TV Review: Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop Is The Western Fantasy I Craved
Out November 19, on Netflix, Cowboy Bebop is an absolute masterpiece. Yup! I said it. I LOVED IT! In the words of Tik Tok, it understood the assignment because, frankly, it ain’t easy. When you take a beloved anime like, Cowboy Bebop, and turn it into live-action, you are bound to piss people off. For many, anime is like cartooned philosophy; it is more than just colorful lines moving around like human beings would. There are deep existential confrontations, and, in that, Netflix and creator Christopher L. Yost transfer this anime into live-action.
John Cho is SEXY as Spike Spiegel: a good guy that has done some horrible things like, kill people for an intergalactic crime ring called The Syndicate. Cho brings out the dichotomy of Spike feeling like a warm, generous, thoughtful being whose horrendous, selfish acts of cruelty make you ponder his redemption. Frankly, he wonders to if he can amend for his past, as well, because he is still so bound to it by the one person he loved: Elena Satine as a shady, yet heartbreaking Julia. Like Spike, both are stuck in a loop that circles around the times they were traumatized versus the times they were traumatizing. Hence, Mustafa Shakir’s absolutely lovely Jet becomes a beacon of light for this show and Spike, while Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) becomes the comedic relied that will both annoy and entertain you; becoming the literal equivalent of your friend that both enlivens a room but cannot read it.
Cowboy Bebop’s ability to question ideas/ ideals that, as a society, we have not even begun to scrape is what makes it so attractive but also a tricky thing to transform and helm with actual humans. Yet, Cho carries such charm and vulnerability, you cannot help but feel a truth many have claimed but still debated: one life can become many persons. I’m not the same person I was as a kid, teen, and now a young adult. Quite frankly, I don’t even think I am the same as last week. Yet, if one thing can be our constant it is love: for better or worse. Hence, Shakir’s Jet is perfect as the contrast of Spike by being a man who has always held a code of trying to do better by others and himself: fiercely loyal, kind, and compassionate. Yet, where does empathy end when dealing with someone that has ended people? Still, when you see Alex Hassell as Vicious, you will understand the difference between him and Spike: one still has a heart while the other enjoys ripping yours out.
Visually, Cowboy Bebop is exceptional, experimental, and exciting. Meanwhile, virtuously, it uses its visionary aspects to help its audience skate through its bigger concepts that, literally, echo the original in storyline and moral delivery. Overall, the show does brilliantly, even in aesthetics, to contrast Spike’s new life with his old persona, Fearless. In truth, Fearless was filled with “fear;” working towards goals that left him unfulfilled and eventually for dead. Yet, Spike’s purpose is to be good, and that makes this show appear like a futurstic western; where our “Cowboy Bebop” scours through planetary Wild Wests to figure out whether a man can ever make peace with himself when, for a long time, he was the one sparking wars.
