Neither Cowboy Bebop nor this movie need any introduction, you know what this series is and how much it's praised by a lot of people; I am part of that crowd who absolutely adores it, so there's a spoiler for how this review is gonna go. Many anime movies tend to be just extended episodes, usually a similar formula to one off episodes and extending it to fill a movie runtime, rarely adding too much into the mix. Knockin' On Heaven's Door is one of these type of movies, but I believe there's more going on here than it simply being "more Cowboy Bebop".
To begin with, the animation is absolutely stellar, every scene is incredibly well made and every movement feels natural. This bleeds into one of the best parts about Cowboy Bebop, and that's the setting; the few montages we have of the gang investigating this bounty showcase the world of Cowboy Bebop perfectly. It's a drab and gritty world, where people are all just trying to get by, people's stories are all being told as we're watching and they're not going to wait for our main cast to catch up. This level of quality is maintained all the way up to the final fight scene which is arguably one of, if not the best hand-to-hand fight scene in anime history.
Another high point of praise (of many) I have is that pacing of this movie is close to being absolutely perfect; it's brisk but it isn't too fast to the point where it feels like it's skipping over details, everything is laid out but nothing outstays its welcome. Well, that's aside from the climax going on for a little too long, particularly the battle with the aircraft, but that's really the only complaint I have with this movie. Quite literally every other scene besides is perfectly paced from start to finish. This, combined with the beautiful animation, gives this movie and incredible sense of "flow". You really have to just watch it for yourself in order to understand what I mean.
Now let's get into the main meat of this movie: the story, and it's damn good. We begin when the status quo is still being maintained, Faye and Ed are in the Bebop and the gang are still struggling to afford food, when on one day, a man named Vincent blows up a tanker on a highway, with his accomplice, Lee, which leads the gang to discover he has a massive bounty on his head. The rest of the movie follows the Bebop crew investigating Vincent and trying to stop his master plan.
We have 2 new big players to talk about with this movie, the first being the aforementioned Vincent. He was once a soldier in an unnamed war on Titan, who was experimented on with a nanomachine virus that infects the blood of people and kills them by destroying their brains, Vincent was the only one with the vaccine. Abandoned by his government, he returns to the world wishing to release the virus unto it because of the vaccine turning him insane. He's a very mysterious and melancholic man, stripped of all his memories, his motivations for doing what he does are unclear, perhaps out of some twisted sense of duty, but in his mystique, he can be seen as a mirror to Spike, with how he uses guns and martial arts, alongside the similar hair, the connection to a woman in their past and similar clothing to that of Spike's when he worked for the Syndicate. Similarly to the other "cowboys" present in the series, Vincent also reflects a part of Spike's character; whereas Vicious was the embodiment of his dark past and Andy a parody of his cowboy persona, Vincent shares his apathy. Both men can be neglectful at times, but both also cared deeply about the woman they loved.
Electra is that woman to Vincent, she was a soldier whom he gave the nanomachine vaccine to and fell in love with, but stopped their relationship because of Vincent's lost memory. Her personality isn't very deep and she mostly serves as a plot device but her relationship to Vincent and the whole story cannot be overlooked. Understandably, like how Vincent is a reflection of a facet of Spike's character, Electra has many similarities to Julia, with how she was forced away from her partner and were both motivated to kill that person by an outside source. I mention all of this because it leads to probably my favourite scene in the movie, where Spike and Electra are held up in cells and have nothing to do but talk to each other, and Spike opens up to her. It's never entirely explained why he does this, but I chalk it up to her few similarities to Julia.
Nevertheless, this is one of the few times in the whole series where we get an insight into Spike's character, where he explains that he had never really feared anything before he met Julia, and when he was in her company, he felt afraid to die. This does so much for Spike's character because it says so much about his actions throughout the main series, he realises that his time with Julia is what truly mattered in the world, but he couldn't put the past behind him and this, similarly, is what Vincent goes through in his final moments, when he remembers Electra and his love for her, and they both die, trying to get over their past (or lack thereof).
An interesting angle to view this movie in is that this could be a long dream that Spike has as he's dying in the main series, I don't think it's entirely likely that's exactly what's happening, but throughout this whole movie there's a strange "dream-like" vibe to it, with a lot more imagery of spiritual/fantastical elements, such as zombies and vampires, as well as a native-American shaman being featured at one point when Spike had seemingly died. It makes sense considering the context this movie was released in, as this was released years after Cowboy Bebop had ended. This is the "encore", all the main characters are still here and they haven't completely met their depressing ends yet.
While that interpretation is debatable, this movie does still reflect the series' most prominent themes, being "death" and "vulnerability". Vincent, similarly to many of the other one-off characters in the series, has a vulnerability to him, being his relationship to Electra and as the main series showed frequently, having that vulnerability is not a good thing, it will get you hurt and it ends up getting Vincent killed, we can see this in a lot of side characters in the series, such as Katerina from the first episode and her longing for a better life on Mars or Grencia from the Jupiter Blues arc and how he was used as a test subject. Death is obviously present here, with a few characters dying, Vincent's apocalyptic plan, I mean, it takes place on Halloween for crying out loud.
This movie is a microcosm for the entire series, which is why I consider it to be the perfect companion piece, as it has all of the characters, themes and ideas of the main show, wrapped into one fun, nearly 2 hour long romp; and that's one of the best parts of this movie, it's just an incredibly fun watch. With the mysteries being unraveled throughout the story at an incredible pace and culminating in a climactic and melancholic finale. This movie cements Cowboy Bebop as one of my all time favourite series in anime, and I hope you found similar enjoyment in it too.
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