Earlier today I watched Cowboy Bebop episode 22, it was pretty fun, that’s not really what we’re hear for. Because just now, I watched the movie, and it was pretty great!
Basically just felt like a really long Bebop episode, it’s got all the setup, characters doing their own thing relating to the plot at hand, big payoff at the end, scary fights, interesting messages - just stretched out to 2 hours. I do kind of want to emphasise that “stretched” tbh, first hour felt really long, and for how long it took I was actually still kind of confused about certain character relations and plot stuff. Certainly would’ve appreciated if they’d trimmed the fat a bit more. Second hour totally blew by though and was a really fun ride - the entire product being helped by the expectantly fantastic soundtrack as well as some god tier visuals and a nice widescreen update. Will say that I wasn’t really endeared to Vincent as an antagonist but, oh well.
Probably the main strength in this movie for me is how well it works as a Cowboy Bebop movie specifically. Like, we’ve got a much longer runtime than most stuff in Bebop, and you kind of want to have a large scale thing happen in a movie to feel like it justifies that. And this certainly did that, but I think it did a great job at not feeling like, I guess doomwank is the term I’m gonna make up for this? By which I mean, lots of anime movies - particularly in the shounen genre - really go big as fuck with their scale, but they do it to such an extreme degree and the characters rise to the occasion so easily that it ironically loses any tangible sense of scale. What happens in this movie A) isn’t even that extreme by Bebop standards, B) fits Bebop anyway since the series plays around with all sorts of structures, and C) lots of it kind of humbles the characters anyway - particularly Spike’s actual fear of death and Jet’s contemplating the nature of the Bebop crew’s relationships. Yeah we went big, but we did in a way that really works for the characters and this setting.
TL;DR pretty great time, nice 8/10.
