Hathaway and the People We Cannot Quite Explain

I have watched the first Gundam Hathaway film several times, and I still find myself mesmerized by the battle above the city and puzzled by what happens in a hotel suite. The scale, danger, and beauty of the battle are easier to name than whatever passes between Gigi and Hathaway there. I recognize the attraction, the retreat, the sudden confidence, the change of mood. What I cannot do is reduce all of it to one motive and feel satisfied that I have understood her.

The film follows Hathaway Noa, traveling under the cover of an ordinary passenger while secretly leading Mafty, an insurgency against the Earth Federation. On the flight he meets Gigi Andalucía and Kenneth Sleg, a Federation officer. A hijacking brings them together; their interest in one another quickly exceeds the circumstances.

Gigi and Hathaway click almost immediately. Kenneth pursues her openly, while he and Hathaway develop an easy rapport with a slight competitive edge. The relationships acquire weight before anyone has explained what they are.

It feels more realistic than a cleaner script would.

Before the explanation

Fiction often gives us a reason before asking us to accept a feeling. A childhood incident establishes the fear. A sacrifice earns the attraction. Several conversations demonstrate that two people understand each other before the relationship is allowed to matter.

People rarely provide that much preparation.

You can become interested in someone before knowing anything useful about them. You can enjoy their company while distrusting them.

Hathaway lets those responses arrive without tidying them.

Gigi wants Hathaway near her. She is remarkably direct about it, including her insistence that he stay in her suite. He goes along, but remains distant. The willingness is there. So is the discomfort. The scene does not distribute them neatly between attraction, caution, courtesy, and whatever else is happening.

His concealed identity explains some of the pressure. His past explains more. Neither tells us everything about how he responds to this particular woman in this particular room.

I like that the film does not mistake an explanation of his circumstances for an explanation of him.

Gigi’s changes of mind

Gigi is perceptive, but that does not make her consistent. She notices things other people miss and still behaves in ways she may not have thought through.

The temptation is to decode her. Decide whether she is manipulating Kenneth, why she wants Hathaway, and which gestures are sincere. But sincerity does not require a person to know where a gesture will lead. She can want him close now without having decided what she wants from him altogether.

Her interest is real; its expression changes with the response she receives, with her mood, with what she discovers about the man. She is participating in the relationship, not demonstrating a motive already settled offscreen.

Across the films, her attachment becomes more definite. That does not retroactively turn every earlier moment into part of a plan.

Hathaway is uneven in another way. He carries a political commitment of enormous consequence and can still be awkward, defensive, or childish in an intimate exchange. Gigi sometimes appears more composed than he does, despite having plenty of uncertainty of her own. She can see something in him that he is poorly equipped to discuss.

Neither is waiting for the other to become an uncomplicated person.

Kenneth in the room

Kenneth is direct, socially confident, and rather a fuckboy. He enjoys pursuing Gigi. He also enjoys Hathaway, and that makes him more than an obstacle between them.

The men find each other agreeable before either understands the full significance of the encounter. Their conversation has ease, curiosity, and the small pleasure of recognizing someone worth talking to. There is rivalry too. It does not cancel the ease.

If Kenneth were merely unpleasant, Hathaway’s position would be simpler. Instead, he encounters someone whose company he might genuinely enjoy under different circumstances. Kenneth can be intelligent and personable while serving a system Hathaway considers intolerable.

The film does not need to choose which impression is the real one.

Nor do all three characters experience the same encounter in the same way. Gigi can shift her attention without announcing a change in the triangle. Kenneth can take pleasure in a conversation Hathaway is also using to protect himself. Hathaway can accept an invitation and remain elsewhere in his head.

A look does not quite answer the previous line. An offer is accepted without anyone relaxing. Someone becomes intimate and then withdraws, leaving the other person to work out what happened. The direction gives those changes enough space to register without explaining them after the fact.

Conviction is not maturity

The Federation is corrupt enough that recognizing its failures hardly seems an achievement. But I do not find Mafty reassuring simply because the grievances are justified. Destroying a regime and building something better are different tasks. A serious account of the second has to survive questions about administration, succession, and the corruption that may develop within the replacement.

Hathaway’s conviction is greater than the reassurance his project offers me.

That is not a flaw in the character that the film needs to repair. It is part of what makes him interesting. He can see something accurately and respond to it inadequately. He can assume responsibility on a grand scale while remaining troubled and immature in ways that affect how he exercises it.

The adult quality of Hathaway is not that everyone behaves like an adult. It is that the film lets them fail to do so without simplifying them into fools.

The visuals and the spell they cast

The fight in the city in the first movie is a particularly striking example of how much the camera choices contribute to that atmosphere of adultness and ambiguity. We see Hathaway and Gigi fleeing from the ground while gigantic robots fight above them. The perspective gives the scale, danger, and powerlessness an impact that a clearer view of the combat would hardly achieve. Combined with the visual dynamism and beauty, the fireworks-like sparkles and the fires, it all casts something of a spell. It pulls me into a state of contemplativeness, fascination, vulnerability, and a mixture of fear-based and beauty-based arousal.

Interestingly, the characters, especially Hathaway, seem mesmerized and troubled as well, witnessing the same spectacular and terrifying battle. The scene pulls us into the character’s POV while also pulling that character into a passive, almost audience-like position. For a moment, we are watching with him. His involvement in the conflict gives him neither control over what unfolds above him nor much freedom to do anything but watch and flee.

The second movie is just as inventive: the ground-level footage of the massacre recorded by the rebels, the Gundam being lowered into the ocean, the fight between Hathaway and Lane Aim, and the literal POV of Hathaway during his flashbacks. These choices are so unconventional and so effective. The familiarity of the universe hardly prepares me for how some of these sequences look and feel.

Fisheye framing recurs throughout the movie, giving the scenery an almost meme-referencing tone of questioning. Gigi, who already had one such moment in the elevator scene in the first movie, gets an even louder one when she provokes Kenneth’s lover and gets slapped in his office waiting room. The framing contributes to the absurdity and discomfort of the encounter without making either feel out of place. There is also an abundance of camera panning and of angles above or below the more conventional eye level.

And yet this originality leaves plenty of room for visual candy and cliché delivery, which arrive tastefully and without holding back. The sequence of Gigi rearranging her apartment, the ending with the kiss and Sweet Child o’ Mine suddenly playing: these moments are an absolute pleasure. I enjoy how confidently the films indulge in them, without seeming to find any contradiction between their sophistication and their willingness to deliver something immediately appealing.

Stepping up the game

I would venture to say that the visual and sound work, and even the “marketing” touches throughout the movies, are absolutely up to the same level of excellence as the adult and meaningful scriptwriting and overall creative direction.

It is a joy to see a franchise embark on a new era by stepping up the game and reinventing just how much its cinematic universe can deliver, beyond remastering, recreating, or continuing the story. While some details, particularly the pacing, have room for improvement, both movies get full marks from me.

The contrast is all the more evident when comparing them with other franchise entries, such as Rozé of the Recapture in Code Geass, or even Iron-Blooded Orphans in Gundam itself. Frankly, those felt to me like little more than attempts to squeeze the existing universes for commercial projects of little substance. To make matters worse, they dumbed down and simplified their plots, cranked up the dramatization and shock value, and provided almost no storytelling, moral, or visual contribution that I found worthwhile.

A telltale sign of such work is when it is loudly childish in its ambitions and complexity, but inappropriately adult in its fixation with large breasts, random-ass pregnancies, and so on. It is clear what audience each kind of project is targeting.

Funny enough, the second Hathaway movie has a scene in which Hathaway gets flustered because a female engineer helping him gear up is not wearing a bra under her loose uniform. The visuals deliver the female eroticism and fan service, but the tone is so very different. He urges her to cover up; she refuses to conform to feminine restrictions while the male engineers get to work comfortably shirtless. The eroticism is there, but so are her perspective and his awkwardness.

Far from feeling like cheap fan service or another money-milking installment, Hathaway feels like it is being treated as a flagship and foundational work for a new stage of Gundam cinema. I can only hope the upcoming projects from franchises such as Neon Genesis Evangelion and Code Geass aim for the same kind of impact and quality.

On a rewatch, I am not all that interested in finding the final explanation for Gigi, Hathaway, or Kenneth. I simply want to enjoy the visual journey, the tension, the ambiguity, and how they all blend together. Even when they are directing events, the characters seem to be observing and digesting the story they inhabit, without some grand, unrealistic awareness of it or power over it. I relate to them more each time, but understand them only marginally better and barely become more capable of summarizing them. That too makes it all the more tasteful and realistic.

Further reading: Shuko Murase interviewed about Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash, translated by SHINSEIKI.