Mobile Suit Gundam 00: A Wakening of the Trailblazer movie.
Some of my thoughts on Gundam 00;
The first season was the best part of 00. It was near impossible to like the characters, not surprising considering the lead character is a former terrorist and one of the main supporting characters has multiple personality disorder, with his other 'self' being a psychopath. Its funny to think I was watching this and hoping that the government forces would win, as my view was that Celestial Being was in the wrong. But this at least made the show interesting to watch, and as their backstories got fleshed out I could sympathise with them to a greater degree. A fantastic final episode too.
The second season is where it fell apart in my opinion. As a consequence of their actions, Celestial Being were now the 'good guys' and the government were indisputably the 'bad guys'. In other words CB had made the world a much worse place, a fact that the show did not shy away from and for which I applaud it. I also applaud it for tackling the contradiction of fighting wars and killing to achieve peace. My big problem with this second series comes from seeing all the supposedly dead characters from the first season had somehow miraculously survived, which completely undermines the great final episode of season one. I could accept one or two characters surviving against the odds, but not all of them. I lost a lot of respect for 00 because of this, in my opinion the show should have brought in more new characters than it did. This is an example of how many of the events within this series felt arbitrary, and there was no real chance that I would like this second season as much as the first as a consequence. In my opinion, this second season is to Gundam 00 what the last third of Death Note was to that series.
The movie was a relief after the second season, maybe because there was not so much focus on the characters and more focus on action (which is the opposite of my normal preference). It concluded the overall storyline in a satisfying way, and avoided the character death retcons that undermined my enjoyment of season two. I also really enjoyed the 'serious sci-fi' ideas like the aliens being made from liquid metal, so much better than the Star Trek style 'humans with funny shaped noses'.
After the second season I was thinking that Seed is the better Gundam series, but after watching this movie I would now say that 00 is my favourite overall. I think if I ever rewatch 00 then I may be more forgiving to season two, but I'm sure I will always see it as the weak point of the 00 storyline.
