Mobile Suit Gundam: Twilight Axis

Universal Century 0096.  The asteroid Axis, which served as a homefront for the displaced survivors of Zeon, floats far from the Earth following the Second Neo Zeon War.  A small research team heads out to the dormant base on a special mission.  With them are Arlette Almage and Danton Hyleg, a mechanic/pilot team who once worked closely with Char Aznable himself.  They have more at stake in this trip than anyone else.  However, when the expedition is attacked by an unidentified Gundam Mobile Suit, the search for answers becomes a fight for survival.

When it comes to telling even the most basic of stories, there are six main questions you must adhere to at all times. Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?  Even if your story turns to crap because you cant explain a plot point or explore a character arc properly, if you make an attempt to answer all of those questions, you’ll be fine.  So why does Twilight Axis seem incapable of following even those most basic storytelling steps?  What should have been a great tale to add to the Universal Century saga turned into a poorly made stew of random scenes cobbled together by someone trying to make their first AMV more than an actual project for a long running franchise.

The summary I gave above for the film I had to cobble together from the “Official Synopsis” from a random Gundam fansite.  If I didn’t have that one little paragraph to go on, I wouldn’t’ve known until much later that we were watching a random research crew fly themselves out to the Axis Asteroid to look for…what were they looking for?  What was the mission?  Why was it so critical that a bratty Newtype Engineer and a test pilot incapable of killing be brought along?  Why is there an evil Gundam flying around trying to kill them and what unit is he with?  Why was Char so interested in Arlette to begin with when he had Lalah around?  Just how long did Arlette and Danton work with Char?  Were they around during Char’s Counterattack?  Is the mission a failure?  What happened to Arlette, Danton and mystery Gundam pilot in the end?

Notice how I dedicated an entire paragraph to asking questions.  That’s because this is the ONA’s end result: More questions than answers.  In fact, I dare say there are ZERO answers given to any of them, meaningful ones anyway.  Sure we learn that Arlette and Danton designed several Mobile Suits for Zeon, including Char’s Sazabi from Char’s Counterattack.  We see how Arlette came to meet Danton and get rescued by Char but we don’t learn a lot about her otherwise.  Only that she prides herself on being a mechaninc and that ego makes her a bit of a brat.  Her history comes off like a random clip show you’d find in an art house film that the filmmakers expect you to spend half your year analyzing to death.  And if this ONA was acting like a half assed, proof of concept pilot for a larger series that would explain all these mysteries, then it’s failed in that too.  I didn’t care about Arlette or Danton or the mystery Gundam they were fighting.  And as if those who made it are proud of what they’ve done, they don’t even include an ending.  The ONA just stops and that’s it.  Lazy, infuriating, just plain bogus.

I came to this ONA hoping to learn more about the fate of Axis in the aftermath of Char’s Counterattack.  Instead, Mobile Suit Gundam: Twilight Axis was a random series of cosmic events that tried to connect to the larger Gundam mythos with next to no success.  More questions were stacked upon ones that hadn’t been answered and the ONA felt so desperate to establish an emotional weight on Arlette and Danton it forgot to delve into anything else.  The animation is nothing to brag about, the mecha designs aren’t either.  Factor that into a patchwork tale and a total runtime of about the length of a standard TV episode and you’ve got a sorry excuse for a Gundam tale that missed every mark it might tried to aim for.  Not even brief cameos from Lalah Sune or the Red Comet himself could mask just how bad Twilight Axis is. 

0/10