Regarding Char's Counterattack:
Like almost everything Yoshiyuki Tomino is given complete control of, with no one to check him, he tends to be all over the place, inserts too many subplots and side characters and has far too many tangents going on at once.
On one hand, you could argue 'well, that's life'. But a story isn't life. A story is a carefully constructed, contrived even, sequence of events meant to engage an audience. In the real world, people yell over each other when they argue. In fiction, they cut promos on each other. It's theater. So I don't accept 'well, that's just Tomino depicting the complications of life in a complicated world', which is an argument I've heard many apologists make.
I love Gundam. Maybe more than an aging fan should.
But there it is.
Char's Counterattack has fragments of a truly great movie in it. There are certainly a lot of great scenes. The asteroid falling on Lhasa. Paraya's politicking to force his way onto the shuttle. Amuro shutting his emotions down because he is afraid of his own feelings hurting others, which is a magnificently realized sequence when the Nu-Gundam's fin funnels activate on their own when the Geara Doga heat lines activate, which results in Gyunie crushing Kayra. Char knowing where the nukes are through amplified newtype intuition. The scene where loyal spacenoids are singing the Neo Zeon anthem to Char on a train. Amuro and Char confronting one another on Sweetwater and engaging in a fistfight that nearly ends when Amuro decides to shoot Char rather than let his crazy plan go on. The entire idea of Char concocting this scheme to wipe out all oldtypes simply to prove to Amuro that patience isn't necessary for oldtypes. The bravery of Brite Noa and his crew storming Axis to plant and then detonate nukes. And, of course, that final duel between Amuro and Char which still stands as the greatest and most important fight in all of Gundam bar NONE.
But it also has Gyunie Gus. And Kayra Sue. And Rezin Schneider. And Hathaway Noah. And Quess Paraya. And Chien Agi. And a whole host of other characters and events that seem packed into a sardine can that simply doesn't have any real room for them. Gyunei Gus goes from being a loyal soldier to wanting to overthrow Char just so he can have Quess Paraya all to himself. Kayra Sue, who is in a romance with Astonaige Mendosa, just seems like a pretty face that can't really pilot anything worth a damn but she gets Amuro's cast off and performs so poorly in it that she ends up as a hostage and then killed. Hathaway Noa's only purpose there is to kill Chien Agi, who herself is just there to infuse the T Sample with a soul so it can catalyze the Nu-Gundam's psycho frame to bring about the Axis Shock. Rezin Schneider is an oldtype that is willing to help Char make her strain of homo sapiens obsolete without thinking what might happen to her if Char gets his way. All of these things could have been great stories if they had a TV series to flesh them out more. It's the same problem with Gundam F-91, which I think could have been a fantastic soft reboot of Gundam but, like CCA, just has too much going on and suffers with poor pacing and an overload of subplots as a result. At least with CCA, long time fans could make sense of the majority of it in one way or another. But for a soft reboot, F-91 deserved better.
Anyway, I think it's a worthy movie but without a better storyteller around, like Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, to guide Tomino's wildly imaginative mind, the end result is usually far too excessive and chaotic. Tomino needs a handler at times. Although I think Victory Gundam had a pretty good pace and didn't seem too wildly incoherent. Also has my third favorite ending to anything Gundam, after the original TV series and CCA.
Also, the animation only looks dated by modern standards. For it's day, there wasn't that much that looked better than CCA. I can confirm it certainly has better production values than, say, Macross '84: Do You Remember Love, which has stunning colors and those beautiful dark lined Haruhiko Mikimoto character designs but is a sorely dated film that doesn't hold up on its technical merits. CCA is still eminently watchable on a technical level, and for its time it was quite advanced.
I'd still give it 4.5 out of 5 because its strengths are good enough to vastly overpower its flaws.
