Gundam film is a bunch of Gundam action: flying around, destroying stuff, and possibly doing battle with other mobile suits.
What hinders a lot of these newer Mobile Suit Gundam films is that they are supposed to be about some sort of ongoing war, but you typically don’t see it. Instead, the films are going to be spending more time on the political portion of it, which means a whole lot of lengthy-ass dialogue sequences you couldn’t give two craps about.
2021’s Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathway is currently streaming on Netflix, and it’s decent. It’s still way more verbose than it needs to be, and you generally don’t care that much about any of the characters, but there are at least a handful of action sequences that make it worthwhile. Hathaway opens fantastically to an airplane heist. There’s a sequence of people trying to run and find cover while mobile suits battle nearby, it’s destructively amazing, and the flying sequences are killer. The Gundam pilots can see everything in front of them with nothing blocking their vision. Everything feels open like an IMAX screen, with every explosion or incoming enemy as visible to you as it is to them.
It’s intriguing that Mobile Suit Gundam Hathway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe is made by all the same people as the previous film because it’s somehow even slower and more boring by comparison, and the character arcs are all over the place. The Sorcery of Nymph Circe is directed by Shuko Murase, who directed the entirety of the anime series Witch Hunter Robin and Ergo Proxy, as well as single episodes of Samurai Champloo and Michiko & Hatchin.
Complimenting Contrasts Were Better Done In The Past
The film is written by Yoshiyuki Tomino, who has been writing for the Gundam franchise since its inception in 1970. Before that, Tomino was also a writer for the original Astro Boy in the 1960s. The Sorcery of Nymph Circe is also written by Yasuyuki Muto, who helped write the adult animation series Bible Black, Afro Samurai, Afro Samurai: Resurrection, and Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn.
The involvement of Murase, Tomino, and Muto is notable because, by now, these guys seem to know what makes an interesting Gundam film. In The Sorcery of Nymph Circe, the animation blends traditional and computer animation. Sometimes the CGI is so realistic that you think you’re looking at actual footage. Most of the water in the film looks real, and the title sequence featuring a white curtain appears genuine for a moment. The contrast also seemed to work better in Hathway, with the traditional animated sequences looking incredible and the CGI complementing them. The mobile suit battles were CGI during intense action, but hand-drawn when they were idle.
Embracing The Darkness In All The Wrong Ways
More often than not, though, the CGI sequences are pure trash in The Sorcery of Nymph Circe. Most of the ships look flat, blocky, and unfinished. There are also at least two instances in this film where major sequences take place in almost complete darkness. It’s just voices in the dark in an animated film for up to five minutes at a time, and it’s during crucial times where it seems like they’d want to show something.
Maybe it was meant to be realistic if you were standing there with no light source, trying to decipher people blobs in the dark. Or maybe it’s an instance of censorship where they’re trying to mask whatever blood or violence we may have seen with the lights on. Honestly, we’ll never know, and the dialogue doesn’t help much despite taking up 90 minutes of the 105-minute duration.
A Disjointed Continuation
Chronologically, Hathaway follows Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative and is the second work in the UC Next 0100 Project. Both come after Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn in the Universal Century timeline. Hathaway and The Sorcery of Nymph Circe are two-thirds of a new Gundam film trilogy, which is connected to the 1988 film Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack. Hathaway introduced us to Hathaway Noa. He pretends to be a plant inspector while traveling to Earth to retrieve the new Gundam.
On the plane, he meets Gigi Andalusia, a young 20-something mistress who has the gift of intuition, and Federation Colonel Kenneth Sleg. Kenneth’s defining quality is that he’s a womanizer. Hathway spends the most time with Gigi; he shares a room with her, sees her naked, and saves her life. But she still runs off with Kenneth at the end. The most important thing to happen is that Hathaway gets his Gundam.
Despite the five-year gap between Hathway and The Sorcery of Nymph Circe, not much happens in the film. Hathway is pulled between three women in the film: his actual girlfriend, who he’s been having issues with, a mechanic who likes to wear overalls and nothing else underneath (he compliments her breasts), and Gigi, whom he now suddenly can’t stop thinking about despite the two of them bitching at each other whenever they were on screen together in the last film.
Gigi is still under Kenneth’s protection throughout most of the film, but she goes back to the count’s place briefly. She’s been seeing an old man who’s wheelchair bound and is probably the reason she’s wealthy. She redecorates his house, then leaves him to return to Kenneth, but spends the entire film obsessing over Hathaway. Her intuition proves useful upon her return to Kenneth, but she’s passed around like a hot potato so often that you don’t care.
A Wordy, Self-Absorbed Drama
Meanwhile, Kenneth has become the commander of The Federation. He was seeing a woman closer to his age, but Gigi ruins that, and he’s into it. The anti-Earth Federation group Mafty is what Kenneth has been chasing in these two films. Hathaway was secretly working with them the entire time during the previous film, and now Kenneth is attempting to find Hathaway, his Gundam, and whatever Mafty hideout he can get his hands on.
There is one flying sequence about half an hour into the film, and about ten minutes of the finale are a Gundam/mobile suit battle, but that’s it. The rest of the film is literally just people talking. It’s also weird that The Sorcery of Nymph Circe features two montages: Gigi’s interior decorating montage and Hathway’s broken relationship montage. Then the end credits play over “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns ‘N Roses.
Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway has some hiccups, but ultimately shows promise with its action sequences. But Mobile Suit Gundam: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe is so dull, feels tortuously long, and all of the characters are selfish a-holes. The sequel feels uneventful, and its strange use of almost absolute darkness and bizarre montages only sours the fact that you could be watching mobile suits pound each other stupid in the sky instead.
Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe SCORE
You literally don’t care about anything they’re talking about. Unless the third film is somehow able to distance itself from being a wordy, self-absorbed drama, then these new Hathaway films are only worth putting on if you’re in need of a good nap.
Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe arrives in US theaters on May 15.
