Every thruster nozzle moves individually. Fingers delicately slide from button to button as shoulder muscles clench to keep levers in place. Glancing blows from beam sabres and rifles leave red hot scars along molten metal. Pilots vomit in their cockpits or block their line of sight with all the snacks required for prolonged watch posts. The sounds of 1979 merge with those of the 80s, 90s and entirely new audio to create the Most Gundam soundscape possible. Hiroyuki Sawano's bombastic earworms elevate the experience to a proclamation: the Universal Century has returned to your screen. Gundam is real again!
Hang on, that Universal Century? The dystopia about a military dictatorship killing its people through neglect? The one where we fantasise about our minds connecting in ways that our efficient nuclear reactors have prevented our technology from doing? The one with all the space lasers? If I wasn't happy to have a fun-filled romp through the One Year War, what makes you think I want a grand return to the years immediately following Char's Counterattack?
There's a joke made in recent years about how until you watch Mobile Suit Gundam for yourself you don't truly realise both just how horrible the war is, nor how cool the robot. Likewise, it's not until you watch Gundam Unicorn for yourself that you see just how jaw-dropping the presentation, nor how garbage the script. Beyond the obvious value of the visuals and foley, every voice actor in this OVA is working their asses off. No line is delivered without gravitas. Moments which would be hokey anywhere else are delivered with such intense emotional weight that they almost make the project work. The script really is terrible enough to kill the whole ride though.
It's UC 0096, three years after Char's Counterattack. The estranged son of a private foundation for rich assholes' president winds up in the cockpit of a gundam which when operated correctly will lead the path to unlocking the foundation's deep dark secret. Both Neo Zeon remnants and the Earth Federation are trying to be the ones to either grab the box once opened or destroy it to stop others accessing it. In between each incredible fight people sit in rooms and pretend their trite observations of the world are profound. There is a giant space laser. It's not even a new one; it's Zeta Gundam's. In the end the dark secret (the Earth Federation charter deleted a line after a terror bombing blew up the location the original monument/document was signed) is revealed and our lead characters presumably have a happily ever after in the depths of space.
As I said back in Stardust Memory, I hate interquels. You're either adding more information than is necessary to a preceding incident (Zeta is far more interesting as a study on failed de-nazification than being the result of a nuclear strike and second colony drop) or you have to write something inconsequential because prior works have made it clear nothing important happened in the time period you're covering. War in the Pocket and The 08th MS Team sidestepped this latter issue by being extremely small stories in an already gigantic conflict. Unicorn's great failing is it wants to be the big important next major chapter in a saga which had already made clear that the Zeon movement fizzled out after Char died. The flags faded away as those who survived the war passed on, but it was the ideology and methods of Zeon which stayed on the table to be picked up by dipshits like Cosmo Babylonia or Zanscare in the following decades.
The mystery box almost works. You can't have the box contain something actually useful because it would've been mentioned in other stories. Having people fighting over a tiny bit of legislation which only seemed imoprtant because some guy said people are evolving better brains a while back is kind of clever. Unfortunately, Gundam Unicorn's political perspective isn't interested in exploring the philosophy of law. It has no desire to discuss how laws are social constructs, only made real when people enforce them. Unicorn is not interested in theories of power, social consent or a Materialist perspective. It just wants to repeat the themes of prior Universal Century shows while adding nothing of its own. It's like reading a wiki summary or series of blog posts about these hours and hours of storytelling and acting like that's as good as experiencing the real thing.
You should keep reading these posts and complimenting me for making them, though. I'm having fun.
This show fucking loves Zeon, but keeps trying to act like it doesn't. We see the Cosmic Era trick of any likable Zeon character jumping ship to hang out on the Nahel Argama by the end of the story, but its criticisms of literal Char clone Full Frontal border on that "True Zeon Hasn't Been Tried Yet" image macro. The true Zeon is rugged friendly men who raise children and go to church. Fake, evil Zeon is when you're planning collective bargaining against a military dictatorship. Of course, Full Frontal is revealed to actually be lying and just a violent nihilist. He's no Casval rem Deikun at all; he's Rau le Creuset. The Cosmic Era reaches beyond the time to inflict its awful rhetorical tricks on us yet again.
Gundam Unicorn has a problem with women. Shocking for Gundam I know, but 00 was such a huge improvement here (you can have the argument about how much of Wang Liu Mei is class critique and how much is hating women in the comments if you want I guess) that it feels like such a regression. Banagher's mother stole him away from his birthright. Marida Cruz is framed as tragic not because of her disposable origins or sexual abuse, but because she lost her womb and therefore what makes her truly a woman. She also dies in the final episode to complete a man's character development. The men of the Vist Foundation conspiring with the Federation all have redemptive moments but Martha is fully committed to the slaughter and abuse of power. Minerva Zabi, the one last loose end from this era of the Universal Century spends almost the entire show moving between various cages, devoid of any agency. It doesn't use this to make a statement on illusions of power, but because it genuinely can't think of anything better for someone who is on paper an extremely important political figure to be doing. When women were getting slapped around in 1979 it felt like a period piece. At this point it's just malicious. Gundam X was 14 years before this man.
This show likes to believe it is about Fatherhood. If so, it is written by someone who's never had a healthy relationship in their life. To be a father means giving vapid speeches, getting into fights and then dying. Banagher's soul doesn't even get to just seek out Minerva's on his own. It's shown clinging to his father, who is then the one who hands Banagher on. It's so tedious and reductive but like everything else in Gundam Unicorn acts like it's the most profound shit in the world. G Gundam handled this better and we got to see the Statue of Liberty Cannon at the same time.
Ultimately, Gundam Unicorn is a cargo cult anime. It believes that by adopting the shape of Gundam, the sounds of Gundam and saying certain Gundam-like buzzwords (adults! Gravity! Reformation of humanity!) that it will become a proper Gundam and thus be respectable, prestige Art. That's not what makes so many entries timeless. It's the weird derivations from those ideas. The original's WW2 trauma mixed with psychedelic reverie. Zeta's soap opera. ZZ's pivot from stupid bullshit to desperately fighting to avoid previous mistakes. CCA saying that line. F91's stories of healing. Victory's relentless trauma and insane attempts at feminism. X's tender love story and critique of what came before. ∀'s boundless weirdos who never have the full picture but keep struggling anyway. When all the quirks are polished away, you just get a story that never moves past the surface details. Gundam Unicorn sucks and any dork who tries to tell you it's the ideal jumping on point for watching Gundam needs discipline from Wong Lee.
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