The problem with Cowboy Bebop The Series and why a good series feels bad:
The original Cowboy Bebop anime is a masterpiece, one of the best pieces of animation ever made, with its unique style, great animation, memorable characters and great writing, it won its place on the list of the best entertainment to ever exist, the problem with the new netflix series is that it is... Good, just good... when you make something based on a masterpiece and that something turns out to be only good... You failed.
The minimum fans were expecting and the minimum they would accept is something either exceptional or unique, being good is just not enough.
I would say that because it is a live action series and not an animation, it is impossible to make it truly unique and to stylize it, but Blade Runner 2049, Mad Max Fury Road, Altered Carbon and many others would prove me wrong on that statement, so its just a matter of what does this series lacks, and i think i narrowed it down to a couple factors:
1 - The characters: One of if not the most important thing about the original Cowboy Bebop is its characters, and while the characters in the netflix series are not bad, they are not as good.
Spike feels like he is just an asshole with good intentions, he doesn't feel like the laid back guy with a broken heart who hides away his pain with witty remarks and justified violence.
Jet feels too stiff with his movements and line delivery, he feels like the actor is trying his best to look tough and invulnerable, even when he talks about his daughter he feels more like he is angry about it instead of desperate to make her happy, the original Jet is a really tough and imponent figure, yes, but he also has a heart made of butter and is always caring and kind, even when he jokingly insults someone it is always followed by his trademarked laugh.
and finally Faye, she feels so distant from her original character... The Faye we get here seems really lost and desperate, seems like she is making joke after joke trying to look cool and not trying to hide her feelings and worries like the one from the original anime, Faye in the original sounded much smarter and more grounded, while still emotional and witty, this one feels more like the secondary character that is there to make the others look cooler.
2 - The styling: The sceneries in the series are really good, and the clothing, weapons and everything else also look ok, the problem is... Nothing feels unique, the camera angles look boring and used a million times before in any other series, the color grading is very normal and bland... nothing really tried to be unique, they only tried to reproduce the places and clothes from the original on the real world, but they completely forgot the styling that makes it unique.
The series would be vastly improved with more bold color grading and more creative camera angles and photography direction, maybe even some creative uses of vignettes, ANYTHING that would make it feel more unique and memorable.
So, after all that what is my verdict? How i feel about the series? Its a good series, i had a lot of fun watching it, but i cant help feeling like i just want to go back and watch the original for the 100th time after finishing this... And deep down i know that in some years, maybe even some months, my only memory from this series is that it exists, and not anything more than that, in the end, its not unique enough to be great or memorable, is just a good show based on an absolute masterpiece, a new forgettable version of a series that most of us will remember and love for the rest of our lives.
Belle... A collection of music videos glued together by a really badly written narrative.
Belle is one of the weakest animated movies i have seen in the past few years, and that makes me really sad, as a fan of the director i went into this expecting an 8 or an 9, but what i got is a 5 at best.
Belle has a interesting idea, with its reworking of the "beauty and the beast" and its child abuse themes... But it fails to build on its characters and to explain basic premises of its own world, making it for a very boring and bland experience.
Most of the things we thought would be relevant were completely ignored and absolutely useless, we asked ourselves watching "did she get some disease and now is unable to sing in the real world and that is why the U is an escape?" No, they never address this, she just fails to sing and vomits once because the movie wanted to i guess? They keep all her "friends" completely irrelevant and underdeveloped until the last quarter of the movie, so i basically don't care about any of them in the end, they never explain the socio economical structure of the U world... How does this work? They say the avatar is made automatically based on people physiognomy, but the avatars are crazy different in form and species, how can that be made from ones physiognomy? How is the invitation system decided? Who is invited and why? Why even have an invitation system instead of selling the app or freely distributing it if that ends up irrelevant to the story? Why show us a very interesting singer character on the start that rivalizes our belle if you are just going to forget her for the whole movie? How to know which avatars are AI controlled and which are actually people? Is it possible do die in U? If not, what is the relevance of all the conflict we see?
Belle raises too many questions and answer very little, it presents us with an beautiful and interesting virtual world but tells us NOTHING about it and how it all works, it presents us with futuristic technology in a world that seems stuck in the 2000s, it gives us many bland and uninteresting characters with only one personality trait each and develops none of them... There are so many problems, so many drawn out scenes... That it all gets boring and tiresome...
And.... That makes me really sad, the music is GREAT, the visuals are BEAUTIFUL, the music scenes are AMAZING... But they are few and far in between and the rest of the movie... Is not interesting, they present us a nice duality of belle and the beast, but their interest in one another is so out of nowhere and forced that it doesnt feel even a little bit real or natural... There is a great scene that develops the characters and emotional connects, but it is only in the last quarter of the movie... When it has already lost all my interest and attention... and the plot of child abuse is ok and very important... But it feels shoved in... The main plot... Feels shoved in... Oh, and how they find the boy... Well, that was just the worst "investigation" bit i have ever seen...
I really wanted to like this movie, but there are just too many unanswered questions, just too little character development, and a plot that is just generic and bland enough to lose my attention... The visuals and music alone are not enough...
At the end, i feel like they made some really great music videos and didnt want to release it as just animated music videos, so they wrote a really bland movie around it and shoved a controversial and important theme(child abuse) to appeal to peoples hearts in an effective but kinda cheap way.
No Spoilers at all.
So, i just finished first season of the series, and having watched this far, i dont really know how this series got an 8 here... its a "kinda good" series, it makes use of a lot of good characters from british literature and has a good cast of actors, really good actually, and they kinda put together a good "ambience" for these characters on a good plot, the problem here is, the plot moves too slow, so slow you actually lose interest in the middle of the episode, i start watching it, and around 20-30 minutes i am already picking my phone and doing something else and not even paying atention, which is a shame, cause the series has everything to be good, another problem i find with it is the way the characters are "connected" everything sees so random that it doesnt seem random at all, its like, every character find each other from time to time with no reason whatsoever besides advancing the plot, its too much of a coincidence.
Its not a bad series by any means, but if you are like me, and like a little bit more action packed and not so "wait for the plot to happen" series, this is not for you, my personal score for this would be 6, cause of this point in question, but since this is a review for other people and not myself, i am confortable with giving it a 7, but i dont find it deserving any more than a 7.
a lot worse than army of thieves, i saw army of thieves first since it was the prequel, and i gotta be honest, army of thieves could have been better if it didnt have the bullshit needed to tie it in with this mess of a movie.
my main problem with this movie is: no character is actually important and likeable, even matthias character that was the best part of army of thieves is just not that great here, he still has the same "personality", but without any of the development, no one has any development here.
also, the plot is so full of holes that it actually hurts, here are some of my problems with it(spoilers)
if coyote has to sacrifice someone everytime she enters, how didnt anybody notice the guards missing? or does she use the people that want in and just select one of them to die as an offering?
the guy that was sent by tanaka makes less sense every second he is alive, any band of criminals would have killed him the minute they were out of tanakas reach, its one of the weakest "plans" i have ever seen from a "villain"
still on the topic of tanaka's guy, when the girl that he locks get out and is dying, instead of telling them that the dude sabotaged and killed her, she just says "run", and of course, no one runs, there is no real reason to run, the zombies are occupied eating her for a while, she could have solved the whole problem introduced by tanaka by just telling them he is a traitor.
the dad and daughter drama is kinda... forced, it looks like they felt the movie didnt have "feels" enough and just shoehorned it in the laziest way possible
the part about how they are in a "loop" is actually pretty cool and i love matthias reaction, but... why were there skeletons with clothes that exactly match up to the clothes of the crew? a bit too much of a coincidence...
i actually quite like the idea of a zombie society with ranks and all, but i really need and explanation and a reasoning why the zombies keep people as kinda of hostages to turn them later, it makes no sense, just turn them at the moment you get them and be done with it, it only happens so the mother can be alive for the daughter of the strong guy to find her, is literally a nonsensical behavior that only exists to facilitate a plot point.
the "the united states want to get a specimen to develop them as weapons and doesn't care about the main mission or the crew" plot was stolen straight from alien, and done so much worse and with absolutely no emotional impact for the audience, its again, just another useless plot point to make the movie feel like something is happening when nothing is.
the traps in the safe are very comical in nature and kinda dont fit the mood of the movie, but i am willing to let it pass cause i actually laughed, and again, matthias reaction saves it
while writing i noticed that most of what i like about this movie is related to matthias, and that is only true cause i watched army of thieves before this and i already know a developed matthias with his motivations and quirks... if i watched the movies the order they came out, i would enjoy these little moments a LOT less
the "our deadline got closer" plotline is so overused in the media already and feels so forced that it clearly was done to give us a sense of urgency in a desperate try to make the movie seem more active and the actions of the crew more meaningful... it seems like it was done because the movie lacked plot to fill the time.
i fucking love matthias, he is the only reason these movies dont have a worse score from me
the zombie sad for the other zombie dying actually made me feel like the zombies are more human and have more feelings than the crew, i sympathize with the zombies far more, this is not me saying the zombies had too much feelings, its me saying the crew had too little.
why the fuck the daughter of the strong guy is approving of him after they get the money? he was still a shit father and he still didnt help her look for her friend, that smile and approval is absolutely undeserved and out of place
the feelings the strong girl has for the strong guy at the end were so not developed on the rest of the movie that it completely missed me, i felt nothing for her (very small) confession
the daughter running away to look for her friend is just dumb as all fuck and not a course of action a normal human would take, its again just to make another plot point.
"i am not letting you go out there alone" and instantly dies, wow... i really didnt expect that when she said it(sarcasm) also, again, the character development is so bad that i dont feel anything from her, her death is almost comical in nature with the way and context that she died
now a whole treason from the tanaka dude fucking over our crew... a whole treason that could have been avoided if the first girl had said something useful before dying... everything just feels so fabricated and unnatural...
frag grenades dont explode in a big ball of infinite flames a la michael bay, they are what the name says, frag grenades, a relatively small explosion that throws fragments everywhere at really high velocities, if they wanted the big mofo fireball that fries every zombie they should have gone for incendiary grenades, not the frags just for the looks
coyote kinda died for nothing since she died because she kept looking away from her opponent for no reason, also, why kill the queen and just make the zombies angrier? why not return her head as a show of good will?
why did the helicopter girl actually agree to risk her life with no money on the line just so our strong guy could rescue some girls? she was in just for the 2 million as we saw in the start, with no money, why would she care? also, 9 minutes are infinite, holy fuck
the fuck are bullets made of in this movie? shooting the zombie king head with a pistol literally split it in half, a 50bmg wouldn't do that, wtf
in the end, it is a snyder movie written by snyder... so i dont know what i expected, every snyder movie is an gratuitous action fest with the shittiest excuse for a plot possible, he did one good movie in his life and then... well, the rest of his career happened and the most i can expect from him is "mediocre" or "ok", but most of his works are just... bad
matthias is the only good thing about the movie tbh, his accting is great, the movie has some good and impressive cgi for the locks, but the plot is bland, the characters mostly uninteresting and there is almost zero focus or mention about "how" he is actually openning the locks, he just magically is.
now, for things that annoyed me a lot:(spoilers)
- They show the previous champion of the safe cracking bullshit being angry with matthias and wanting to kill him... and then they instantly forget the guy and that was completely useless and with no consequence
the brazilian hacker(nice touch having someone speak portuguese btw) just wants to fuck matthias because yes, but he is in love with the thief girl also because yes... there is no development on both
why the fuck is there a zombie bullshit happening that is never actually shown or relevant? it makes the movie look so silly and infantile...
why is that cop so mad if he didnt even actually get shot since his cannister stopped the bullet?
why did the cop let matthias go? there was absolutely no reason for him to do this
the safes were made to seem mythical and almost untangible, like if no one ever knew where they were or how to open them... but they are all in the custody of the exact same man and he has put money inside all of them, so he knows the combination, thus making the story a bit exagerated and silly
not a bad movie, the tech seems believable and well thought but i guess that is a merit from the original comics and not the movie, vin diesel is good on his role of... being himself, cause that is who this character is, he is just vin diesel, wiggins absolutely stoles the show and i want so much more of him, he is AMAZING, best secondary hacker character in any movie to date, and the action scenes and CGI are quite good...
BUT, the movie falls flat near the end, the last 10 minutes are kinda generic "we need to end this action flick" bullshit, and that is because the actual plot through the movie is really thin, with almost no character development, its never shown that KT "had enough", we just get told that she had enough and then she starts rebelling, its never shown why the dr octopus dude hates vin diesel so much, he just does and that is it, the blind guy doesnt even have a character or personality, he only exists until he doesnt anymore, we never were made to care about the targets being innocent, they seem like assholes anyway so i didnt feel anything for them and the fact that vin diesel killed them is never addressed with no consequences at all... the only well done character is wiggins, his personality is top notch and he is both funny and awesome, almost in a spider-man way, really liked him and he had a nice twist in his first appearance, but that is it, besides that... the movie has no development, just kill kill kill, but with it clearly being a superhero action flick, i dont really mind that much, i had fun, i liked the tech, i liked wiggins, i am happy.
this is no masterpiece, but it is a good action flick with some good action, cgi and a great character(wiggins), well deserving of a 6-7 rating and quite enjoyable, can recommend to watch when you just dont want to think too much .
