Gundam: Hathaway’s Best Moment Is About the Horror of Mechanized War

Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway, the most recent entry in the beloved mecha franchise, isn’t actually a film that’s targeted on its motion. It’s extra within the politics of its world than it’s the big robots which have made Gundam a merchandising powerhouse for many years. But when it does get aspherical to squaring off its titular Mobile Suits, it does so with an interesting new perspective.

Hathaway’s first main Mobile Suit motion scene doesn’t happen till nearly midway via its runtime. The movie’s protagonist, Hathaway Noa, is often known as Mafty Navue Erin—head of an anti-Earth Federation terrorist group itself referred to as “Mafty.” He’s at present underneath the watchful eyes of each the Federation and native police forces in Davao City, the Philippines, following a failed terrorist assault on the ship transporting Hathaway and several other distinguished Federation ministers to Earth. As he sits in his lodge room reflecting on his previous and his resolution to wage a violent revolution towards the Federation his father nonetheless serves (and he himself briefly served as a youth throughout the occasions of Char’s Counterattack), Mafty forces put together to stage a precision strike on the surviving Federation ministers from Hathaway’s flight, who additionally ended up being diverted to Davao forward of an vital convention.

As Mafty Mobile Suits soar into the sky and put together to start launching strikes on the lodge the ministers are in, Federation fits from the town launch to counter them. It opens with an intense staring contest between the 2 sides; the Mafty fits fly down beneath the Federation’s, placing themselves between their foe and Davao City, believing that there’s no method the “good guys” would try to fireside down at them and threat collateral injury on the civilian inhabitants beneath. The Federation fits fireplace anyway, partaking with the unstated calculus that civilian lives are price sacrificing to destroy even a handful of Mafty dissidents. In a single second, peace explodes into absolute chaos—fireplace and explosions engulf Davao. In the air, Mafty fits attempt to steadiness putting their goal with surviving towards the Federation fits. On the bottom, Hathaway and his new “friend,” the mysterious younger Gigi Andalucia (a fellow survivor to the terrorist’s tried ship-hijacking), desperately attempt to escape the devastation raining down round them.

But it’s not simply that our heroes are in peril that makes the scene tense. When the fight shifts from Davao’s airspace and into the town itself, Hathaway’s lens by no means strikes away from Hathaway and Gigi’s perspective on the bottom, as we would count on. Mafty and the Federation’s mechs don’t develop into our protagonists on this second of motion. These gigantic stage setters are each away from our focus, and but additionally the driving momentum of practically 10 minutes of sheer chaos. And whereas it’s certainly a slickly animated sequence on a technical stage, it doesn’t really feel “cool” to look at Mafty and the Federation duke it out. It’s horrifying, enjoying out like a scene from a catastrophe film and in contrast to the sort of motion we usually get to see in Gundam.

Everything is framed from the attitude of the terrified civilians (Hathaway and Gigi amongst them) quite than the Mobile Suits themselves, amplifying the size and destruction of the fight. A beam discharged from a Mafty Messer’s rifle doesn’t simply punch a gap in a Federation Gustav Karl’s armor, it spews searing scorching, molten scraps of steel and pure power down onto the crowds of fleeing folks beneath. Crowd photographs are framed by disorienting fireplace and noise, punctuated by booms that knock swaths of individuals clear over, a few of them by no means getting again as much as maintain working. We’re proven that it’s not simply blasts of missed photographs from beams and cannons which might be deadly to the folks on the bottom, however even the easy issues that years and years of Gundam motion has de-sensitized us to. The sheer warmth from a swimsuit’s vernier engines kicking up clouds of mud because it descends, blowing close by autos away. Mobile fits don’t delicately land on or round buildings however smash down and thru them, their agility within the air contrasted with a heaving sense of weight as they stomp via housing blocks and metropolis streets—an unflinching, uncaring response to the chaos of their wake.

While it’s an extremely violent phase, it’s by no means gory. We’re not given the prospect to see the aftermaths of fireplace and rubble on the our bodies of individuals falling throughout Hathaway and Gigi, apart from to see them susceptible within the streets. We don’t must in an effort to perceive the horror of the second, as we’re reminded of it continuously by Gigi’s panicked cries and screams. We’re reminded even additional by the distinction between her demeanor—presumably by no means having seen a Mobile Suit this close-up earlier than, or maybe ever outdoors of reports broadcasts—and Hathaway’s strained, but additionally numbed, response to the horror round him after the trauma he developed combating in Char’s Counterattack as a teen. His desensitization to the nightmare unfolding additional speaks to his personal conflicted feelings earlier within the film, sparked by Gigi’s questioning if he and Mafty are in the suitable putting towards the Federation the best way the have been. The method they are, as flames engulf his world and the just about catatonic Gigi cradled in his arms.

The skirmish ends when two Federation fits nook a lone Mafty swimsuit in a park that Hathaway, Gigi, and the surviving residents had fled to for a short refuge. One blocking the only Mafty swimsuit’s escape, the opposite reaches to its waist, because it ignites one in every of Gundam’s most iconic mecha weapons: the fiery, purple-pink power blade of a beam saber. So usually in Gundam, a beam saber being unsheathed signifies the approaching killing blow of a combat, a exact stab to the chest of an enemy swimsuit that disables it and incinerates the helpless pilot inside in a single strike. In shocked silence, all Hathaway and Gigi can do is watch because the Federation swimsuit plunges its blade into the Mafty swimsuit’s again, its chest unit streaming sparks throughout like lovely, horrible rainfall.

Hathaway doesn’t know if his good friend within the swimsuit, Gawman Nobile, survived the blow. Gigi, traumatized by the expertise she’s simply endured, can solely sob into Hathaway’s chest. And but, as Gawman’s swimsuit lifelessly slumps towards its attacker and to the bottom, the digicam lens attracts again to distinction its type with Hathaway and Gigi’s, as they start caressing and exploring one another’s our bodies. It’s an act of tender intimacy—awkward sensuality, massaging consolation, the pent up power of a tense scenario having to go someplace, wherever. The humanity of their tenderness and the inhumanity of the horrifying fight they simply watched unfold round them are positioned towards one another—these two totally different sorts of our bodies, mechanical and natural, dealing with their inflicted traumas.

Presenting Mobile Suit fight in Gundam like this isn’t a brand new concept, and shouldn’t actually be anticipated to be in a franchise as outdated as it’s. Gundam has, many instances earlier than Hathaway, juxtaposed the trauma it presents on the mechanized our bodies of its humanoid mecha with the very actual our bodies of the people that pilot them. Its message all the time that, as visually thrilling as its motion may be, the price of all of it is perpetually deeply traumatic—Hathaway is not any exception. By pulling its perspective away from the mechs themselves to the grounded lens offered by the civilians on the bottom round them, Hathaway additional amplifies the dehumanizing nature of its mechanical weapons of battle, presenting them as one thing akin to monstrousness despite their humanoid type. To have Hathaway largely eschew motion for thematic interrogation and use one in every of its uncommon sparks of battle to talk to this long-running theme within the franchise is an excellent second of spectacle in and of itself. One that looks like a pointed evolution of that theme, quite than only a continuation of it.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway is now streaming on Netflix.

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