Thoughts on 'Gundam Thunderbolt: December Sky'

01 Jan 01 00:00 UTC

Spoiler Preface!!!

This post contains extreme spoilers. You have been warned

I’m doing my recap of all the Gundam movies I watched on Youtube in order, which means we have to start with Part 1 of Gundam Thunderbolt

Gundam Thunderbolt: December Sky is quite beloved by fans. I can understand why. It’s beautifully animated, with some of the best looking mobile suit fights I’ve ever seen. It’s (mainly, but not exclusively) jazz-driven soundtrack is the kind of thing you can either genuinely appreciate, or at least pretend to appreciate in order to look smart.

Most importantly (in the sense that it’s key to understanding its popularity), December Sky wallows in the kind “#wellactually both sides were wrong” whataboutist BS that is increasingly (and disturbingly) common in modern Gundam stories. And it does so by being excessively dark and edgy in the name of highlighting the horrors of war (which, I imagine, is also part of the appeal).

So I understand why it is popular, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s good. Yes, the animation is good. Yes the music works (the chaos of improv jazz really does match the chaos of the Thunderbolt sector, a region place where the remnants of destroyed colonies crackle with lightning). But as a story, this one falls flat.

At its core, December Sky is the story of two pilots who are broken in (differently) tragic ways, who find themselves linked by fate and driven to increasingly desperate actions in order to beat one another. It’s an interesting premise, if for no other reason than the particulars of each character’s background.

The problem, then, is that the show only focuses on these two in roughly the first half of its short runtime. After that, they take a backseat in favor of over the top edginess, all in the name of that aforementioned whataboutism.

The most obvious and brutal example of what I mean is when the Federation sends backup in the form of roughly 40 or so child soldiers. These are literal teenagers, who are seen taking selfies in front of mobile suits, who have no idea what they are about to get into.

I mean … come the f*ck on. Zeon gassed colonies and dropped them on Earth, but even they’ve never been portrayed doing something like this

When we see them engage in combat, it’s clear that they have absolutely no decent training, and they all get slaughtered by a handful of Zeon aces. It’s not an easy scene to watch, nor is it meant to be. But any fan who thinks the film benefits from this scene is exactly the kind of modern Gundam fan who I take issue with.

Part of my problem with this scene is that, contrary to a lot of people, I don’t think it makes sense that the Federation would fill forty mobile suits with inexperienced teens who they knew were guaranteed to die in a sector that no one seems to care about. It’s an absolute waste of resources and people.

My other, bigger problem with this scene is that it isn’t in service of the ostensible core of the story, that being the struggle between the two main pilots. This doesn’t deepen their characterization, or the characterization of the people around them. We never get to really know any of the kids, we never get to see any good scenes in which people react to their deaths. It’s all meaningless beyond the edginess of making it happen.

You can’t argue that something depicts the “horrors of war” when it strips away most semblances of humanity. Beyond the basic horror of the scene, why should we care about characters that the story itself clearly cares nothing about.

GM’s are always protrayed with multiple shields. At first I thought this was due to the nature of the Thunderbolt Sector, but we see this later on, in other battle zones. I guess it’s a stylistic choice

I just don’t get this obsession of modern Gundam writers to try and make the Federation look so much worse (while also making the Zeon look, if not better, than at least more sympathetic). I don’t think it actually brings any sort of benefit. Tomino’s stories were very good at depicting both sides of the war as having crappy leadership at the top of their militaries, and (some) good people at the bottom. But at the same time, they made it clear that one side of the conflict was very clearly in the wrong. This is not the case of all (or even most) wars, but when you consider how much First Gundam was Tomino’s commentary on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it makes sense for this fictional war to play out taht way. The attempts to move away from this portrayal are confusing, if not disturbing.

In any case, the bottom line is that I think this should have centered more on the conflict between its central characters. The fact that it fails to do so means that December Sky is really only watchable as an alternate universe depiction of the One Year War, one that’s more interested in presenting a superficial change in tone than in re-examining the heart of the conflict. From that lens, it’s certainly watchable. But I find it laughable to consider this a Top Tier Gundam story.

Random Observations

  • A lot of people argue over whether the technology seen in this story is too far advanced for late UC 0079. I tend to believe that the problem is twofold. First, the problem with the new Gundam isn’t so much that it’s too advanced, but that it seems ridiculous that such a capable new mobile suit would be deployed to such an unimportant fleet in an unimportant sector. Second, if any bit of tech is hard to swallow, it’s the Psycho Zaku. Not only is it super capable, but it seems odd that a small and largely ignored Zeon squad would have the resources to build something like that.
  • It seems odd that the Zeon Navy would be able to send so many reinforcements to the Thunderbolt Sector so close to the battle of A Baoa Qu. How is it that they can send a bunch of competent backup, while the Feddies can only send off a bunch of kids to get killed? That seems to flip the script regarding the state of both factions at the end of the One Year War.
  • I remember when this first came out, and a lot of fans were under the impression that the Moore Brotherhood weren’t strictly the Federation, but were rather some sort of independent pseudo-monarchy that lived at Side 4, and happened to have enough money to buy mobile suits and stuff directly from the Federation with which to defend their homeland (and later, get revenge for its destruction). This turned out to be incorrect, but I wish it wasn’t. I think the story would make a lot more sense from that angle.