Despite knowing better, I watched all ten episodes of Netflix's live action "Cowboy Bebop" series. It's not very good, and I knew from the outset that it wasn't going to be very good. However, the original anime is one of the foundation pieces of media that helped to define my path as a young animation nerd, so I felt obligated to take a look at this thing and see exactly how bad the damage was.
From the first episode, the biggest issue is clear. The creators of the live-action "Bebop" are way too enamored with the anime. They spend considerable effort recreating whole scenes from the original show in live action, the way the recent "Ghost in the Shell" feature did, even reusing not-great dialogue and a ton of the old music. The opening sequence and title screens are reproduced with remarkable faithfulness. Key members of the original "Bebop" creative team like director Shinichiro Watanabe and musician Yoko Kanno are prominently credited. However, we can place most of the blame on the 2021 series creators, Andre Nemec and Christopher Yost, who decided to make the show look and feel like the anime in every way that they could, from the production design to the cinematography to the actors that were cast. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it really doesn't, especially when the copying is so direct that it feels like something akin to slipping into a reverse uncanny valley.
The main cast is the best thing that "Bebop" has going for it. Space cowboy and bounty hunter Spike Spiegel (John Cho) and his partner Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) chase bounties all over the solar system in the beat-up starship Bebop. Sometimes they team up with wild card Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) for various jobs. The three of them have great rapport, and it's fun to watch them banter and compete, and eventually form a rough found family together. The changes to their characters, like Jet having a young daughter, Kimmie (Molly Moriarty), and Faye's mother figure Whitney (Christine Dunford) are good ones, who help them come off as more well rounded. When the show is about the Bebop gang having their day-to-day adventures, and tackling the new problem of the day, the show is watchable. The bounties are a greatest-hits collection of the most memorable characters from the anime, and include some memorable weirdos.
Unfortunately, the show also devotes considerable amounts of time to the story of two people from Spike's past as an assassin for the mob - his old partner and nemesis Vicious (Alex Hassell) and his old lover Julia (Elena Satine). Vicious and Julia were minor characters from the anime, their relationships with Spike never really developed much. The new show makes them main characters, a loveless husband and wife, who are trying to move up in the Mars-based Red Dragon Crime Syndicate, and destined to intersect with Spike again someday. And they're absolutely terrible and boring whenever they're onscreen. In trying to flesh out Vicious and Julia, the show's limitations really show. No matter how much backstory they get, they're never more than bad copies of bad cliches.
Despite "Bebop" being billed as an action series, the fight and chase sequences are fairly mediocre television quality. They're very style over substance, and all the major set pieces constantly feel like they're stretching the budget to its limits. Overall, the show's quality is wildly uneven, with some episodes looking very polished and expensive, while others are scraping the bottom of the barrel. There'll be a great-looking effects shot followed by an especially garish use of greenscreen moments later. Compared to other science-fiction shows, "Cowboy Bebop" too often underwhelms. Many similar space cowboy concepts were executed a lot better twenty years ago with Joss Whedon's "Firefly."
I don't think that a live-action "Cowboy Bebop" is a bad idea, inherently. One of the impulses behind the original series was mashing up different genres, different musical styles, and different influences to create something new. Remixing the show's elements again in a live action format yielded some good things - Cho, Shakir, and Pineda's performances as our heroes are fun and engaging. I don't mind that minor characters like bar owner Ana (Tamara Tunie) were transmogrified into totally different new versions. However, too much of the show is not remixing or reinventing, but straight up regurgitation, with very disappointing results.
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