Hogan Reviews

Thanks to a production delay meaning the Gundam Seed movie wasn’t released until literally now as I type this in 2024 (blimey…) Gundam 00: Awakening of the Trailblazer became the first non-UC Gundam movie released in cinemas and with it a lot of controversy. You see, as teased at the end of Season 2 the main threat of the movie is an alien race known as the ELS (“Extraterrestrial Living-metal Shape-shifters”) making this the also the first Gundam… anything to have aliens in it, something more associated with Super Robot shows than the “Real Robot” ones that Gundam pioneered. Does it work? Well, sort of. It matches what 00 has been going for from the start narrative-wise but sadly regardless of the aliens I find the film a bit of a slog… Let’s take a deeper look!

The opening part of the film is partly establishing the world of 00 two years after Season 2, including a more calm and unified Earth working on various projects in the Innovators’ old Celestial Being colony ship, complete with the introduction of new natural Innovator Descartes Shaman; Saji looking after Louise as she’s still recovering from her experience at the hands of Ribbons (a weird sentence if you don’t know Ribbons is a character…) and Setsuna and Lockon are still intervening in conflicts, including a scene where they save Marina Ismail from some assassins. While this is all going on though a space probe is taken over by the ELS and heads to Earth, eventually breaking into bits and showing down to the planet, taking over various machinery and driving people with quantum brainwaves crazy. This includes Louise, who is driven mad by an Innovade who looks just like Ribbons but actually being controlled by ELS (they’re saved by Setsuna, if you’re wondering) and Allelujah and Marie are attacked by empty trucks and other construction equipment at a construction site in the middle of nowhere, being saved eventually by Lockon and taken back to the Ptolemaios to reunite with the rest of the protagonists.

Where’s my “Unmanned truck” enemy in the Gundam games?! … Actually, where are the ELS enemies in nearly all Gundam games really…

Soon the ELS takeover a Jupiter research station and begin multiplying in great numbers so Celestial Being (our heroes, not the large ship) goes out to take them on but find their liquid nature and ability to both assimilate and copy the forms and technology of Earth make them a hard foe to fight, eventually being saved by an arriving Tieria, who has given himself a new Innovade body to use, as well as a new Gundam, naturally (as the whole cast minus Setsuna have as well, though they’re not as noticeable an upgrade at Setsuna gets later in the movie…) Before anyone has a chance to catch their breath a massive fleet flies out of the big red spot in Jupiter and heads for Earth, so the united forces of Earth try to cut them off at Mars but they fall to the aliens (including Descartes, so that was a waste of a new character design right there! I did wonder why I didn’t remember him when he was given a big introduction…) leaving Celestial Being to give it another go, complete with Setsuna using the 00 Gundam’s GN particle field to try and communicate with the ELS, thinking this was the “dialogues that are to come” that Celestial Being’s founder created them for but instead he’s mentally overwhelmed and sent into a coma, the 00 Gundam destroyed in the process (but Tieria manages to pull the cockpit out at the cost of his… temporary body, so no big loss!)

Descartes contemplates why he was created only to die without accomplishing anything… Which sounds like a deep philosophical thing, but I was actually riffing on the creators of the film and the plot…

Celestial Being escape thanks to a new “Sol Brave Squadron” led by Grahm Aker, who has discarded his Mr. Bushido personality fully. While Setsuna lies unconscious the Earth scientists find out that a much bigger ELS army, including a moon-sized ELS “ship”, is heading for Earth and will arrive in just a couple of months, leaving everything looking pretty grim for humanity…

There were some good moments and its always fun seeing humanity struggle with the idea of a superior alien force heading to wipe them out, but a good majority of the film, including pretty much the entire final third, is just generic metal versions of 00 era suits being destroyed by regular 00 era suits and vice versa to the point where it all starts to lose meaning. Far too many lasers and explosions and given the enemy can’t speak to gloat or give us any kind of story or drama to break up the action it really is JUST action and can really wear you down. I don’t mind aliens in Gundam (though I do admit it is really weird) but I don’t like a film with a good message but no idea how to deliver it for over half its runtime so just resorts to generic blasting…

Overall Thoughts:

That’s … quite the unexpected final enemy for a Gundam show, that’s for sure!

Awakening of the Trailblazer does a good job of putting a full stop at the end of the 00 universe and has some fun moments but it also has an awful lot of a space shootouts with little to no dialogue to break it up, making it quite hard-going after a while, especially the finale. A mixed bag but does at least bring the 00 series’ core narrative of Earth unification for the sake of humanity’s future to a satisfying conclusion.

As mentioned, the final third of the movie is mostly one long battle in the space above Earth as all the named characters that can pilot a mobile suit from the two TV seasons (that are still alive) fighting the ELS. Eventually Setsuna awakens and heads off to battle in the brand new GNT-0000 00 Qan[T] Gundam, complete with a Veda-like system controlled by the AI Tieria so they can better process the information the ELS send out. The Qan[T] cuts through a bunch of ELS and heads for the moon-sized ship as Tieria believes within it is the best place to try and communicate with the alien species, and in order to get there Lockon, Allelujah/Marie and Graham Aker all cut a path for Setsuna to reach his goal (and it looks like Aker dies in the process, though short stories and manga one-offs set after the movie say otherwise…)

The 00 Qan[T], a Gundam that did so little during its brief screen time that future Gundam games had to pretty much invent a moveset for it…

Setsuna reaches the centre of the ELS moon and sets off his quantum field and does indeed strike up an understanding with the metal race, finding out their original home world was destroyed by a supernova but they resettled and are now exploring space out of nothing but curiosity. Setsuna and Tieria make peace with the ELS and the war ends in a heartbeat, the moon-sized ELS turning into the shape of a flower to show their new intention. Setsuna and AI Tieria then use the 00 Qan[T]’s ability to “quantize” across deep space to head to the ELS homeworld and talk to them about a permanent union between the two species, fulfilling Aeolia Schenberg’s original plan of a unified humanity using their natural Innovator powers to create a dialogue with an alien species, something we see a young Aeolia talk about in a flashback after the credits.

We also get a flash-forward to see the world 50 years later, complete with half of humanity having evolved to become Innovators and a bunch of them planning a trip into deep space thanks to their longer lifespans, and a much older and now blind Marina being visited by Setsuna, who looks exactly like he did 50 years ago apart from his body is entirely metallic, making him some sort of human innovator / ELS hybrid, I guess.

This whole thing is just weird. I wonder if Setsuna is immortal now or something? How would a new 00 Gundam show work set after the movie? I guess it wouldn’t, which is kind of the point…

The two embrace as the Qan[T] “parked” outside covers itself in flower-like GN particles to give us a happy final visual…