For the uninitiated, GQuuuuuux Beginning is the first fourish episodes of the upcoming Gundam series, made in collaboration with Studio Khara and plenty of staff of Neon Genesis Evangelion fame (including Hideaki Anno himself), recut into a short movie to preview the series in theatres. I had the chance to watch it this afternoon. This review has no major spoilers if you’ve been keeping up with the trailers and media leading into it.

I had a great time, but I can see the series being polarising. The pacing is frantic and the energy is super high with little to no downtime. You basically have a prologue section, then the start of the actual story, splitting the “movie” right down the middle. The first half is a flurry of nostalgic bodyblows, full of recreated shots from the original series, classic character designs and uniforms (despite the redesigned mobile suits), and parts of the OG soundtrack remastered for surround sound. Even the title card jingle from the old episodes made it in.

Second half, a switch is flipped and it seems determined to contrast the first as hard as possible. Instead of appealing to nostalgia, the shot selection and animation embrace the new blood of the Eva/FLCL staff – cameras in creative places and battles shot from low angles with silhouetted powerlines crisscrossing the scene, and humans running and jumping with a manic, cartoon fluidity. The soundtrack ditches the old standbys for energetic, synthesised J-pop, a decent amount of it with vocals. This is where the new cast with the Pokemon trainer-looking designs come in, their vibrancy standing out from the familiar uniforms of the old group.

The one thing not dichotomised by the first and second halves is the relentlessness of the pacing. Neither one slows down to explain or relax for a second. I imagine Gundam newbies are going to feel lost in the first half without the lore knowledge needed to fill in the gaps between that section’s forward time jumps. The second half also demands you do some thinking to fill in the spaces between its rapid shot and scene changes, but at least puts old and new fans on even footing for their understanding of the general shape of the story.

And to be clear, I came out of it feeling wired. I was head-bobbing to the music in the second half, feeling smart tying together offhand comments to lore I remembered on the fly. I was surprised to look up the runtime and see just 80 minutes because that machinegun pace meant they fit so much story in.

The only place I felt it was let down by its speed is Machu’s thin-feeling characterisation. There’s a vague wistfulness for freedom set up early on, but she swings between recklessness impulsiveness and flighty panic on a dime, making her real goals and drives hard to pin down. But I’m hoping the full series will be able to give her a few more layers.

This is the perspective of a relatively new and passionate fan though. The background info needed to keep up is still fresh in my mind. I might have come too late to the party to be nostalgic about Gundam, but Evagelion’s directing and FLCL’s loony tunes energy were big influences in my formative years. If you don’t know your OYW and Char Aznable lore, on the other hand, and if you haven’t previously learned to roll with that kind of rapid fire storytelling, I can see this one being tough to stomach. But then, the enforced breaks with a week to simmer between episodes might help reign it in for the unprepared.

I’m feeling super hyped up to see the full series, and more curious than ever to see what the wider fandom reaction is going to be when it arrives.