Saalon Muyo

Note, I’ll be getting into spoiler territory eventually.  I’ll give you a warning before I do, but in case you were going to start skimming: Be warned.  Also, this is kind of long.

It’s been a while since I plowed through a fantasy series.  There was a time when it was a huge part of my life.  Even the oft-encountered disappointment didn’t slow me down.  I love to read; mostly I love to read stories.  But most of all I love to read long stories.  Big stories.  Stories that took on pivotal events, that gave me more than the mundane, daily crap I found at school or work.

Before I sat down to write this review, I thought about all of the series’ I’ve got under my belt.  The good ones, those never really leave the mind.  But there are dozens of other ones. Books that I powered through years ago but left a sour taste, or that unshakable feeling of disappointment.  Like Stephen Lawhead’s The Song of Albion, or Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Darksword Trilogy (which were, oddly, lesser novels than their Dragonlance books),  or Mickey Zucker Reichert’s Renshai Trilogy and its sequel.  The interesting thing about them is, despite their flaws,  despite the disappointment, there are things that stuck with me from these books.  Things that were unique to them, that I never got even from more accomplished novels.

Which brings me to Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn.

Mistborn: The Final Empire has a great sounding hook: What would happen if the hero of prophecy failed? What if, at the pivotal moment, the Dark Lord killed him and took power for himself?  The idea of Mistborn’s first novel is an interesting amalgam.  Part turning the genre over on itself with a triumphant Dark Lord, part heist novel as a group of thieves set out to steal a cache of power so important that it could lead to the overthrow of the empire – even if all they’re in it for is the profit.  Cool, huh?

Though the series’ strongest novel, there’s a critical problem that haunts the rest of the series.  Within the first few chapters it becomes clear that the hook – a hook that the author himself says was his starting point – is either a spoiler or a misdirection.  And, for a series’ whose primary theme is trust, it’s disappointing that it betrays its readers’ trust in the first novel.

Still, Sanderson is a good writer, and having read the annotations for the books on its website, it’s clear he really thinks about what he’s doing.  I’m going to get into spoilers, now, and as I do I’m going to be pretty critical of my problems with the series. But let this be known: I had a good time reading it, and I think that Sanderson has the right stuff to make some killer fantasy novels. Hell, if you liked Mistborn, then he’s writing killer fantasy novels right now.  I admit that much of my disappointment in Mistborn is an entirely personal reaction to the conclusion of the series.

Now, let there be spoilers.

Mistborn begins in the city of Luthadel, the seat of The Final Empire.  Yes, the empire is called the Final Empire.  No, it’s not as silly as it sounds.  The empire has been ruled for 1,000 years by a man who seems to be immortal and omnipotent, who took the power of the Well of Ascension and became as a god; he is, as his church proclaims, the Sliver of Infinity.  In other words, this empire is the last one the world will know, for it will last forever; it is, literally, The Final Empire.

And it’s not a pleasant place to live.  By day, ash is spewed into the sky endlessly by volcanoes.  By night, mists that flow like water chase the superstitious into their homes.  And most of the population, known as skaa, work as slaves for the Lord Ruler’s nobility.  Though rebellions are attempted, how do you kill a man with seemingly endless power who can be burnt to a skeleton yet regrow skin in seconds? How do you bring down an empire with a god at its head?

To its credit, Mistborn answers these questions in the first book.  The trilogy is not about killing the Lord Ruler; it’s about the power that he wielded, and the worse danger the tyrant held back.  Even the seeming main character, a powerful but impulsive thief named Kelsier, doesn’t survive to see the end of the first novel.  The hand off to his protege, Vin, is so smooth that I should have seen it coming earlier. We get a trilogy’s worth of plot development in the first volume, which makes for an exciting novel.   Even despite the misdirection/spoiler of the hook – everyone believes the Lord Ruler is the hero of prophecy, meaning you spend all of book one wondering if they’re wrong, or if the book jacket lied to you – The Final Empire is a great read.  It has its problems, mostly in a clunky, implausible opening where a bunch of thieves just kind of decide that taking on a 1,000 year empire is good business, but is very worth the time.

Things get dicier from there. Like many great fantasy series openings, the follow-through has problems.  There’s a great set up, some interesting characters, but the further it goes the less tight it all feels.  With Mistborn, significant pacing problems and an odd lack of scope kill the second book’s momentum and it never really recovers.  And it doesn’t help that the set-up of the first book – that the hero lost – is less interesting than what initially appeared to be the case: that the hero had won, taken the power, then turned into at tyrant.  As the series progresses, I got the feeling that Sanderson was actually more interested in this idea, and he does his best to split the difference with the Lord Ruler’s motivations.

The Well of Ascension takes another fantasy trope, that of the Prophecy of the Hero, and flips it on its head.  The basic idea around it is great, but getting to the end requires slogging through 500 pages of indecision, inaction and inner monologues about indecision and inaction.  There’s an interesting idea of nation building embedded in the book’s structure, but it never gets any momentum.  Yes, the idea of how you hold together a people that are used to a God ruling them is great, but it was disappointing that the best Sanderson managed was a protracted siege of Luthadel by squabbling warlords and a game of musical chairs with the throne of the Empire.  Eland, the man who tries to make the Empire into a better place, spends the entire book thinking about how he wishes he was a better leader.  And Vin, his lover and protector, worries that she’s nothing more than a killer. That’s about it.

Still, the climax of the book had a great moment: Vin begins to believe she’s the true Hero of Ages, the thing the Lord Ruler failed to be.  She makes her way to the Well of Ascension, the source of the Lord Ruler’s power, only to learn that the prophecy of the Hero was a lie, manipulated by a chaos god the Lord Ruler took power to try and contain.  And Vin, trying to fulfill the prophecy, lets it out.

That gave me hope for The Hero of Ages.  Perhaps with one book left to go, Sanderson would set a brisker pace.  I hoped in vain.  Instead of the heroes stuck in a single city defending against a siege, they take an army to another city and…begin a siege.   Mistborn‘s problem is common in Big Stories: a lack of scope to the story’s actual events.

I think authors get wrapped up in the scope of their setting and miss the needs of the story.  Yes, The Hero of Ages deals with a godlike power of chaos trying to end the world, and yes, the actions of the heroes are meant to save the world.  That’s not scope, though. That’s setting.  Constructing a plot that matches the scope of the setting can be difficult, and I think that Sanderson got lost trying to create understandable plot points.  In The Well of Ascension, it was resolving the Siege of Luthadel.  In The Hero of Ages, it was the artificial need of finding the Lord Ruler’s hidden supply caches, left to combat the chaos-god Ruin.  At the start of the story, there is one left to claim, and the bulk of the book is spent with the heroes trying to get this one supply cache.  By the time the plot twists come, there are only 100 pages left and the story feels too small because of it.

Scope is a tricky thing, and I’m coming to believe it has more to do with the impression of movement in the plot than with the actual size of the events.  The world ending doesn’t, on its own, give a novel scope.  Scope demands, I think, objectives and motivations to constantly evolve, for goals to be achieved but prove to be only a piece of the story.  Keeping characters mired in indecision for 2/3 of the a novel means, essentially, that nothing happens for 2/3 of a novel, and that kills any sense of scope.  When battle for the fate of the world comes, it feels out of place next to a story about a group of insecure people refusing to make a decision.

This is especially a concern in The Hero of Ages, as while the characters are doing very little, massive chunks of plot revelations are given through the quotes that precede the chapters.  Things like why the world is covered in ash, where the various magic systems of the world are from and the very nature of the villain himself are all given here, and not in the body of the story.  I started to wonder if Sanderson had simply held too much back for book 3 and decided to dump his world notes into the book to catch things up.

Mistborn made something clear to me, though, that I had not noticed before.  Many of the fantasy series’ of the past, the ones that I liked but left me cold at the end, share an important similarity.  They all end with some mixture of the end of the world and the mysterious pseudo-deaths of the main characters.  I don’t mean that the main characters died.  I mean they sort of died but really became gods, or returned to their world, or people thought wait, maybe they didn’t really die and will return again and the audience is left to wonder.  It’s a really, really common ending in fantasy and science fiction.  You can see it from The Matrix to Evangelion to every book series mentioned above.  And I’m starting to think that, as a rule, this kind of ending is simply an unsatisfying cheat.

Mistborn ends with not one but two characters ascending to godhood within 50 pages of each other.  It ends with the world becoming so blasted out by the battle that only two options are possible: an utter remaking or the death of mankind.  And I’m completely unsure of what to make of one of its major character arcs, in which a character teaches hundreds of religions, then becomes an atheist, then becomes god.

I think the problem is that, despite Sanderson’s opinion that allowing his characters to monologue about how insecure they are is character development, in the end he cheats by not giving an actual character ending for them.  It’s just really, really hard to relate to a character whose culmination is and then I remade the world in my image.  I can buy into a character  dying for his cause, or because he failed, or because of bad luck.  But how many more character deaths can I hope to relate to if their death is not really a death and might lead to their eventual return outside of the actual story? I don’t know. Maybe I never had it in me.

And I’m tired of the ambiguity. Did the character die, or not? Did the world end? When it was reborn, do the characters remember what happened? How do they feel about it? Even with omniscience, how good of a god would even the best of humans make, anyway?  If ascending to godhood is the goal of your story, set that up earlier.  Don’t give me the gritty story of people trying to create a government, only to spend 100 pages at the end making everyone turn into gods. Serial Experiments: Lain is maybe the only successful version of this story, and that’s because within 2 episodes “god” is showing up telling Lain that she has the power to change the world.  That is the point of the story, and the character.

I’ve gone all this time without mentioning Mistborn‘s intricate magic system, and that’s on purpose. Every reviewer has said how cool and well done Allomancy is. They’re right. It’s neat. It’s consistent. It’s well used.  It’s just that a magic system can’t save a book, even if it makes the battle scenes more interesting an readable. Sanderson did a great job on it, though, so let that be noted.

Yet, despite all my complains, there’s something here. Just like The Darksword Trilogy’s totally batshit last book where the guy with the magic canceling sword has to fight tanks, I came away with something I didn’t have before.  The image of the Ashmounts and the mists will stick with me.  The sad sense of a world being smothered to death by ash will haunt me.  The thought of a world broken by the heroes of old so that it could survive destruction will remain.  And, despite the inordinate amount of time they spent whining and doing little else, many of the characters will stay by my side as well.

All that reminds me of something  important that I shouldn’t forget: Sanderson made me feel like a teenager again, shut up in my bedroom with a book, ignoring the world around me.  I missed that feeling.

Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory is based around a question which does not need answered. When the answer arrives, it proves neither interesting nor plausible.  It meanders for the majority of its 13 episode run, never finding an engaging idea that can support the series.  Its main character never stops being a miserable, talentless whiner and its villain is a poor imitation of the franchise’s best.  If it’s not the most pointless Gundam series of all time, I fear the day I watch the one that’s worse than this.

The question 0083 poses is this: What led to the formation of the Titans, the elite and fanatical military force that served as Zeta Gundam‘s primary antagonists?  At first, this sounds like a neat idea, until you realize that you don’t need to know why the Titans were formed.  The One Year War against Zeon was so destructive, so terrible, that it’s believable that fear of Zeon’s reformation would enable the rise of a unit dedicated to their annihilation. And really, why do we care how the Titans came to be? It’s not like they were a complex and multifaceted bunch, anyway.  I’ve seen Nazis with more nuanced motivations.

I’d like to describe the plot for you, but I’m a little cloudy on what it was.  Yet another remnant of the Principality of Zeon enters stage left and steals one of two experimental Gundams the Federation is testing.  Why one and not both?  Well, besides the fact that stealing Unit 1 would leave the hero would nothing to pilot against Unit 2, it’s not really the Gundam they’re after.  They want the nuclear weapon system it carries.  Why the Federation is building a nuclear weapons system in violation of treaties when there is no enemy to fight is perhaps a question for another OAV.

This kicks off a convoluted series of events known as Operation Stardust. It involves a series of unconnected military actions designed to, I guess, spontaneously reconstitute the Principality of Zeon by use of a nuclear weapon attack followed by a colony drop.  Maybe picking apart the plot isn’t fair.  The Gundam universe portrayed in 0083 is one in which a single nuclear warhead can take out 2/3 of the entire Federation fleet.  If the sky was also purple in this world, it wouldn’t surprise me.

It might have all been worth it if they could have either given us some interesting characters, or ended it with an insane mobile suit battle.  They do neither.  In fact, this might be the only entry in the Gundam franchise not to end with a mobile suit battle at all.  This is not a distinction to praise.  After what felt like fifty hours of pointless skirmishes and indecisive character whining, to end without a couple of characters tearing each other up in big robots was downright heartless.

Kou, the “hero” of 0083 takes the worst parts of every Gundam hero ever but never delivers on the change into someone you can cheer for. His nemesis, Gato, meanwhile, dances around in Char’s shoes for a bit (he is quite literally portrayed as the other best Zeon pilot from the One Year War) before finally getting so bored with the series that he goes on a kamikaze run. Since actual mobile suit combat has little to do with Operation Stardust, the presence of an ace pilot seems like a waste of resources. He gets to pilot the beefiest Gundam this side of SEED‘s Providence Gundam, though, so maybe that was worth the trip for him.

There’s also some romance that you’ll want to ignore.  Even with the revelation that the main character and the villain are actually engaged in a love triangle with the same girl, you still won’t care. That the girl in question’s name is Nina Purpleton does not help. Purpleton. Seriously.  It makes you yearn for the days of Seabook Arno, doesn’t it?

By the time you get to the postscript telling you that all record of the events of this series were deleted you’ll be wondering why they couldn’t have told you that the series literally had no point back in the first episode when it would have made a difference.

On the bright side, the mecha designs were done by Shoji Kowamori, he of Macross Plus fame, so there’s a lot of pretty to look at.  And the one decent mecha battle that takes place about 4 episodes from the end is actually worth the time you spend watching it; it’s just not worth the time you spent watching the rest of the OAV.

I hate to be so glib about this, but watching 0083 was a chore and I want to take out my frustration on it somehow.  It tested my patience in a way only one other Gundam series ever has, and at least that one had its bright spots.  This was, frankly, a total waste of time on every level.  The time you spend watching this could be better spent doing almost anything else.  Even if you’re a Gundam completist, I suggest lying about having actually watched this and responding with a few generalities like, “Kou sucked” and “Why the hell wasn’t there a mecha battle at the end?”

I am not joking when I tell you that one of the space ships in this OAV has a wooden steering wheel like the ones on boats in pirate movies. That’s the kind of series this is.

I didn’t even put a video at the top of this review like I do for the rest of my Gundam reviews.  If nothing else has made my spite for this clear, I hope that does the trick.

I got lax on keeping up my film education over the last quarter of 2009, but I’m back and ready to keep going.  How’d I do in January? Let’s see.

The 400 Blows

Continuing my unbroken streak of disappointment in the French New Wave, I sat through François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and had only intellectually nice things to say about it.  It was well shot. It had realistic characters going through honest, believable situations.  But just like with Breathless, I didn’t care.  The genre strikes me as so aggressively distant and plotless that it almost wants you not to connect with it.  I can see how this movement, at the time it came out, influenced filmmakers and lovers of film, especially in a Hollywood dominated by an oppressive studio system.  Even so, I haven’t seen a single French New Wave film that makes me think something other than “I wish I was watching Fellini.”

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Speaking of styles that leave me cold, how about a little Stanley Kubrick? There are certainly Kubrick films I like a lot, but on the whole he’s all brain and no heart through too much of his filmography.  I put this in immediately after The 400 Blows, and I honestly don’t know if I thought I’d follow one potential disappointment with another, but either way what I got was a surprise: I really, really loved Dr. Strangelove.  It was funny and biting and a really good time.  This is the first time I’ve seen Peter Sellers and, based on this film alone, the praise of his comic talents does not seem overblown.  Also, I’ll be making “precious bodily fluids” jokes for weeks.

M.A.S.H

Somehow, despite my love of Robert Altman, I’d managed to never get around to seeing M.A.S.H. Tsk, tsk.  I never saw much of the television series, either, so I went into the movie cold.  Verdict: I can totally see how this movie made the successful translation to a television series.  The movie is broken into a series of episodes as it is, each one connected by little more than the characters themselves. What better compliment can I give a movie than this: I not only did not hate Donald Sutherland in this, I actually liked him.

Dirty Harry

We begin and end with a disappointment.  I guess Dirty Harry is exactly what it tried to be.  It’s a mean spirited, nasty little action film about a cop who can’t be bothered with things like Constitutional rights and due process and is proven correct by the end.  What can you say about a movie in which the hero tortures a suspect after searching his home without a warrant, rages when said suspect is released because of the violation of his rights then seems to suggest that when the killer then continues to kill that it’s the system’s fault, not the rule breaking cop’s?  At least Clint Eastwood is always a good time.

What do you get when you start planning a 52 episode television series but stop early on and turn the project into a film?  You get this:

Mobile Suit Gundam F91 is an interesting and difficult film to discuss.  Does knowing that the film was supposed to be a full fledged television series cause you to prejudge it, holding things against the film which are not fair?  Or does it help explain some of its weaknesses in a way that allow you to appreciate the film for what it is.  Both?  Neither?

Let’s start here: I enjoyed F91 a lot. More than I expected to, in fact.  Despite a flabby middle where the only plot was a convoluted retread of a dozen other Gundam plot ideas, it had a tense, involving opening and an exciting, full-on Gundam battle to close things out.  Which, I suppose, makes it the film equivalent to most of Tomino’s Gundam television series.  In this one case, film was a kinder medium to Tomino than television; stretched out over 20 boring middle episodes, Tomino’s water-treading can get tiresome to watch.

Describing the plot of F91 isn’t difficult because it’s complicated, but because it’s so banal that the plot barely exists.  Set in the Universal Century timeline, F91 is the first Gundam story to take place after the dissolution of the Principality of Zeon.  Without his old warhorse of an antagonist, Tomino needed to come up with something new.  Instead, he gave us the Principality of Zeon with a different name: The Crossbone Vanguard.

What are the goals of the Crossbone Vanguard? Oh, you know, independence for their colony and the complete takeover of space.  Or something.  Oh, and their leader wears a mask.  Even if you didn’t see him you’d know it because his nickname is “Iron Mask.”  As in, The Man in The.  There’s some hand waving about the formation of a new space empire, Cosmo Babylon, but other than a lot of talk about destiny and ascendency it doesn’t add up to much.  Tossed in is the old standard of Gundam plotting: the lost son/daughter who is actually the prince/princess of the enemy kingdom but is now on the side of the heroes.  Or is he/she?  Tension!

As plotting goes, F91 is an awkward bridge between former and upcoming Gundam stories.  An awful lot of the Crossbone Vanguard stuff mixes well-tread Zeonic ground with some of the odder, less coherent space empire ideas that would get more play in Victory Gundam.  The secret princess du jour, Cecily Fairchild, combines two character ideas that Tomino would split in Victory.  She’s a blonde mobile suit pilot who’s the romantic interest of the hero (see: Katejina Loos) and the princess whose choice of side seems based on whose ship she’s riding around in (see: Shakti Kareen).  Which is to say, Cecily isn’t a very interesting character, and thus neither is much of the plot she’s involved in.

Yet, beyond the daddy issue driven story so common in Tomino’s work, F91 is a lot of fun to watch.  The film opens with an assault on a colony – y’know, just like every Gundam – only, instead of it being an attempted theft on the new, advanced mecha, the objective is Cecily herself.  The abduction of Cecily forces Seabook Arno (yes, Seabook) to pilot the new, advanced, mobile– never mind, you don’t need me to explain this.

As mecha goes, the F91 is decent looking and not too overpowered, so the battles are pretty to watch.  And despite the overplotted nature of the Cecily stuff, it does at least set up Iron Mask as a bizarre, unlikable bad guy who you want to see get into a mecha and be turned into pulp.  Also, it was a nice change of pace for the main character’s love interest to be a mecha pilot and not the girl who takes care of the occasionally naked children inexplicably running around the endangered military vessel.

The final battle, with Seabook and Cecily on one side and Iron Mask in a really strange mobile armor on the other, was a surprising amount of fun considering how barely invested I was in the plot itself.  It even made me worry about one of the heroes buying it to take Iron Mask out when I hadn’t cared up to that point.  As Gundam final battles go, F91′s is one of the better entries.  In fact, for the opening and closing battles alone, the film is probably worth seeing.

Unfortunately, F91 doesn’t really tell a complete story.  Cosmo Babylon still exists a the end and has more or less trounced the Federation in their only major battle.  Iron Mask’s death is pleasant, but like most military villains in Gundam, he was not the real power behind the throne.  I understand that the follow-up manga Crossbone Gundam picks the story up and runs it to its conclusion, but I’ve never read it and have no idea how satisfyingly it ties things up – especially since I think it deals with a different group of characters and really only resolves the political plot threads left hanging.

I was expecting to barely enjoy F91.  Maybe lowered expectations helped.  Or maybe it was just a fun, likable mecha film with enough good going on to make seeing it worth the two hour investment.  Certainly, in its own way, it’s a more enjoyable film than Char’s Coutnerattack, even if that film told a better set up story than the grand tale of the badly named space empire.  It’s still probably only for Gundam completists, but I think Gundam completists will enjoy the film more than some of the other things they’ll inevitably force themselves through.

I have a challenge for you.

It’ll be easier if you have Netflix and Watch Instantly.  If not, it’s still worth it if you can do it for free.

Get yourself a stopwatch.  Optionally, pour yourself a few shots of tequila or, if you prefer, vodka.  Then, start watching Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

Time how long you get into it before your hand involuntarily snatches the remote and turns it off.  If you think slamming a few shots will improve your resolve, feel free.  I doubt it will help.

I was sober and I made it 5 minutes.

Trust me, you’ll be glad you tried.  It’ll be like the getting a red badge of courage for sitting through horrible animation.

Can you make it to 6 minutes?

Here’s where things start to get interesting.

Before Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, everything in the Gundam franchise had been put together by Tomino Yoshiyuki.  Much as Gene Roddenberry was the heart and soul of Star Trek, Gundam was  all Tomino.  I think there are two points at which the franchises made vastly different choices over how to continue, and I think those decisions have a lot to do with Gundam being the superior franchise.

The first is in how the franchises grew beyond the direct control of their creators, which for Gundam began with 0080: War in the Pocket. The second was its decision that the spirit of Gundam was more important than its continuity and began producing alternate universe versions of its themes, starting in 1994 with G Gundam.  The first choice, to open the universe to different creative talents, made the second possible.  So where did Gundam get it right where Star Trek failed?

Star Trek grew away from Roddenberry awkwardly, simultaneously locking him out of creative decisions while straitjacketing themselves into a limited conception of the “Roddenberry Vision.”  It led ultimately to a string of too-similar shows that were never allowed to push the concept past its high water mark in the early 90′s.  Like a religion tied more to its rituals than its spirit, Star Trek became an increasingly empty series of rote repetitions of the same concept.

Gundam, on the other hand, was not as extreme in either direction. Tomino never entirely stopped producing Gundam shows, and Sunrise never felt so tied to some abstract, limiting conception of what his vision was as to let their franchise stagnate.  Interestingly, I feel that Gundam managed to stay truer to its roots than Star Trek precisely by being willing to go off the map when they had to.  Imagine a Star Trek series as different in form as G Gundam was to everything that had preceded it that still managed to wrestle with the moral dilemmas that made Trek what it was.

All of that began with 0080.  The first full Gundam OAV, War in the Pocket did something that I have to imagine sounded crazy at the time.  It told a sympathetic story of Zeon soldiers fighting the the Earth Alliance during the One Year War.  It also avoided the kind of scope that marked the previous Gundam series’ and film; instead, we follow a young boy, Alfred, on a neutral colony as he befriends an undercover Zeon pilot.  Bernie, the pilot, has come to the boy’s home on Side 6 to destroy an experimental Earth prototype.  What follows is more coming of age tale than war story, closer to The Red Badge of Courage than Star Wars.  Alfred develops a sort of hero worship for Bernie and his comrades and comes face to face with the daily tragedies of war.

0080 is an odd bird, and if you’ve seen any Gundam prior to it you may find yourself fidgeting through the first three episodes of this six part OAV.  Like I said, it’s small and intimate, and you’ll see little battle until the end.  By the time the battle comes, you’ll almost wish it hadn’t as the war takes a terrible toll on the characters.  It’s the kind of small, slice of life story that would have made the Star Trek universe so much richer had it been allowed.  The demands of an epic, 50 episode war story leaves little time to see how the average person – or even average soldier – deals with life in the world.  War in the Pocket gives us just that.  It’s a story of characters at the mercy of larger forced, forced into combat when bloodshed is the last thing they want.

There’s a battle near the end, where Bernie’s unit makes its assault on the prototype’s military installation, that’s brutal to watch.  Character after character is cut down mercilessly in a mission that has lost all meaning in the face of the relationship that’s formed between Bernie and Alfred.  What follows that battle hurts as much for its inevitability as the actual deaths that the series’ conclusion gives us.

War in the Pocket is canny in how it ties into the mainline Gundam story without ever getting directly wrapped up in it.  The prototype under construction is codenamed the “Alex” and serves as an intended replacement to Amuro Ray’s RX-78.  Though the project fails to go into production before the end of the One Year War, the technology used serves as a link – retconned though it may be – to the Gundams we see in Zeta.  It gives the impression of a realistic, ongoing attempt by the Earth Military to stay technologically ahead of its enemy.  Like actual military research,  not everything under development becomes reality.

It took me time to come to grips with how I felt about War in the Pocket, but the more I think about this OAV the more I like it.  It’s small and quiet and painful.  It’s one of the most effective tragedies in the franchise, perhaps the most effective.  While Tomino was always good at giving his audiences depressing, nihilistic conclusions, he never quite nailed tragedy.  Unlike the endings to Zeta and Char’s Counterattack, War in the Pocket‘s characters do  not meet their doom because life sucks.  They are trapped by their own decisions and by a remorseless system that has no interest in small, human needs.  Bernie goes into battle that final, fateful time because to choose any other way would be a betrayal of self.  True tragedy only emerges from characters given the choice between change they cannot stomach and continuing on to their doom.  War in the Pocket navigates this tricky narrative landmine perfectly.

I don’t know if I’d recommend War in the Pocket to someone who hasn’t seen Gundam, because I simply do not know how it would play.  On one hand, it’s an identifiable, human story regardless of knowledge of the world.  On the other hand, it’s an extension of themes developed in the ten years of Gundam’s existence to that point; whether it stands on its own or not isn’t a question I can answer.  I saw it very late into my Gundam experience – just months ago, in fact – and cant’ separate my feelings on it from my broader feelings on the franchise.

I can say this: War in the Pocket is an amazing piece of work, and the first step Gundam would take in taking a great concept and turning it into something that could be healthy 30 years after its creation.  If only Star Trek had done the same.

It might be hard to accept, but it needs to be said.  Dollhouse‘s failure is not the fault of Fox.  This time, we have to blame Joss Whedon.

After watching Fox rake Firefly over the coals, I know it seems natural to point fingers at them as Dollhouse has struggled with with a poor time slot, increasingly common preemptions and an early, lengthy production shutdown.  Firefly was a classic show right out of the gate.  Its treatment as a failed property so early in its run was absurd, made worse by Fox’s meddling with the airing order of episodes and – yes – regular preemptions.  Its run was cut unceremoniously short halfway through its first season.  It was a travesty; Firefly started great and got better as it went.  What could have been a healthy SF franchise died because executives didn’t understand what they had.

On the surface, the problems with Dollhouse sound familiar.  Without knowing what’s going on behind the scenes, I can’t discount executive meddling as a drag on the show.  There’s a clear difference, though, between Firefly and Dollhouse.

Dollhouse is a far worse show, by almost any measure, than Firefly.

It has a great premise, I agree.  Occasionally, when they find the right story to tell within the premise, it really works, too.  The unaired episode, Epitaph One, is ironically the best of the lot, and it shows that the premise Dollhouse is far from an unworkable idea.  It’s got some amazing actors running around in it, too.  Olivia Williams, (Adelle DeWitt), Enver Gjokaj (Victor), Dichan Lachman (Sierra), Harry Lennix (Boyd Langton) and Reed Diamond (Laurence Dominic) have all put in noteworthy performances.  The ingredients are there.  Even with every bit of executive meddling Firefly faced, there’s enough raw material to pull from to put together something worth everyone’s time.

A premise is not a show, nor are the raw materials of good storytelling guarantee of creating something memorable.  Dollhouse is troubled by problems deeper than network interference. What bothers me is that, judging by his interviews and statements, Joss Whedon is either unaware or in denial about his show’s weaknesses.  With Dollhouse a near lock for cancellation at the end of its 13 episode second season, it’s fair to ask why this show didn’t succeed, despite a miraculous and probably undeserved renewal after its troubled first season.

• Misplaced Faith – I love Eliza Dushku.  She’s sexy and tough and full of charisma.  I fell for her as Faith and was impressed by how well she handled some of the tougher material for that character.  Watch “Five by Five” and “Sanctuary” in Angel’s first season for Eliza at her best.  But when I hear Joss claim it was her ability to play any role that inspired him to create Dollhouse, I question his judgment.  While strong in some areas, Dollhouse has put her weaknesses center stage.  Worse,we’ve twice seen better actors play the exact same character as her within the same episode: Season one’s “Gray Hour” and season two’s “Belle Chose.”  If you were concerned about her ability to be the center of a show that demands she convincingly play different people every week, you were sure of it after those episodes.
• Broken Dolls – One of the worst things you can do to a group of characters who are supposed to be experts is to give them only stories where they screw things up.  Yet Dollhouse‘s primary plot device is to have the Actives malfunction in the middle of a mission.  We’re three episodes into season 2 and we’re still without a successful engagement.  It strains credulity that anyone would hire these people when malfunctions result in things like kidnapped babies and homicide.  (Having worked in many corporations I’d argue that it does not strain credulity that these people still have their jobs. Look how long Ken Lewis kept his position at Bank of America).  It’s also boring to see the same device used over and over again.  Joss has been a canny writer in his other shows, able to turn cliches on their heads every episode.  Here, we just get the cliche.
• Inertial Dampeners – What do you do with your miraculous renewal after ending a season with the introduction of a great antagonist, followed by an un-aired episode that turns the premise of your show on its head? Go back to the status quo, right?  For reasons I do not understand, Joss Whedon opened a season that needed an immediate ratings boost with three stand-alone malfunctioning Actives plots in a row.  This is where my disappointment with Joss – and my annoyance with his apologists – becomes acute.  By rights, your show should have been canceled.  Yet, rather than open with a barn burner of a season premier, we get Echo pretending to marry an arms dealer to help take him down.  This was followed up by imprinting Echo to think she was the mother of a newborn.  Then a serial killer story.  Yes, Friday night is a death slot.  Yes it can be hard to pull ratings up.  But it’s nearly impossible to hold an audience when you tread narrative water for most of a month.  With your show on the bubble, there’s no excuse for not going all out.  Nothing in season two has been bad, but not bad is not enough when your existence is on the line.
• Ignoring History – I realize that Fox’s decision not to show “Epitaph One” made things difficult for Joss and his writers.  For those who saw it, a troublesome premise suddenly made sense.  Coming into season 2, Joss made comments that the premier would feature new scenes in the bleak future of “Epitah One” to get the rest of the audience up to speed.  When this was dropped due to concerns of creating an overly complex opener, I got worried.  Without seeing where this technology was going to lead, Dollhouse can seem small and uninvolving.  Now, three episodes in, I’m wondering if we’re going to see that future acknowledged at all before the lights go out.  I worry that this has created two, separate but equally unsatisfied, groups of fans.  On one side, you have those who haven’t seen “Epithaph One” and feel, as I did last season, that the premise is intriguing but pointless.  On the other, those who have seen it and are wondering when the hell it’s going to have an impact on the show itself.  Ignoring his most provocative episode, for any reason, is not helping Joss’ show.

A better time slot, a more consistent schedule and better advertising might pull in more first time viewers.  But of the shows that have aired, how many would compel them to keep watching?  Of the first season’s thirteen episodes, I can only think of six: “Man on the Street”, “Needs”, “Spy in the House of Love”, “Briar Rose” and “Omega.”  If someone watched it on DVD, you can add “Epitaph One” to the list.  That’s half, and all of them in latter half of the season.  Of the second season’s three episodes, I doubt any would turn a casual viewer into a fan.

It’s not Fox’s fault that Joss Whedon has had trouble getting a handle on his own premise, nor is it their fault that he started season 2 with a run of episodes resembling the least favorite of the previous season.  Like every other working writer, Joss Whedon is not infallible.  He’s fantastic and funny, and he’s created three of the most beloved series’ of the last decade.  He’s no slouch.  But that doesn’t make every failure someone else’s fault.  Dollhouse has been an interesting piece of work and, on the balance, I’m glad to have seen it.  It still could be a lot better.

I hope that the second half of season 2 is as good as people are saying.  Sadly, it’s too late.  I fear Joss missed his shot.

At the least, let’s give Fox the credit they deserve for giving it to him.

It’s too bad most cliffhangers suck, because I really do love them.

I can’t entirely blame the people who use them badly.  The term itself refers to the kind of cliffhangers I hate, where we cut away with a character in imminent danger then cut back to see them rescued without an extra scratch.  I get why they became so popular in old serial films. Any kind of suspenseful, what-the-hell-will-happen-next ending is likely to pack the seats for the resolution.  If every single episode ends with one, maybe you’ll keep making each installment as must see as the last.

Like half of the Star Trek season finales that ended with a giant OMG only for the Enterprise to come back next season and solve the whole problem in the teaser, a bad cliffhanger only reveals itself in its resolution.  It buys you some time with your audience.  Cliffhangers, both good and bad, work.  At least, they work until the audience catches on that you’re cheating.

I think Annie Wilkes in Misery said it best:

Anyway, my favourite was Rocketman, and once it was a no breaks chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn’t cheer. I stood right up and started shouting. This isn’t what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn’t fair! HE DIDN’T GET OUT OF THE COCK – A – DOODIE CAR!

So if the difference between a good cliffhanger and a bad one are in the resolution, what is that difference?  Leaving aside cheats like Rocketman’s retconned leap from the car, there are still a heap of really terrible cliffhanger resolutions sloshing around out there.  Especially on television.

My feeling on cliffhangers has always been this: The “What will happen next?!” suspense is nice, but that alone is not worth the cliffhanger.  That moment in The Next Generation’s “The Best of Both Worlds”, where Riker orders the Enterprise to fire of the Borg ship carrying Locutus-ized Picard is awesome.  If you happened to see it when it originally aired, you probably spent all summer freaking out over what would happen next.  It was a damn good feeling.  But when you got back, here’s what you got: The Enterprise fires…and the super-cannon does nothing.  At all.  Sure, the explanation is fair.  Picard’s knowledge of the weapon when he became Locutus prompted the Borg to prepare for the attack.  It was logical.

It also sucked.

A really good cliffhanger is one not where we cut away before the pivotal moment, but where we cut away after.  We don’t have to know we’ve passed the pivotal moment, or even what that moment means.  We could cut away after Riker says “Fire!”, provided that act – the act of firing on Picard’s ship – set in motion something irrevocable.  If the next season opened with the Enterprise damaging the Borg ship and killing Picard, yet not actually destroying the ship itself, imagine the intense episode we’d have gotten as Riker must continue to fight knowing that he has failed to end the threat, instead only killing his own captain?

A cliffhanger that convinces your audience to be even more excited by the next has to change something.  It doesn’t need to be what the audience expects to change, but if all you’ve done is made people wait for things to snap back to the status quo, you haven’t played fair.  Putting your heroes in danger for a cliffhanger doesn’t require their deaths when you return, provided their rescue costs something.  There are only so many costless, clever escapes an audience can take before they stop feeling the suspense.

In fact, if you play fair, you can get away with a cliffhanger pretty much as often as you want.  Code Geass ended almost half of its episodes in cliffhangers.  They never got old, either, because every single one changed the series.  Instead, since they let every cliffhanger push the series forward, the effect was more of an escalation; every one had you more anxious, because you knew how much getting out of the last one cost.

Guy Gavriel Kay and George R. R. Martin do much the same thing, ending chapter after chapter in a nail-biter of a scene.  But since they never cheat, nor do they allow their heroes to escape them all unscathed, each successive cliffhanger ratchets the tension further.  So their books are really, really good.

Use cliffhangers.  Use them liberally.  But try to forget how they were used when the term was coined.

“You adults are always making up excuses! That’s why you’d destroy the Earth without a second thought!“

This is the kind of review that will make me unpopular with most Gundam fans who read it.  Rather than cushion the blow, let’s just get the worst of it out of the way up front.

Char’s Counterattack is not a very good movie.  Not even by Gundam standards.

There.  That’s out of the way.  Now I can think clearly.

By the time Gundam ZZ was into its run, Sunrise realized they had a hit franchise on their hands.  It was time for a feature film. At that time,  the only Gundam films in theaters were the partially reanimated compilation films that have been am inexplicable staple in the anime industry for a long time.  (Side note: Could you imagine any American television show being compiled into 3 or 4 theatrically released films?  Exactly.)  So Tomino Yoshiyuki began work on Char’s Counterattack.  More than just another entry into the Universal Century timeline, the film would both bring to an end the long-standing rivalry between Amuro Ray and Char Aznable as well as resolve the on-and-off war between Earth and Zeon. So, kind of a big deal.

My larger feelings for this film aside, getting to see a Gundam story with a feature animation budget is a pleasure.  When you see a well animated television anime, it’s easy to forget what a difference the extra money can make.  Zeta Gundam looked great when it came out, but it can’t hold a candle to the level of detail and craft on screen in this film.  The characters look great and the mecha looks better.  Real, honest to god anime films are rare enough that you have to appreciate them even when they’re a failure.  Like when I managed to sit through all of Ghost in the Shell: Innocence without falling asleep.

Unfortunately, my praise for Char’s Counterattack stops there.  It’s great to finally get a resolution to Char and Amuro’s relationship in theory.  They’re the heart of the U.C. Gundam timeline and deserve a true finale.  Their role in Zeta Gundam was interesting, but the time was never given to truly develop who these men had become after the One Year War.  I liked that Amuro and Char became rival allies for the show, even if that relationship was never mined enough for my tastes.  Giving them center stage again was a good idea.  Just, perhaps, not this particular stage.

The sad fact is, Tomino never got a good handle on how to make a good film.  His instincts seem geared toward episodic storytelling.  Given a single, two-hour block with which to work, he loses his way.  You see this not just in Char’s Counterattack, but also in the Zeta New Translation remakes.  Though the latter were more successful, they share Counterattacks’ tendency to choose the wrong things to focus on at the wrong times.  The opening of Char’s Counterattack just drops us into the middle of a situation that really, really needed set up.

For instance, Char is now the leader of Neo Zeon.  How did this happen? Where was he during the whole war between Earth and Neo-Zeon that took place during ZZ?  What caused him to change from a confused, reluctant leader into a man so focused on driving humanity into space that he’s willing to ruin the Earth to do it?  Not only are these questions left mostly unanswered, they’re also poorly addressed.  Everything just kind of starts, and the film feel shallow for its lack of context.

Char, you see, has decided Newtypes are the future, and that by staying tied to a dying homeworld, humanity is retarding its needed evolution.  And so he has reformed Neo Zeon with the express purpose of dropping its massive asteroid-space station onto Earth.  His plan is discovered by the single most oddly named organization in the history of Gundam: Londo Bell.  Commanded by the perennially in-the-mix Noa Bright and supported by Amuro Ray, Londo Bell races to stop Axis – that’s the battleship asteroid thing – and end the Zeonic threat once and for all.

There’s a lot of plot jammed into Char’s Counterattack.  So much that none of it has much impact, even when it should.  for instance, just before the battle Amuro is given an unexpected mobile suit upgrade: The Nu Gundam. (Side Note:  I don’t love this film, but Nu Gundam might be my favorite Gundam name ever).  It’s equipped with an experimental psychoframe system that allows Newtypes unprecedented control over the suit.  Somewhere along the line we learn that the technology was given to Londo Bell by none other than Char himself so that he can face Amuro one, final time on equal terms.  It’s a cool idea, but the whole thing is so badly set up that it feels like an unnecessary complication on an already confused story.

We meet Bright’s son, Hathaway, who falls in love with a female Newtype named Quess.  Unfortunately, Quess falls under Char’s spell, and the two are forced to face each other in battle.  If this sound suspiciously like the story of Katz and Sarah from Zeta Gundam, you’ve just found another problem with Char’s Counterattack.  I expect a certain amount of theme recycling in Gundam, but many aspects of this film feel almost lazy.  I wasn’t a tremendous fan of the Katz/Sarah plot in Zeta, but at least there it was given time to develop.  In this, Quess’s motivations are too murky to understand, and thus Hathaway is impossible to sympathize with.

With the exception of the ending fight between Amuro and Char, everything about Char’s Counterattack feels empty, overused and nihilistic.  It’s as if the worst of Tomino’s storytelling ideas all got crammed into this script, from maudlin, doomed romances to unnecessarily character deaths to a victory so hollow that suicide seems the next logical choice for the surviving heroes.  Do we want to see Hathaway Bright left so distraught that he’d attack and kill an ally?  I don’t know, but better motivation would have helped either way.

As for the battle royale, it’s not a classic, but it is pretty good.  It involves not just mobile suit acrobatics but some well planned trickery by Amuro.  It was also the only time in the film I felt any real momentum.  While the reversion of their relationship back to Lalah Sune-obsessed enemies is yet another unmotivated plot point, it does let the characters get out some things they probably should have dealt with back in Zeta.  And the final moments, involving Amuro’s attempt to stop the fall of Axis, is thankfully almost as moving as it is confusing.

I know this film is a favorite for many people, but this film really didn’t work for me.  There are problems with Tomino-era Gundam that people don’t like to address, and those problems are on proud display in Char’s Counterattack.  Every writer brings their personal problems into their writing, but Tomino was rarely able to mine his own depression for compelling stories.  Sadly, it only got worse from here.

If you’ve watched U.C. Gundam, Char’s Counterattack is a must to complete the story.  Considering other people’s reactions, there’ s a good chance you’ll like it more than me, too.

“Kamille Bidan. Ikimasu.”

After the premature cancellation of Mobile Suit Gundam, a series of films were made retelling the story of the series.  This was done using some animation from the series itself and some new animation in parts where they could afford to re-animate.  The films, unlike the series, proved to be popular.  So popular that by the third, concluding film in 1982, they were able to get the budget to reanimate about 3/4 of the ending.

Money changes everything.  Now with a profitable property on their hands, Sunrise realized a sequel would be a good idea.  So, in 1985, Tomino launched Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, set 8 years after the end of the original series.  Zeta was the success the original never became.  In fact, many people still consider Zeta to be the best all time Gundam series.  I disagree, but I can see their point.  Its popularity even today was strong enough to merit a series of three movies Tomino entitled A New Translation that, like the original Gundam movies, reanimated big chunks of the original story.  Unlike the original series films, though, A New Translation drastically changes key plot elements.

It’s impossible for me to talk about my feelings on Zeta Gundam without also talking about how A New Translation changed them.  As I said, Zeta was not a favorite of mine.  Its animation was top notch and the story was dark and mature, but it had narrative problems the original did not.  By the last third of the series, Zeta Gundam was reusing plot ideas from ten episodes before.  Did you like when Four, Kamille’s enemy/love went crazy and turned on him then seemed to die? What if that happened a second time?  And what if we brought in a crazy enemy/sister that piloted the exact same suit and acted the same way, too?  Triple the fun, right?

Worse, the series seemed to revel in being as depressing as possible.  By the end, I was numb to it all, especially in the final moments when the main character’s fate proves to be both ugly and pointless.  Some of the deaths had real teeth, but others just felt perfunctory.  I don’t think getting across “War sucks” is so difficult as to require that much nastiness.  I find nihilism obnoxious in most fiction, and the Zeta Gundam television series was no exception.  What could have been a strong series was ruined by endless meanness.

There were things I liked, but I had a hard time giving the series credit for them until Tomino launched A New Translation.  Older, wiser and out of his own personal depression, Tomino seemed to recognize the same flaws in Zeta that tainted it for me.  Rather than reproduce the show’s plot with extra pretty, he began a series of subtle tweaks to structure that culminated in a very different ending for the main character.  Free of the nihilism, I found a new appreciation for the story.

8 years after the end of the One Year War, Earth has become space’s oppressor.  Fearing a resurgence of Zeon, the Earth military has formed the Titans, an elite military unit tasked with hunting down the remaining Zeonic support in the colonies and crushing it.  Free of limitations on their power, the Titans have become relentlessly cruel, murdering civilians and gassing colonies that refuse to comply.

Fearful of the Titans work on a new Gundam unit, the Anti-Earth Union Group (AEUG) decide to steal it before it can go into use.  Stumbling into the center of the battle is Kamille Bidan, a teenager who steals one the Titans’ new Gundams and joins AEUG to escape them.  The series follows AEUG’s efforts to destroy the Titans and free space from Terran oppression.

Zeta Gundam is perhaps the franchise’s most nuanced entry.  Rather than play as a straight war story as the original did, Zeta is more concerned with the personal failings of its heroes.  Char Aznable, ace pilot of Zeron, is now a member of AEUG.  Once again he’s gone undercover, this time naming himself Quatro Bagina.  His disguise? Red sunglasses.  Somehow, no one ever connects his ace piloting in a red mobile suit to the old “Red Comet” from the One Year War.  Just because.  Char isn’t the man he was back then.  His revenge complete, he’s reluctant to be the leader he’s capable of becoming.  Even his piloting skills seem weaker, less confident than in his younger days.

Kamille has problems of his own.  He’s an angry kid, bitter at the loss of his parents.  The worse the battles get, the more disillusioned he becomes with his elders.  Is war all they’re capable of?  Will they continue to ignore the concerns of the young men like him who are forced to be the tools of larger forces waging petty battles?

Unlike Zeon, the Titans are basically pure evil.  They commit mass murder, experiment on innocent people to create artificial Newtypes (Cyber-Newtypes, to be specific) and generally do their best to drop some big object on some population center in an effort to crush AEUG.  We spend time with some of their pilots, like the eternally failing Jerid or the really gross Yazan, but most of them lack the personality of the Zeon foes of Mobile Suit Gundam.

Things get more interesting when a fleet of advanced mobile suits arrive from deep space.  It’s Neo-Zeon, led by the villainous Haman Karn.  The Titans are evil, but Haman is a terrifying creation.  Her imperial ambitions are clear, yet needing an edge to win the war, she’s suddenly courted by both sides.  Which is perfect for her; she can do her best to help both sides destroy each other, then clean up the pieces.  Around the same time as Haman Karn shows up, one of the oddest villains in all of Gundam rears his head: Paptimas Scirocco.  You know he’s weird because he spent a lot of time on Jupiter.

There are many things I love about Zeta.  The main characters are, for the most part, pretty good.  The mecha designs are all over the place, but the show cranks out some real classics, especially Char’s awesome golden mobile suit, the Hyaku Shiki.  Zeta is the series that introduces the Mid-Series Power-Up to Gundam, when Kamille dumps the Gundam Mk II for the transforming, eponymous Zeta Gundam.

On the other hand, we get saddled with a Giant Mobile Suit, the Psycho Gundam, which is both ugly and stupid.  Bonus: It transforms into a box.  This show has a real love affair with transforming mobile suits.  It’s a bit obnoxious.  It also brings out a new prototype mobile suit or two every few episodes, which starts to grate on the nerves.  These suits are always piloted by boring, annoying pilots who stick around too long.  Most of the battles with these kinds of suits involve both sides shooting at each other and missing. A lot.  The writing for the female characters is shoddy, too; the worst is when Reccoa, an AEUG pilot, switches to the Titans because Scirocco makes her feel like a woman. I kid you not.

A New Translation cleans up much of this.  Because of its shorter running time, the films cut a lot of the plot repetition and toss most of the stalemate battles.  Four dies the first time and doesn’t come back for a second round.  Even Yazan, king of the pointless battles, has far less screen time.  Even better, the brisker plotting gives the ending deaths more teeth, as we’re hit with tragedy after tragedy, almost too fast to process.  It’s less melodramatic, and more effective.

The third part, Love is the Pulse of the Stars, not only has the coolest title of all time.  It’s also gorgeous to look at and filled with some really well animated mecha combat.  It’s fast paced, intense and appropriately brutal to its characters.  Tomino toned down some of the worst excesses of his depression, but kept in its most powerful moments.  The best moment in the series is retained in the film: After the death of a friend, Kamille leaves the body and returns to his mobile suit with a quiet, sad version of Gundam’s typical launch call: “Kamille Bidan. Ikimasu.”  It’s crushing.

Part of me wants to say not to bother with the series itself, but that might not be fair.  Zeta Gundam is a classic series, despite its flaws.  Even before seeing A New Translation I was glad I watched it.  But if you decide to see the series, be sure to at least watch the third film.  The new ending for Kamille is deserved, and the animation for the battle for the Gryps Colony Laser is incredible.  The final moments of Kamille’s battle with Scirocco are killer, far better than in the series itself.

A final note.  The last shot of the Zeta Gundam series is a classic, hinting at Char’s presence in the follow-up series, Gundam ZZ.  That was the plan, too, until Tomino got the budget secured for a feature film, Char’s Counterattack, in the middle of working on ZZ. So if you go into ZZ hoping for the continuation of Zeta, you’re not going to get everything you’re hoping for.