The touched up animations, frames, and new scenes to either expand on pre-existing scenes or compensate for cut elements elsewhere are all great, and particularly with the Zeon scenes you get the sense a lot of them would have been in the show if it was not cut short.
The recent watch I did of this movie followed right after I had just finished rewatching the series. I was interested, 'could this movie work as an improved final arc from the show'? The last episodes of MSG are a whirlwind of excitement but you can see cracks in the paint here and there.
While there are improvements to most of the action scenes, we see the grunt suits of each faction putting up more of a fight, I still feel there are too many narrative compromises for the overall character journeys for pretty much all characters other than Char; he maintained nearly all his scenes and even got some extras from the show. I will say this is undoubtedly the best of the three compilations and can function as an actual movie, whereas the other two did not feel so. There are some absolutely gorgeous moments for sure, but most of these moments are also from the show only having what would appear to the casual viewer as minor touchups or music differences.
This being said, I cannot say anyone should skip the Series version, or even skip just the last 10 episodes or so in favor of this film, it is still well worth experiencing as a cherry on top of the OG MSG cake, but it's still missing many of the spices and flavours that made the original characters so endearing.
