Overdue #2: Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001)

Don’t you just hate redundancy? Those days of counting the seconds, minutes and hours until your next interview? Well, the crew of the spaceship Bebop feel your pain, a quartet of misfit bounty hunters looking for the next hit. They hit the jackpot after arriving on the human colony on Mars in the year 2071, when a mysterious explosion snaps the crew back into action. The bounty in question is on the head of the enigmatic bomber Vincent and his hacker sidekick and the reward just capped at 300 million Wulongs (the currency of the moment). More than enough to get Spike off the instant noodles.

It’s a shame then that the film itself couldn’t be as exciting as that paragraph, indeed the biggest flaw in the entire enterprise is twofold: The lack of urgency and the lack of consequence. Neither is improved by the lack of empathy between the crew themselves, as quirky as they may be none of them seem to care about each other, most of them even lament the fact that they don’t even notice when one of them has been kidnapped. One can guess that this was meant to be endearing or melancholic, but it backfires drastically in just how dramatically moribund it is. When they don’t care we don’t care, period. The mission feels arbitrary and it pretty much is, we never even get any sense of any competition from other bounty hunters (I mean, it’s only 300 million Wulongs after all, no biggie). The plot thickens as the crew’s investigation reveals a plot to release poison gas upon the Martian city, but there’s no real urgency or motive to stop Vincent besides the reward. These characters have no affection for the world (or universe even) that they inhabit.

Remarkably the tone of the film itself is particularly blasé in the face of potential bio-terrorism, murder and supposed inner-turmoil. We’re supposed to believe that our hero Spike Spiegel is a tormented soul hiding behind a veil of dashing bravado, but all we can think is how duplicitous this is. If we’re to believe that he has this depth then we need to see shades of it during his heroic moments, lurching from ‘I’m smug’ to ‘I’m sad’ doesn’t illustrate anything beyond haphazard writing. Even the dastardly plan of the antagonist Vincent is based on flimsy cod-philosophy, more insultingly however is the fact that the film thinks that his delusions are profound, so much so that a post-credits title card asks “Are you living in the real world?” Cos’ it’s philosophical, ya’see?
Vincent’s generic ‘Rasputin in a trench coat’ design doesn’t help either.

The look of the world is impressive but offers little that we haven’t seen done better (Akira, Rintaro’s Metropolis and Ghost in the Shell come to mind), certainly the animation is impressively fluid especially during an aerial dogfight near the film’s climax. The most impressive technical feat here however is Yôko Kanno’s fabulously catchy soundtrack, if the sign of a great song is one that is familiar but new then Kanno delivers in spades. From the opening “Ask DNA” to the showstopping “What Planet is This?” An electrifying and bombastic jazz brouhaha that brings out the wit and adventure that every scene of this movie promises but never delivers.

It should be noted that this is the opinion of someone who has never seen the series, and it may yet be brilliant and this film may be an example of a damp squib that carries the name of Cowboy Bebop. The film itself thankfully appears to be more of a spin-off than a continuation of a narrative from the series (as opposed to the ‘fan only’ offerings of Final Fantasy Advent Children’ or the arguably superior The End of Evangelion) but the problem is a fundamental lack of empathy, wit or urgency. Sure there is style, buckets of it, but an offshoot of a series should be more than just a disposable skirmish. Film as a medium demands more than that, in film, you bring out the heavy guns, rack up the tension, make the characters NEED each other (as opposed to bemoaning their social inability), grab the popcorn and turn off the lights. The rumoured live action adaptation couldn’t be more urgently required, there’s a lot of room for improvement.

 

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is currently available from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.