Kidou Senshi Gundam: GQuuuuuuX - Beginning

7.25/10 ~ Man im so hype for this

From what I can tell this is going to be the first few episodes of the TV series so dont fret if you did not get the opportunity to see it in theaters like I did. GQuX is an alternative timeline of WHAT IF Char got the RX78 instead of Amaro during the One Year War. You do not technically need to know anything about Gundam as a whole and you can go into this one pretty blind, however for the best viewer experience I would probably recommend watching:
- 0079 (the original show or 3 piece movie)
- Gundam ... the Origin (back story on Char)
- Char's Counter Attack (to know what the outcome of the original show to have a comparison of why this is so hype)

And for you Gundam Nerds out there they took the overall Plot elements from G-Fighter and mashed them together with the Universal time line.

Gundam has become very stagnant over the years with only 2 real stand outs in my personal opinion, Thunderbolt; a pretty forgotten about series that is unfinished that really took a fresh way to look at Gundam. AND Which from mercury, that really just took all the Gundam tropes and reversed them.... which honestly was pretty poorly executed. Pretty much every other Gundam feels like Gundam, is loaded with nearly all the same story beats, at this point Cliche's and almost everything feels pretty over done.

GQuX really feels diffrent, it feels like something TRIGGER would have made, very wild and over the top. It doesnt even really look like a Gundam show and I honestly love all the changes to the show. I forsee this being my favorite Gundam Show to date which currently is Origins, I really just hope they do not botch this.

I also am really curious if they are going to do what DBS did with the DBZ-battle of gods movie which was the same events but spread out into a season vs 1 movie... or if it will be a 1-1 copy and paste from the anime, hard to tell honestly. I may update my score when I rewatch this as well.

In an early scene in Gundam GquuuuuX Beginnings, Char makes a comment to the effect of “Mobile suits can only influence conditions on a tactical level. It’s the generals and politicians who really decide how a war is won or lost.” Being conscious of this claim, the film’s scope becomes especially significant, because it then shows a war that is largely won without the help of generals or politicians, seemingly suggesting the opposite of Char’s statement to be true. By way of contradistinction, the original Mobile Suit Gundam incorporated a balance between mobile suit combat, political considerations on the construction of Zeon and the Federation ... as societies, and both high and low levels of strategic command. Rather than comprehensively showing all the coalescent elements that inform each other and maintaining a steady trajectory, GquuuuuX demonstrates an interest in only one aspect of warfare, which is the pure chaos inherent in combat, and it uses every aspect of production to reinforce this idea, and to create a relentless sense of pacing that brings the viewer and the character much closer together than a more standard mode of editing would allow for.

The most remarkable aspect of GquuuuuX’s design is the sheer fluidity in its camera movement which completely disregards the concept of a fixed or level viewing position. Across any individual scene, the camera may pan spherically, forwards or backwards, and with a level of commitment that is fully unprecedented in its ambition. The movement is constant and multiplanar, it’s not a strategically planned battle with a front line, but an unrelenting primal charge in all directions at almost every moment. This approach to depicting mobile suit combat with such speed and aggression makes for a continuous assault on the senses, which is a point that even reflects back towards how the camera operates and depicts that level of chaos. The way debris falls and responds to impact, the fluttering of an ammo belt as it spits out cartridges and jolts in the low-gravity environment, or the recoil of a shot causing shockwaves and vibrations that affect the camera itself, all these aspects that inform the specific movements and mechanisms of weapon systems can essentially be defined as details, and with the hard-hitting drums in the soundtrack pushing forward the tempo in corresponding sequence with the visual action, these details, of the camera movement, the inner feeling of terror in trying to grasp it from the characters, and of the environment itself, all coexist simultaneously, creating a pure sensory overload that perfectly exasperates the insanity of combat, with so much happening at one time, one feels as though they can only jolt their eyes for a second to scan for a second, everything moves so quickly that they cannot fully comprehend everything that is happening at any time.

Through the audio-visual onslaught, the way the individual pilots react to the distortive effect of mobile suit combat is a constant presence that provides a sufficient level of context and meaning to its combat sequences, which are so invested in creating these sweeping cinematographic moves and indulging in their pure anarchic chaos, that the psychological element becomes a necessary presence through which to intelligibly identify and interpret the volume of images that the viewer is presented with. With this in mind, the film’s notability extends beyond its combat sequences, for it is able to carry over its sense of pacing and tone outside of that area, largely through the usage of similar directorial techniques which are recontextualised to show the dystopic reality of life within the space colonies. In a manner similar to the works of Edgar Wright, it is able to create highly choreographed action sequences, while also finding a way to visually invoke and parallel that same action energy within its lighter character moments, something which is especially poignant as GquuuuuX, in Gundam tradition, creates a main character whose main identifiable traits are their impulsivity and combative attitude which certainly helps in linking together the two parts of the film’s construction. Significantly, although this relentless pace is present for most of the runtime, by virtue of the depiction of the Newtype inner self, a sort of reprieve into an alternate world, it is able to concomitantly produce rare moments devoted fully to character introspection in which the viewer is absorbed fully into the protagonist’s own view of the world they have been put into, with none of the distortion or sensory overload of industrial warfare, or plain industry. Being conscious of Taki Koji’s comment that the act of photography is an “attempt to overcome vision itself”, GquuuuuX seems to find a way of moving past the limitation of vision as it is typically understood. Through such a heavy emphasis on multiplanar movement, it creates a pervasive sense of tension and terror in its action set pieces, which then inform its aspects of life outside the mobile suit.

Machu says at one point that she desires freedom from the artificiality of her constructed environment, and another character tells Machu that “Spacenoids will never be free.” Liberty as a political condition may differ from a personal feeling of freedom, but GquuuuuX manages to present that individual feeling of freedom through its floating world, only viewed and understood by Newtypes. It may not quite “overcome vision”, but in this floating world, when the camera and music move into stillness in response to their new transcendent environment, it creates a feeling of freedom that is able to be so deftly emphasised due to the persistent mode of editing and pacing orchestrated by the rest of the film.

Callbacks to the original 0079 were great, but Char's new VA reads a bit flat; maybe it's just me.

The second half, or the 0085 segments, have so many ideas and remnants from Evangelion and Utena that are being forced over onto GQuuuuuux. No, we don't need another Nagisa Kaworu(basically what Shuji is) for the Gundam universe, and I'm saying this as a huge Evangelion fan.

The good thing is Amate's character has some shining moments that gives me hope that her character buildup has potential far beyond mediocrity like Suletta was in WFM.

Here's to hoping that the tv series version will be better, but if ... they keep fixating on this clan battle thing that already did not work out in WFM, it will fail exactly like how WFM did.