MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM 00 THE MOVIE: A WAKENING OF THE TRAILBLAZER

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ANIME ActionMobile Suit Gundam 00 Second Season
MANGA ActionMobile Suit Gundam 00 - A Wakening of the Trailblazer
MANGA ActionMobile Suit Gundam 00I 2314

REVIEWS

• 

  CodeBlazeFate

  37/100
  Not gonna lie, I expected worse.

  Not gonna lie, I expected worse.

  Spoilers for Gundam 00 Awakening of the Trailblazer

  So, let me get this out of the way. A lot of people seem to believe that this is the only bad installment in the Anno Domini timeline of Gundam, as well as the worst by that virtue. I disagree wholeheartedly. Yes, this film is insanely dumb, with asspull after asspull, and it is preachy as hell, but the second season had a lot of these same problems, and actually, as controversial as this may sound, that installment's even worse. At least this film doesn't ruin any characters, given that it redeems some of them instead. It's no preachier or more contradictory than the second season either. It's still a bad anime, just not as bad as its predecessor. So, what made this film resonate so poorly with the Anno Domini fans? Well, let’s find out, shall we?

  Let me get the only two positives out of the way: I like that they brought back the ability for machines to turn invisible from season 1 since it was only shown once in season 1 and never again. Narratively, that is the only positive I can give it other than maybe continuing its theme, though I'll touch on why I can't give it that one in a minute. The other positive is that I like that there is this cheesy action movie retelling of the events of the end of season 1 with a filler ending that didn't actually happen in real life, sorta like with a lot of movies based on true stories, and how Saju commented on it. That was a nice touch.

  The concept of random metallic aliens (ELS) appearing is, to put it lightly, absurd. There was no foreshadowing to it from the main series and if anything, it's just a cheap ploy to reinforce the main theme of the Anno Domini era, that understanding is key to humanity. That has always been a theme of Gundam to some extent, but especially in this timeline. The problem is, like in Second Season, it becomes incessantly preachy with that message; it genuinely can't go 10 minutes without spouting that message, and it is genuinely annoying. That is why I can't compliment bringing back that theme like I ordinarily would. Also, I never attacked this ideology back in my Second Season review over a year ago, but here it goes. This claims that understanding is the key to the end of conflict. The problem is, even with understanding, people aren't always willing to agree, and not everyone is willing to listen, let alone understand. It's human nature, and this entire timeline, including this film, is naïve for thinking otherwise.

  Another reason it doesn't make sense is that this era also tries to keep in some interesting bits of realism rarely seen, notably involving G-force (which comes in for half of the Gundam timelines)!during that one time in season 1 when Graham having trouble with his Flag because of that, making it jarring when you see everyone perfectly fine with insanely fast mobile suits far outspeeding anything from the previous seasons. Coming this with pretty much sentient yet not sentient metal alien parasite things coming to this world for understanding via absorbing everything (notice that insane contradiction), and you have absolute absurdity where it has no place.

  There are a ton of asspulls aside from that one. First off, only Tieria can come back as some kind of AI thing that can use another host body of himself because he’s one of many Innovades. How come no one else can? Also, Innovades are apparently clones that are meant for information, hence why Ribbons Almark and Nena Trinity are clones of people that appear in the movie. They're the only only ones we see with clones though, and Tieria seems to just clone himself like Ribbons did back in season 1. Apparently there are a ton of people, including random citizens, that have amazing quantum brain wave potential. They never really explained that well in the series but you mean to tell me that people with no combat experience or lab experiments or whatever can do this? I get it, Universal Century did the same thing with Newtypes, except they explained things, that this was a space-induced evolution. Here, nothing.

  Apparently Louise and some other random girl, both of whom do nothing in this movie, are Innovators like Setsuna and the new character, Descartes Shaman (who is just here for some reason and we don't know where or how he was discovered to it an Innovator) since only Innovators can feel this strange and painful sensation from the ELS, and other people with Quantum Brain Waves can't, for some reason. 00 Q-T’s Quantum mode is just slapped in there during the final 10 minute mark with no explanation or buildup beyond “this Gundam that Setsuna pilots is the key to understanding”, and other Gundams can do ridiculously crazy things now. Lockon has two Haro units for some reason when he only had one in the series, and they don't explain where or how he got the blue one. I can go on, like about the inconsistency of how TRANS-AM works, but now I’ll just talk about the ending.

  They literally end en medias res. No joke. All that talk about understanding, all that conflict, just to end on Setsuna moving to God knows where in order to talk with the enemy aliens (we don't see him engage in dialogue with them, we just see him go somewhere) and a giant space flower blooms where the ELS Sphere was. I genuinely laughed my ass off at this. I get that this is a connection to Setsuna’s flower from the second season, but this is just cheesy. Still, nothing here is resolved. It's like an even worse version of how Char’s Counterattack ended, except the new characters here aren't as bad as the ones there.

  Speaking of characters, for all intents and purposes, the main cast is the exact same as before, except Lyle "Lockon Stratos", who for some reason is now much more jovial and laid back. Most of the other old cast are just as bleh as before with three exceptions I'll talk about in a minute. Let’s talk about the two new characters: Mina and Descartes. Mina is literally a more annoying Nena Trinity with no emotional baggage, who is suddenly introduced as Billy’s lover for some reason. All she provides is awful comedy and some necessary exposition. Descartes is just some random asshole with hardly explored personal lab baggage and that’s about it, especially since he dies halfway into the movie, not even being there to help in the final act.

  The 3 main exceptions I wanted to talk about are Billy, Graham, and Andrei. Billy isn't a pathetic and inconsistent cunt this time around. Instead, he’s just a dork with exposition. Still a bad character though is what I'm getting at. Andrei is just there for some sacrifice in the final act and while I don't think this truly redeems his character, it's nice to know that they tried and that even this guy can do a good thing. Now Graham, he is what he should've been in season 2 and not some dead-set weeaboo. Here, he’s still relaxed but cool and powerful, be his sacrifice at the end actually means something to the characters. He gets a salute from me for that and for being the only good character in this film.

  This film has a lot of bombastic, flashy action with many sparkly and multi-colored particles, and the animation is up to snuff for a film. At a glance, this film looks gorgeous, as you'd expect from a big mecha action film. The problem is the insane amount of awful CGI hallways and battleships there are, as well as the ELS in most of the second half of the movie. It becomes rather hard to look at sometimes despite the mostly good and flashy animation and action. Again, the film overall looks good, but the increased and equally bad CGI from the previous installments that wasn't very frequent back then, bogged things down.

  Conversely, I found the overall OST by Kenji Kawai here to be better in the original series, with a few new and interesting tracks. That said, it's still not that great. The only track I really remember is Last Mission, which was a perfect score to accompany the visually chaotic and overall climatic spectacle of the final battle. The OP, "Tozasareta Sekai" by THE BACK HORN, is a pretty good OP, especially the full version, though some of the other OPs from previous installments, mainly the first season, are better, which proves that if nothing else, this timeline has great OPs overall. The ED, "Qualia" by Uverworld, is a pretty meh Uverworld theme and one of the absolute weakest I've heard from them, which is disappointing.

  The dub for the first two seasons was overall sort of decent, despite a few weak performances and equipment issues. Here, no dice. The dub kinda suck here, with Brad Swaile’s repressed role of Setsuna being the only saving grace. Is it just me or did a lot of characters get a casting change, each of which being for the worse since many of these voices don't have good delivery or even feel right with these characters? The worst offenders of this are Tieria and Saji it seems. Regardless, this was a pretty weak dub, especially for the time where dubs were actually at their peak.

  Not gonna lie, I wasn't very entertained by this film. The action didn't sit right with me, the characters were still pretty bad, the weird comedy from Mina was insufferable and cringe-worthy to me, and the plot was a preachy, messy disaster. I was almost bored. There were some really stupid moments, particularly the ending, that made me laugh my ass off, but overall, I didn't have that good a time with this film, and when an action film, even a flashy one, isn't engaging, that's a problem.

  This movie was the final nail in the coffin for the Anno Domini timeline and embodies pretty much everything wrong with it. The asspulls and inconsistencies, the awful characters, the insane preachiness, everything. I’m not gonna go out of my way to call this the worst Gundam timeline, nor am I going to call this the worst installment of said timeline, but both are pretty bad overall. Even the decent music and flashy visuals can't save it. With all that said, I bid you adieu.

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• 

  Exia

  100/100
  What It Means to Become a Gundam

  Contains spoilers.

  A Wakening of the Trailblazer is a flawed conclusion to Mobile Suit Gundam 00. Yet the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that it is also the only conclusion Gundam 00 could reasonably have had.

  Aliens are, admittedly, a strange place for a relatively grounded political mecha anime to end up. After two seasons of war, terrorism, religious conflict, and humanity's seemingly inexhaustible talent for finding reasons to self-destruct, suddenly introducing an extraterrestrial hivemind sounds less like a natural conclusion and more like the writers finally ran out of humans for Setsuna to shoot.

  And the movie does little to make that transition graceful. Its pacing is unwieldy, several characters are given too little room to breathe, and the enormous battles occasionally bury its ideas beneath an ocean of lasers. The ELS themselves are deliberately unreadable, which makes them thematically interesting but dramatically difficult to engage with. Anyone who preferred 00 when its conflicts were rooted in human politics has perfectly coherent reasons to find the movie excessive.

  But strange as the ELS initially appear, they force Gundam 00 to answer the question it had been approaching from the beginning: if understanding one another really is the means through which humanity can overcome conflict, what happens when we encounter something we cannot understand at all?

  It is easy enough to preach communication when both parties are able to. The ELS afford humanity no such luxury. They cannot speak or explain their intentions, and their attempts at communication involve assimilating the entire planet. To humanity, they look indistinguishable from an invading force. Responding with overwhelming firepower is not exactly irrational.

  Yet, if Gundam 00 ended with humanity encountering something incomprehensible and deciding extermination was the only answer, two seasons of preaching about understanding would suddenly be rather hollow.

  So naturally, responsibility for communicating with an incomprehensible alien intelligence falls to Setsuna F. Seiei, our boy who once considered “I am Gundam” an adequate explanation of his emotional state.

  There is something almost comically appropriate about it, yet also deeply sincere.

  Setsuna and the ELS mirror each other surprisingly closely. Both lost their homes. Both wandered without anywhere they truly belonged. And most importantly, both are catastrophically incapable of communicating with those around them and consequently hurt others around them without fully understanding why.

  The Setsuna of Season 1, for all his good intentions, was still deeply damaged. Raised as a child soldier, he understood violence far better than ordinary human connection. Gundam became his idea of salvation because he had witnessed one descend from the heavens and stop violence where words and faith had failed. Instead of a superior power he could pray for, it's something reachable enough to become.

  By Trailblazer, that same boy has become the person most determined to understand an enemy before destroying it.

  This is why the 00 Qan[T] is such an appropriate final machine for him. The final Gundam belonging to a character who once defined himself through fighting is designed to make fighting unnecessary. That is Setsuna's real transformation.

  The contrast with Descartes Shaman reinforces this. Descartes is also an Innovator and can perceive the ELS will, but innovation means very little if humanity changes biologically without growing emotionally. He can hear them without caring what they might be trying to say. Setsuna cares.

  And Setsuna's attempt to understand the ELS costs him dearly. After making contact, he leaves Earth with them and disappears for fifty years. His friends age. Some die. The world moves forward without him.

  #####Setsuna goes anyway.

  There is something almost haunting about hearing THE BACK HORN's Tozasareta Sekai, the opening theme, in retrospect. The song carries an almost otherworldly unease, fitting the ELS and the terror of encountering something humanity cannot comprehend, yet its final lyrics sound like a mission statement for Setsuna himself: "And until the end, until the end, continue watching over the world."

  He does. He leaves behind the people and world he loves not because he has stopped caring about them, but precisely because he cares enough to risk everything on the possibility of understanding something humanity has never understood before.

  That sacrifice is why I cannot regard Trailblazer as an unnecessary appendix to the TV series. Season 2 concludes Celestial Being's conflict, the movie concludes Setsuna himself. His story was never simply about defeating those responsible for war. It was about whether a child whose entire existence had been constructed around violence could learn another way of reaching others.

  And then comes the ending theme, UVERworld’s Qualia. The title is particularly fitting. Quanta is a central element of Gundam 00. The smallest measurable units, what can be broken down, counted, and shared. Qualia, by contrast, refers to subjective qualities of experience. Quanta are what make us the same, qualia are what make us unique.

  The lyrics of Qualia read unmistakably as Setsuna's own point of view. After carrying the burden of uniting the galaxy, he finally turns inward, giving space to his own feelings.

  Which is why the epilogue matters so much.

  After decades travelling with beings humanity once considered monsters, Setsuna finally returns to Earth. He doesn’t look for Celestial Being. He doesn’t get congratulated for saving humanity.

  He returns to Marina.

  Despite their connection often being read as romantic, even in the non-canon manga adaptation, that’s such an oversimplified way of putting it. I’m not personally against that interpretation either, but Marina represented something more important to Setsuna: a way of living almost completely foreign to him, that somehow bloomed from the same soil. She believed peace could be achieved without violence, while Setsuna had known virtually nothing except violence. Neither could completely accept the other's answer, but neither stopped trying to understand the other.

  Fifty years later, Marina is an old woman and Setsuna is barely human in the conventional sense anymore.

  And finally, they mutually acknowledge each other’s path wasn’t wrong.

  #####"You know, the loneliness of the days when we couldn't meet #####Only proved the fulfillment of our time together" #####- UVERWorld, Qualia

  Outside stands the 00 Qan[T], once a weapon, now covered in flowers. The imagery is almost embarrassingly unsubtle, but subtlety is for cowards, and it’d only weaken the final message. The machine that carried Setsuna through his journey no longer resembles a weapon. Something designed for destruction has become life.

  That is Gundam 00 condensed into a single image.

  None of this makes A Wakening of the Trailblazer a perfect movie. It is messy, excessive, and sometimes much better at expressing its themes than constructing a compelling film around them. The ELS are conceptually stronger than they are as antagonists, and the spectacle occasionally overwhelms the character drama that made 00 work in the first place.

  But I cannot agree that the ELS are a meaningless last-minute escalation, or that Setsuna's story was already complete without them. Whatever its flaws as a film, Trailblazer touched something in me that no other piece of media ever has. For that and all the explained reason, I will always regard it as highly as I possibly can.

  Season 1 asked whether Setsuna could become Gundam. Trailblazer finally asks what becoming Gundam was supposed to mean.

  Setsuna F. Seiei began the series as a child who could barely communicate with another human being. He ended it by crossing the stars to understand an entirely different form of life.

  Then he came home to the person he had wanted to understand all along.

  Perhaps his final smile was over sixty years overdue.

  Or perhaps Setsuna simply couldn't truly smile until the rest of the world could smile with him.

  
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• 

  IsNotAChar

  79/100
  I enjoyed it, but it definitely has issues

  You know what? I enjoyed it. It wasn't perfect but it landed the right emotional notes. If you enjoyed the previous 00 entries, you should watch this.

  Spoilers for the whole movie from here on.

  It was visually spectacular, somehow that massive battle managed to not get monotonous and was surprisingly easy to visually follow even with all the chaotic moving and explosions. Even the cg of the ELS wasn't that bad. Overall, no complaints with the animation and action.

  I did really like the early parts of the movie as well, especially way the mystery was built up surrounding the ELS. The first few combat encounters with the ELS were also really good at keeping them feeling mysterious and threatening.

  That said, there are some plot threads and character arcs that are introduced in the first half and just don't really go anywhere.

  Saji and louise are one pair that yet again get a lot of screen time, but it doesn't really go anywhere this time. I feel like their inclusion was mostly out of the kinda obsessive need of this movie to give every 00 character something to do.

  The other dead-end character is Descartes. The movie makes something of a big deal out of him early on as the first (non setsuna) innovator, and gives him a unique mobile suit and a sorta superiority complex. Then he just dies. I really thought he would return as something of an avatar of the ELS or something (similar to how they had a ribbons clone earlier). Instead he ends up as a just kinda nothing character who dies before he can even really do anything.

  On a more positive character note was Graham, who redeemed himself from his time as Mr Bushido by being actually cool this time.

  The ending was a little strange I admit, a bit underwhelming, but thematically appropriate. the whole theme of mutual understanding being the key to peace, as opposed to military force. As such, it makes sense that the ELS are defeated not through military force but through communicating. Although, I'll say that it felt rushed. It might've been nice to see some more of that communication actually happening. Also, I don't think the message really needed to be literally spelled out before the final fade to black, it was obvious enough already.

  In the end, the movie managed to achieve one very important thing, and that's feeling like a good sendoff. It did get me in the feels at some points and it really nailed that feeling of a desperate final stand to protect humanity. I was invested enough in the characters (minus descartes) that I wanted to see them survive and the stakes were such that it felt like they could die (some of them even did). As such, I was thoroughly engaged throughout.

  Overall, it was a 9/10 that got bumped down to an 8/10 due to a rushed ending and some characters/plot-lines not really going anywhere.

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