Shinichiro Watanabe's "Cowboy Bebop: The Movie" doesn't give us anything new. We don't learn anything more about the four characters and dog that are the crew of Bebop (well, we do learn that Ein can play chess), or have anything really earth-shaking happen to them, like, say, actually winning the bounty (a hefty 300 million "woolongs"--which, if someone who wrote about this is right, should be equal to the Japanese yen, or roughly two million dollars).
Nope, nothing really new, and I don't think that's what the filmmakers were after, either. They merely thought, in the same wayward spirit of the Bebop crew, that fans would like to spend another hundred and fourteen minutes in the ever digressive, never straightforward world of Bebop. And they would be right, too.
So we get various scenes of Faye, Spike, Jet, and Edward (with Ein in tow) working their various beats, trying to trace this clue or that to their quarry. It doesn't occur to them to team up and work together, which would be the most sensible way--it's the way they actually do things in the end, but they never make a big deal out of it, never have a "yay, team!" moment--Faye grouches as usual and Jet complains about playing hen mother to everyone and Spike just jumps ahead of the rest. The movie isn't at all about being efficient or effective or even about teamwork. It's about dealing with your personal demons, either in the past or in your head, rubbing your more abrasive character traits against the sandpaper of this particularly gritty future, and hoping the result would be more presentable, if not socially acceptable. As for us, the audience, we're here to enjoy the screech, the sparks, the friction that results.
(cont'd)
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