Dec 22, 2019
Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, often touted as Yoshiyuki Tomino's magnum opus, is an incomprehensible mess of a story that utterly pales in comparison to the already not-that-great original.
The animation may look pretty and the sound design may be satisfying as always, but those things don't really mean anything when the story they're working in service of is utter nonsense and the characters aren't interesting.
If you decide to watch this show because you've heard good things about it, I sincerely wish you the best of luck trying to comprehend what the Sam Hill is going on and who's attacking whom, because after spending about a month
...
watching the whole show from start to finish, 2 episodes per night, I still don't really know what happened. Not helping is the abysmal dialogue which more often serves as a shameless mouthpiece for Yoshiyuki Tomino than a natural conversation between two humans. In other words, on the rare occasion that characters do actually stop to explain something, they're usually explaining whatever Tomino's pretentious speech of the day is instead of the plot or their own motivations.
I'm now going to move on to a very specific complaint which isn't the show's biggest problem but it definitely pissed me off the most. I'm not normally the kind of person to play the "misogyny" card, but I have some serious beef with a particular character who must not be named because that would be a spoiler. Now, I'm a man and I certainly won't claim to be some sort of expert on women, but I can't help but feel that if I were a woman, I would find it incredibly insulting that when this character betrays her friends and comrades and participates in mass genocide just to impress the hot enemy commander, and both she and other characters state it's because she's "being too much of a woman". I'm sorry if I'm misinterpreting this, but what else am I supposed to take away from that other than there's some sort of connection between being a woman and becoming a treacherous mass murderer for the sake of getting laid?
That aside, the show's actual biggest problem is that there are just too many moving parts in the narrative to possibly keep track of it all. You'll be scratching your head wondering who's attacking whom and why, and by the end of episode 50 you still won't really know.
Also you'll be wishing Kamille could win his battles legitimately instead of randomly unlocking superpowers out of nowhere at the eleventh hour.
EDIT: Oh my god how did I forget to mention the numerous forced romances in this show? Between Kamille and Four, Amuro and Beltorchika, Henken and Emma (granted this one is rather one-sided), Jerid and Mouar, there's almost too damn many to count and they're all boring at best and infuriating at worst to watch because none of them have any meaningful chemistry. Most of them share less than 10 minutes' worth of screentime before falling in love.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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