The emotions are hollow, a damning indictment in a story supposedly about the horror of death and the fear of loss. It’s as if Unicorn’s more ambitious aspirations have allowed NT to start interrogating topics that would before have seemed beyond the universe’s scope.īut beyond paying lip service to these higher ideas, the movie seems uninterested. There’s also a healthy dollop of psycho- and techno-babble about how the Phenex possesses a system that will allow users to transcend death in a franchise where spiritual manifestations have until now been used solely to represent the emotions and memories of the fallen more than literal ghosts, the acknowledgment of a literal soul is novel-if admittedly awkward-thematic territory. Some superficial narrative detail suggests better, at first: beyond allowing a handful of cameos from Unicorn’s protagonists, NT’s focus is on orphans Jona Basta and Michele Luio as they hunt down an offshoot of the Unicorn series of mobile suits, the Gundam Phenex, they believe to be piloted by their long lost friend, Rita. Sadly, ironically, Mobile Suit Gundam NT (Narrative) makes very little effort to live up to this lofty promise.
The way forward was clear: the new century, we were told, could begin.
Newtypes have always symbolized the next step in mankind’s evolution, after all, an idea that Unicorn director Kazuhiro Furuhashi zeroed in on to such an extent that his own series investigated deeply what truly accepting such an existence would mean not just for the people of the Universal Century timeline but for viewers who had grown inured to the constant cycle of violence between Federation and space colonies that had defined the franchise’s mainline universe for decades.īy series end the ghost of Char Aznable had been exorcised literally and figuratively, Zeon had finally been declared a sovereign state, and the original sin of the Universal Century-burying the rights of Newtypes before they even had a chance to claim them-had been exposed. It’s a gutsy thing to saddle any Gundam movie with the initials “NT” in clear allusion to the Newtypes at the core of the mythos, let alone a movie meant to serve as a direct sequel to Gundam Unicorn.
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