Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash – I’m confused but it was a good movie

At this point, the only Gundam series I’ve watched in entirety is G Gundam (when I was 4 years old). I’ve watched a bit of OO and Seed Destiny while it was airing on TV but was kinda meh. Last year, I also watched Narrative and was thoroughly confused. I don’t know what made me watch Hathaway, but I gotta say, for a non-Gundam fan, it was a pretty good movie.

The movie is about this Hathaway Noa guy, who’s actually a leader of a terrorist group. He befriends a military officer and a weird girl who seems to have like, 3 personalities in one person. Stuff happened.

Since this is a first of a trilogy movie, I’m not gonna rat about how confused I was for the first 40 minutes. (It was a better kind of confused than Gundam NT; in that movie I was confused for the whole run.) The second half of the movie was really good as everything started coming together. Hathaway’s Flash didn’t really wrap anything up aside from the first step in Lane Aim’s character development, so I’m excited for the second movie.

At this point, the characters feel more like concepts than people. However, I’m expecting that to change later on.

For cinematography, I’m giving this 10/10. Although some backgrounds look like rendered photographs, it suits the overall tone of the movie since it’s going for a more realistic vibe. The overall tone is not like an anime but really similar to a Hollywood film… I could even imagine how this movie would look as a live-action. If you swap the characters with real actors, you could still keep everything else the same and it wouldn’t feel weird at all. I haven’t been to the Philippines, but from what I know, there’s actually a Jollibee’s in Davao.

After I watched this, I watched a bit of Char’s Counterattack just to get the context (before my dad took over Netflix and started watching the Color Purple) and I must say, just from the first few minutes I understood the first half of Hathaway a lot more.

I don’t have much to say at this point, but I’m looking forward to the next installment.

If you’re a Gundam fan and would like to give me more context for this movie, please feel free to put it in the comments 😀