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The Big Gundam Watch, Part 4: Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack

Char’s Counterattack is a tremendous milestone for Gundam as a franchise. It was the first original theatrical film (versus the three compilation movies made for the original series), and cemented Gundam as a pop culture institution. It also serves as the epic climax for the multiple-series-spanning, nearly-decade-long rivalry between Amuro Ray and Char Aznable, introducing some of the best mecha designs the series has had to date and multiple lavishly animated action sequences to help give them a worthy send-off.

It’s also a hot mess.

I mentioned elsewhere that I watched this for the first time just a day after finishing Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ, and then I watched it again a few days later, because even though this is infinitely shorter than the three 40+ episode television series that came before it, it tries to pack a lot into its two hour runtime. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do it elegantly.

I’m going to be changing the format of this post slightly for this movie: rather than breaking it up into what I liked, what I liked less, and other observations, I’m gonna talk at length about a handful of specific subjects and then just go into other observations. The reason, to be perfectly blunt, is that it’s still hard for me to say what I liked and what I didn’t.

QUESS

There’s a lot to say about Quess, but first and foremost it’s critically important to state right out of the gate that she fucking sucks. I did not think, after my assertion in in my ZZ review that Beecha Oleg was my least favorite character so far, that he would be so swiftly and definitively replaced by Quess Paraya, who in under two hours manages to create such a massive power gap between herself and any other character I would consider for this position, that I struggle to think of what it would take to displace her. A spoiled rotten brat with a frighteningly poor understanding of anything outside her own tiny bubble of experiences, who mistakenly believes she’s a Super Empath beyond reproach because she was taken in by a con artist- there has never been a more on-the-nose name than “Christina of India”- and as such, she does absolutely nothing but be a horrible clueless monster until the split-second before her death. But hating Quess seems to be the default stance for most people who’ve seen Char’s Counterattack as far as I can tell, so I don’t think I need to go much deeper into that. What really gets me is that, even now, I’m not sure whether or not I’m supposed to sympathize with her, because she’s such a tragedy.

The tragedy of Quess, within the narrative, is that she actually had nearly limitless potential. Despite what I said before, she was, in fact, a Super Empath- at the tender age of 13, Quess was one of the most powerful Newtypes we’ve seen in the Universal Century yet, being compared directly to Lalah during her early training and outperforming the overcharged Cyber-Newtype Gyunei in short order. The problem was that, due to the teachings of Christina of India, she seems to have believed that being a Newtype grants you inherently better understanding of other people, which isn’t actually the case. Instead, it grants you the ability to more readily receive the emotions of others, which can lead to better understanding, but she didn’t know how to process any of it due to her limited worldview. Had either Amuro or Char actually invested in helping her resolve her crippling issues with her father and misunderstanding of her own abilities, it seems to me that she could’ve become a major force for good, especially within the Earth Federation as the daughter of a high ranking politician. Instead, for all intents and purposes she was dismissed by Amuro, and Char, having strayed so far from his own ideals, opted to utilize her solely as a weapon instead. This ultimately resulted in her untimely death, and all that potential was reduced to nothingness.

The tragedy of Quess, as a viewer, is that even though I can identify all that, I can’t actually bring myself to feel bad for her. In recent years, I’ve come to give a lot more slack- arguably more than I should- to teenagers in fiction when it comes to annoying personalities and/or bad choices, because those are just part and parcel of being a teenager. Unfortunately, Quess surpassed my tolerance very much in the same way that Kamille did for the first half of Zeta, because she's completely stagnant for the entire movie. I also keep wanting to compare her to Reccoa, but for as bad as Reccoa was, there was at least the implication that her brazen shamelessness was a cope; furthermore, everyone who isn’t Scirocco (or Sarah, technically) is pretty open about calling her a garbage can of a human being for what she’s done.

Quess never once takes a moment to consider what she’s actually doing, and the gravity of it never occurs to her, either. She supports Char’s “kill all life on Earth” plan well before she links up with him because she’s mad about her dad, and when Hathaway suggests that's not a good justification for causing a mass extinction event, the most consideration she can muster is “Iunno”. You get the sense that maybe she’ll have some kind of introspective moment when she discovers that the disarmament at Luna II was a lie, where Char’s dishonesty might rub her the wrong way considering the whole reason she joined up with him was because she was so angry about her father’s infidelity, but no. Even after her breakdown where she’s struggling with feeling all of the deaths during the battle at Luna II, which should give her even just a split second of hesitation about the mass extinction event she keeps trying to usher in, she’s back to her normal, intolerable self by the next scene. Even the appearance of Hathaway has no real effect on her until she suddenly develops the wherewithal to save him at the moment of her death, but seconds before that she was resolutely screaming about how he and the Earth needed to die, exactly as she believed when they first arrived at Londenion.

Additionally, it’s not at all reasonable to blame Amuro for not getting more involved in Quess’s wellbeing. Putting aside any of his own unexamined parental issues, he can’t be expected to drop everything to prioritize the welfare of a diplomat’s child that he barely interacted with to start, especially not when there’s a war threatening the entire population of Earth going on. As for Char… well, let’s move on to Char.

CHAR

The filmmakers were very bold with the way they chose to characterize Char in this movie, but I also think it was necessary for them to do what they did. At the surface level, he still comes across as cool as he ever was in previous appearances, but looking any closer than that reveals what a fucking loser the man has become. It’s important that they did that, because if you’re going to make him a villain again, you don’t want to have the audience sympathize with him, but they’re primed to do so because, you know, he’s Char Aznable, one of the most influential characters in pop culture. As such, the best way to get people to root against him, or at least not root for him, is to highlight the fact that as of this movie, Char has given up on everything he ever believed for the sake of petty revenge.

Technically, Char’s story was done at the end of Zeta. His meeting with Lalah shifted his focus from revenge on the Zabis to setting the stage for the arrival of Newtypes en masse, which he believed would usher in a new age of prosperity not just for mankind, but for the Earth itself. After all, it does make sense that as more and more people are born with the capacity to psychically feel each other’s emotions, there would be a concerted effort to improve the quality of life for everyone to minimize pain and suffering, and environmentalism goes a long way towards that. A lot of the final episode of Zeta is Char firmly asserting his willingness to wait for that promised time in the face of both Scirocco and Haman taunting him and, in Haman’s case, trying to bait him into taking immediate action. Hell, the very last thing he says to Kamille is that he’s not the one who’s going to be creating that better world.

Char’s Counterattack begins 5 years later with the very abrupt reveal that Char changed his mind: he’s not willing to wait for that promised time and he is going to be the one who’s creating that better world. This was alluded to during the conversation between Bright and Sayla near the end of ZZ, where they’re aware Char survived the Gryps Conflict and suspect that he’s plotting something, but it made sense for those two characters to be suspicious. Save for Amuro, they probably have the strongest insight as to what kind of person Char is. What makes less sense is how right they were, and how quickly he turned on his heel, because nothing in particular seems to have happened to push him so far, so fast. The war with Haman’s Neo Zeon revealed that even without the influence of the Titans, the Earth Federation remained deeply corrupt, and their corruption even spread to the AEUG in the absence of men like himself or Commodore Blex, but the response to those depressing revelations should not be “everyone’s gotta go”. And I don’t believe Char thinks so either, but what I do believe is that Char thinks it’s the best way to ensure Amuro winds up fighting him.

The crux of the problem with the idea that he’s trying to accelerate humanity’s evolution into Newtypes is the fact that

he knows

Newtypes can come from Earth. Literally, the

single most important person in his life

, Lalah Sune, was born and raised on Earth until she was 17. Quess, who again is remarked upon as being as gifted as Lalah

by Char himself

, never visited space until the events of this movie, and Char even talks to her about it. Even Amuro, despite being raised on Side 7, was also born on Earth and proved himself to be a more advanced Newtype than Char. Worse yet, he also knows that being a Newtype does not guarantee better, more compassionate people, because the

other

strongest Newtypes we’ve seen up to this point are Paptimus Scirocco and Haman Karn. Again swinging back to the end of

Zeta

, Kamille and Haman actually have a moment between them that could have led to a deeper mutual understanding, but she

violently

rejects the connection. At the end of the day, Newtypes are still people.

The biggest confirmation about why he’s really doing all this comes when he tells Amuro that he was the one who gave the psychoframe blueprints to Anaheim Electronics, to ensure that they would be evenly matched for their inevitable duel. There’s just no way to reconcile that with the actions of someone who genuinely had a greater goal in mind than settling a score. He even shows a total willingness to be deceitful by lying about the plans for disarmament at Luna II; the level playing field was just for Amuro. If this whole conflict really was about things as lofty as “shouldering the evils of humanity” and “eliminating the source of all wars within the Earth Sphere”, he wouldn’t give the person most likely to foil him the means to do so, especially considering the inevitable consequences of failure.

The icing on the pathetic cake is that the lie about a bigger picture seems to be mostly for him, much in the same way that the Quattro Bajeena disguise was also mostly for him. The only person we see buy into his philosophy is an impressionable 13 year old girl with no real comprehension of the scale and consequence of what he’s doing. The rest of Char’s Neo Zeon is made up of displaced spacenoids who just want stability, or politicians who’re hedging their bets on the legendary Char Aznable to get them into power. Even Nanai, who genuinely cares for Char, prods him multiple times with “yeah but you’re really just doing this because of Amuro Ray, right”.

I will give Char one thing, though. If the force ghost of my girlfriend who tragically died protecting me spent the last 14 years watching over me and telling me I’m a good, pure man, while simultaneously letting me know she’s also watching over my rival- the person she was protecting me from when she died- because they established a deeper and more meaningful emotional connection with each other in mere minutes than I ever was over the course of our entire relationship, I would probably also do something as insane as Char. And that’s without even touching on the fact that he was projecting his mommy issues onto her.

AMURO

I don’t have as much to say about Amuro as I did about Quess and Char, but something about the way he’s used in this movie doesn’t sit right with me. Specifically, it’s the way he constantly rebuffs Char’s grandstanding about how the people of Earth can’t change by saying of course they can, but they need to be guided. He’s ultimately proven right, because when he resonates with the psychoframe sample, he unwittingly manages to convince both regular Earth Federation and Neo Zeon troops to help push back Axis. Otherwise, though, it rings hollow, because we never get the impression Amuro has tried to do that up to this point.

Granted, I think it’s safe to assume that the reason Amuro fights for Londo Bell is because he’s still under the same tight scrutiny by the Earth Federation that he was during Zeta, meaning any attempt to get into political affairs would get nipped in the bud. It’s probably all he’s allowed to do other than sit in his mansion, and he’s presumably doing it because he trusts Bright won’t allow it to become the second coming of the Titans. That trust is well placed, because Bright insists on taking action despite Adenauer Paraya trying to keep Londo Bell out of the loop with Char. However, for how often Amuro dogged Char for not getting into politics during Zeta, you’d think he’d either find someone else to get into the Earth Federation that he could back, like Sayla, or even just a proxy to represent his beliefs, like Beltorchika. In the absence of action on his part, there’s a reading of this film that makes Amuro out to be a typical political moderate, which is a dire way for a hero like Amuro to be interpreted.

HATHAWAY

Long ago, before I started watching any of Universal Century Gundam, I made a jokey post asking if Hathaway was Bright’s failson. Having now seen Hathaway’s proper debut as a character (rather than just being a prop in Zeta)... well, kinda? Hathaway is very much the second coming of Katz, because his arc in this movie is nearly identical, with Quess playing the role of Sarah. The crucial difference is in how it ends, with Chan killing Quess, Quess protecting Hathaway at the last moment, and Hathaway, shockingly, murdering Chan in revenge. It also marks Hathaway as the first person to be completely wrong when talking about adults: his last words to Chan as he fired at her were “You grownups don’t understand. That’s why you’ll destroy Earth!”, but that has nothing to do with what happened. Chan didn’t sneak attack Quess while Hathaway was on the cusp of bringing her back, they were actively fighting each other. Quess even launched into an insane tirade about how Chan should’ve cleared out so she could’ve had Amuro’s attention.

I find myself not really sure how I feel about Hathaway. Like I said earlier, I’m willing to give a lot of slack to teenage characters, and a 13 year old not thinking about the consequences of his actions while overwhelmingly grief-stricken over the death of his first love he spent the whole movie trying to rescue deserves some of that slack. That reaction shot immediately after also suggests he understands the gravity of what he just did, but after that, the movie only briefly cuts to him to show that he’s still alive right after Axis gets blown in half, and then one last time during the credits. A single extra scene of him drifting, alone with his thoughts about what happened would’ve gone a long way in making this a non-issue. And maybe this is a weird thing to get hung up on, but I feel like all of my sympathy for the character would go out the window if the only part of this encounter that he reflected on was the fact that Quess died. So, I suppose this’ll have to wait until I get around to watching Hathaway to be resolved...

THE THEATRICAL FORMAT

A lot of my problems are rooted in the format of the story itself: even while clocking in at a little over two hours, film is a super limited way to tell a story. I understand that there are a number of reasons Char’s Counterattack was developed into a movie rather than, say, a series of OVAs or a television show. Movies carry with them a level of prestige that television has never had, and despite the popularity of the OVA format in Japan in the late 80’s, there’s surely no way they ever hit as wide an audience as a theatrical release, to say nothing of lost profits. For comparison, light research suggests that Megazone 23, an original story credited with proving the viability of the OVA format, made 1.7 billion yen, and Char’s Counterattack made 1.6 billion yen at the box office alone.

However, it’s really obvious that the story is pressing up against the constraints of the format. The movie is struggling to breathe from the start, with the reveal that Char is back, leading another revival of Zeon, and planning on dropping an asteroid on Earth. That’s a huge deal! But the movie doesn’t have time to linger on it and go into why it happened in the detail it deserves, because it has a lot of other things it needs to get to, and none of those get time, either. Maybe a lot of the stuff I’ve brought up so far is addressed in the High-Streamer novel that Char’s Counterattack is based on, but you shouldn’t need to read the screenplay’s source material to get the full picture. And just to be clear, I don’t hate the movie by any means, but the way things happen, and the pace at which they happen, is dramatically different than anything that’s come before, which is jarring.

I will say this: the Beltorchika’s Children manga is supposedly going to start releasing this summer (2022) in English, and I am extremely eager to see if this story is better served by a less constrained format, even if it’s not the exact same story.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS:

Despite elaborating on the depths to which Char has sunk in this movie, I still can’t believe his last words were about his heretofore unmentioned mommy issues, and even worse, he admitted it in an attempt to absolve himself of responsibility for the way he treated Quess. The “i’m literally neurodivergent and a minor??” of the Universal Century.

Speaking of pathetic men: in my notes, I made jokes about Cameron Bloom coming back and being a cuck, but in actuality he wound up with some pretty major character development since Mobile Suit Gundam. He seemed to have actually reflected on why Mirai left him and his own cowardice during the One Year War, and as a result was willing to risk life in prison to keep Londo Bell informed of Char’s backroom deal with the Earth Federation. Instead, the biggest cuck award goes to Gyunei Guss, who talks a big dick game about Char being a loser and a pedophile until he’s actually confronted by him, at which point his spine turns into spaghetti.

Also from my notes, here’s my live reaction to the design change the Noa family received:

For some reason, I always assumed Lalah was like… 13 or 14, so finding out she was actually 17 while browsing the wiki was a very pleasant surprise. It also makes Gyunei’s rumor that Char is a pedophile even more transparently lame.

The fact that Sayla doesn’t show up or even get mentioned in this movie is insane. Especially since she has a cameo in ZZ where she expresses concern about this exact situation happening! She would’ve slotted into Chan’s role perfectly, although that would’ve made the scene with Hathaway and Quess even more devastating. Beltorchika is also strangely absent, but her absence was apparently due to orders from Sunrise, which is why Tomino later wrote Beltorchika’s Children.

I was so happy to see my man Astionage, and to see that Astionage had a cool girlfriend, but then the girlfriend died, and then Astionage also died so abruptly that I initially didn’t realize he was dead, and then I thought Chan had killed him with the Re-GZ’s thrusters until I scrubbed the scene and realized it was a stray beam hit. My man survived getting tossed into space by Kamille’s dad at the start of Zeta to die here, like that? At least they didn’t feel compelled to kill Anna Hanna.

I mentioned it at the very beginning, but every mobile suit that shows up in this movie is a winner. The Nu Gundam feels like it was from the same boxier evolutionary branch as the Mk-II, instead of the sleeker Zeta Gundam, with the bonus of a cool set of asymmetrical fin funnels that look like a wing. The Sazabi feels like the final evolution of Neo Zeon mobile suit design philosophy, where it has the same chunkiness all the Neo Zeon mechs did in ZZ, but refined with a distinct silhouette of a real suit of armor, and that trickles down to the various Doga units. The Re-GZ, Jegans, and GM III’s are all also perfect grunt mechs.

It’s always been present, but I think Char’s Counterattack really cements how hilarious the Universal Century’s dummy technology is. Dummy asteroids, dummy mobile suits, dummy ships: everything has been made into a 1:1 scale balloon, and probably can be launched from the arms of a mobile suit.

In my ZZ review, I talked about how it goes completely unmentioned that Haman’s Neo Zeon was using Dias mobile suits, presumably made by Anaheim Electronics. I assumed maybe that had something to do with Chara Soon being left there, but this movie confirms that no, they’re just profiteering. This is now the third time I’ve brought this up and I guess I’ll keep banging the drum: I really hope something comes of this eventually. “Most of the weapons used to fight wars come from a single manufacturer” seems like something worth exploring, especially in a setting that’s really keen on criticizing political apathy and corruption!

The second time I watched the movie, I watched it dubbed, just to get that experience. Some thoughts on that:

I don’t like how the dub refers to the mobile suits without articles, as in “Gundam can do this” rather than “the Gundam can do this” The subs seem to alternate depending on the scene, but I prefer the “the”.

Some real baffling pronunciation during Char’s speech at Sweetwater, like Haman being pronounced “Hahmen” or Titans being pronounced “Tee-tahns”. The Zeta dub wasn’t recorded until 2 years after this one, but... Titans is an English word, guys.

Most of the dub cast is solid- I think Amuro, Char, and Quess are especially well-performed- but they made that critical mistake of hiring a guy to do Hathaway’s voice. To be fair, his voice actor, Bill Switzer, was only 18 at the time, so it’s not like he sounds comically old, just clearly older than 13.

I assumed the logo on the Nu Gundam’s shield was Londo Bell’s, but apparently it’s Amuro’s very own custom logo? He doesn’t seem the type to have something like that, but it is a really cool logo. What’s weirder, though, is that he’s now “the White Unicorn” when “the White Devil” is a way better name, racist implications be damned.

I feel like the most important thing you get from watching Zeta and ZZ before Char’s Counterattack is having your suspension of disbelief set appropriately for Amuro managing to stop Axis. The Zeta and Double Zeta Gundams’ biosensor activation in their respective finales are functionally magic, so the Nu Gundam possessing an even stronger version of that is like, yeah, this mech can totally push back an extinction-level event single-handedly due to a double supercharged psychic resonance cascade.

There's one bit of implied world-building that Char’s Counterattack inadvertently provides: the final piece of the Cyber-Newtype puzzle. If- as Hathaway talks about it- the reason Newtypes started to exist is because humans need a way to keep in contact with each across the vastness of space, then people who have their Newtype abilities awakened strictly for combat applications would need to find someone to bond with to satisfy that aspect of being a Newtype. It was Kamille for Four and Rosamia, Judau for Ple, Ple-Two, and Chara, Haman for Mashymre, and Quess for Gyunei.

I was pretty cold on it at first, but upon repeat listening, Beyond The Time is a pretty great ending theme.

It’s probably not intended to be as funny as I found it, but I love how Amuro slams Char’s cockpit into Axis and he just gets shaken like a snowglobe.

IN CONCLUSION:

Char’s Counterattack is kind of a bittersweet send-off to the “core” of the Universal Century. It’s designed to be bittersweet, in the same way Zeta’s ending was bittersweet, but I also mean bittersweet in that it’s my least favorite Gundam thing I’ve seen so far. Taken as a standalone action movie, it’s great, but when placed in the scope of the Universal Century’s ongoing story it just doesn’t sit right for a number of reasons. Like I said, maybe it’ll all feel more right when I read the version of the story presented in Beltorchika’s Children, but in this movie format, I’m ultimately a little disappointed.

In the course of writing all of this, I came to a very important realization: I am more interested in following up with Hathaway than I am about anything else Gundam-related right now. The way the movie left him has me burning with curiosity, but if I stick to my plan of watching everything in production order, there’s no way I’d get around to watching Hathaway until at least 2023. Combined with the urge to see the Xi Gundam in action considering I recently finishing building the gunpla, I don’t think I can hold out that long without soiling the experience in some way. So I’ve decided to compromise: with full intent to circle back, I’ll be skipping all the way from 1988 to 2010 with…

Next up: Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn! The plan is to watch Unicorn, Twilight Axis - Red Trace*, Narrative, and then Hathaway. After that, I’ll circle back to War in the Pocket, which will also conveniently have me chronologically lined up for F91 and Victory. I’ll also start interspersing the non-UC shows whenever I feel like it, although I intend to watch those in release order as well (with the exception of SEED, SEED Destiny, and AGE, which are still in the maybe column).

*According to this little bumper that shows up before Hathaway, Twilight Axis is evidently not an important part of the story of the Universal Century, but I can spare a little under half an hour to see if that thing is as abysmal as I’ve heard.

#Gundam #Char's Counterattack #CCA #Mobile Suit Gundam #The Big Gundam Watch #anime #blu-ray #long post

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