Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway

Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway is a 2021 anime film from Sunrise, the studio behind the Gundam series. It is the first part of a planned three-film story. Shuko Murase directed it, Yasuyuki Muto wrote the screenplay, and Hiroyuki Sawano wrote the music. The film is based on Hathaway's Flash, a three-book novel series that Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino wrote in 1989 and 1990. This first movie covers the first book. It runs about 95 minutes.

The film was meant to open in July 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic pushed it back several times. It finally opened in Japan on June 11, 2021, in 215 theaters. Netflix released it around the world on July 1, 2021, with dubs in eight languages. It earned about 2.2 billion yen in Japan, one of the bigger film results of that year there.

The story is set in the Universal Century, the main timeline of the Gundam world, in the year 0105. That is about a dozen years after the film Char's Counterattack. Humans now live both on Earth and in huge space colonies. The Earth Federation, the government that rules them, has grown greedy and cruel. It keeps harming the planet, and it forces ordinary people off Earth and up into space against their will. Small wars keep breaking out.

A rebel group called Mafty has decided to fight back with violence. It kills top Federation officials, and many common people quietly cheer for it. The secret leader of Mafty is Hathaway Noa. He is the son of Bright Noa, a famous captain from the very first Gundam story. As a teenager, Hathaway was in the battle against Char, and he saw the hopes and beliefs of the heroes Amuro Ray and Char Aznable up close. Now an adult, he believes armed rebellion is the only way to change the world.

The movie opens with Hathaway on a passenger plane that gets hijacked. On board, he meets two people who will shape his path. One is Gigi Andalucia, a strange and beautiful young woman who seems to sense things others cannot. The other is Kenneth Sleg, a sharp Federation officer who will soon hunt Mafty. Neither of them knows who Hathaway really is. The film also brings in two new giant robots, called mobile suits: the Xi Gundam that Hathaway pilots, and the Federation's Penelope.

This is a serious, grown-up Gundam story. It is about terrorism, politics, guilt, and whether killing can ever be right. The main characters are adults, and the hero is an anti-hero, which means a main character who does bad things for reasons he thinks are good. Critics praised the beautiful art and the huge, heavy robot battles, many of them at night. Some felt the picture was too dark to see well and that the story moved too fast. The rock band Alexandros sang the theme song, "Senko." The story continues in the second film, The Sorcery of Nymph Circe.