Movie Review: Gundam 00 A wakening of the Trailblazer

I just finished watching the Gundam 00 movie , and while I was not expecting much , I still felt dissapointed.
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 The movie starts out by showing us what happened to the Meisters after the end of the second movie and then follows the half baked plot that aliens are attacking the Innovators because they are attracted to their quantum brainwaves. The story was as linear as they come, with the deaths of some of the major supporting characters never really tugging at any emotional heart strings. To tell you the truth I completely forgot about some of them until they showed up in the movie ." Hey who is that guy( they explain) oh its  hims, oh he died".The whole movie felt like one big commercial , with the fight scenes becoming massive scale , everybody get a super-powered mech to fight of the  aliens and looking cool. I mean come on, Tieria used to have the mecha with the heavy artillery , but its seems like everybody else has gotten big gun , or a sword that acts like a big gun. The conclusion of the movie was pretty lame and leaves it open for a sequel. Pleaese Bandai, do not  make a sequel!

 The franchise started out strong, with the first season of the show being pretty solid once the pace picked up after the beginning episodes. Whats more the show seemed like it could be the departure from mediocre- non UC gundam of recent ( Seed). However , it manages to destroy all of the momentum that was built in the first season. 
Beginning with the second season, the show jumped the shark so to speak. I think part of the problem with 00 is it started combining so many concepts and ideas from other shows and movies ( Macross, other Gundam series, Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive with the whole aliens taking over vehicles to kill people, in the movie that is  ) that I really never manages to define its own identity .

Verdict 

Bandai is obviously letting the business of selling toys run its biggest franchise  into the ground. While every Gundam series has always been about seeling toys, it is more obvious in the more recent iterations of this series. This makes me miss the days when the storytelling and good animation of the Gundam franchise drove people to buy their toys. Now its just fanservice commercials intended to peddle the newest 00 gundam , with ultra- mega-hyper trans am, that Setsuna can use to cut through entire galaxies.