Cowboy Bebop: The Ballad of Fallen Angels

Really? That's what I waited for?

I am now convinced that Cowboy Bebop, praised as nothing less than the anime second coming, is one of the most overrated TV shows of all time. Throughout these five episodes, I don't feel like I've gotten to know these characters at all and now I've come to the episode that the fans call a transcendent experience.

This episode finds Spike confronted with a previously unknown, but hinted at, tragic past. Nothing really happens until the end of the episode except Spike getting ready for the climax and poorly trying to make us care about something that wasn't even built up in previous episodes. What happens in the climax is next to nothing interesting; a lot of over the top gun fighting with no further explanation as to what exactly Spike is fighting for so there's no emotional weight to any of the violence. The bad guy is unbelievably boring, so there's not even that to enjoy.

I don't understand how people can find an obviously emotionally shallow show engaging. To show why this show doesn't work I'm going to compare it to a similar space Western: Firefly. In Firefly, none of the characters were given proper backstories except Mal, but we still understood where each of them fit in on the crew. We got a sense of their strong personalities and camaraderie for one another, even if they did anger each other at times. We got the feeling that these people had history together, like they'd been to hell and back as one. I felt nothing like that on Cowboy Bebop. The characters are shallow, they have no strong personalities and the dialogue is poorly written/translated.

I think between this, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, Naruto and Deathnote I am done trying to get into anime. Sorry anime-niacs. It's just not for me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bumblebee Review

Among seasoned cinefiles, the Transformers  movies have become punchlines in their own right. While they're not exactly incompetently made, they're generally unpleasant to watch and lack any respect for its source material to the point where it just ceases to be a Transformers  movie. However, even though everybody seems to generally agree how horrible they are on an entertainment or even moral level, the movies have continued to make money hand over fist regardless. Nobody seemed to be figuring out that the movies were awful. That is, until the last one, which at that point was the lowest grossing film in the Transformers franchise. This sudden realization is the reason I think nobody is going to see Bumblebee ; the film hasn't even made its modest $100 million budget back. Was it deserving? Set in the 1980s, an Autobot scout is sent to Earth to defend the planet and prepare a new base for his fellow Autobots. However, his memory is damaged and he is forced to take the
Read more

What Movies Are We Gonna Make?

(Note: Please keep in mind that this involves a lot of pure speculation with not a lot of hard numbers to back it up. This is purely for fun.) A long time ago George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese were all sitting in their living rooms watching TV. Although this doesn't sound all that interesting, for these young kids it was an experience. Mob movies, sci-fi serials, monster & samurai movies were all seared into the minds of this young generation of film lovers. These "Movie Brats", as they were called later in life, went on to make some of the greatest movies of all time, drawing inspiration from their childhood movies. A couple of decades later Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez started making movies based off the exploitation grind house movies they loved as kids. This all got me thinking: what kind of movies are this age of film nuts going to make? What wild inspiration will find its way into our screenplays, cinematography and color cod
Read more

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Review

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  is a 1966 Spaghetti Western directed/written by Sergio Leone and cowritten by Luciano Vincenzoni, Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli and Mickey Knox. The film has garnered a reputation as being one of the best, if not the best, film in the Western genre since its release. Story A cowboy (Clint Eastwood), a bounty hunter (Lee Van Cleef) and a drunk (Eli Wallach) all hear about a $200,000 treasure hidden in a graveyard and the entire film is a race to see who will reach the money first. You'd think a premise like that would lead to a short movie, but the writers got everything they could out of it. Instead of going right into the plot, we have an entire act dedicated to setting up the characters, their personalities, their motivations and their world. This makes it so that we can focus on the adventure through the second and third acts without too much character exposition. The character who's developed the most is Wallach as Tuco, a treacher
Read more