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List Price: $35.95 | | Label: Sony Pictures
Salesrank: 87181
Released: June 24, 2003 |
| Our Price: $26.28 |
| Used Price: $27.01 |
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Movie DVD
Description of Cowboy Bebop The Movie / Metropolis:
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie
As the eagerly awaited Cowboy Bebop feature film reunites the original director, screenwriter, composer, and vocal cast, it's not surprising that the film plays like an expanded TV episode. What should be the routine capture of a two-bit hacker by Faye escalates into a deadly game of cat and mouse, as Spike and the gang struggle to prevent the evil Vincent Volaju from murdering every human on Mars. Director Shinichiro Watanabe handles the action sequences with his usual panache. Inside the sinister Cherious Medical research facility, Spike fights a beautiful agent, using a push broom in a series of maneuvers Jackie Chan might envy. The climactic duel between Spike and Vincent plays against innocent yet eerie images of a Halloween carnival, recalling the amusement park setting of episode 20, "Pierrot Le Fou." Knockin' on Heaven's Door will delight fans of the series and provide an excellent introduction for the uninitiated who want to know why Cowboy Bebop is so popular on both sides of the Pacific. (Rated R: violence, brief nudity, minor profanity, tobacco use) --Charles Solomon
Metropolis
Adapted from Osamu Tezuka's 1949 manga, Metropolis (in Japanese with English subtitles) is an opulently beautiful film that fails to present a coherent story worthy of its extraordinary visuals. Evil Duke Red (voice by Taro Ishida) plans to rule the world from Ziggurat, his newly completed art deco tower. A new robot is being developed by his henchman Dr. Laughton (Junpei Takeguchi) to control all the machines in the world from Ziggurat. Japanese detective Shunsaku Ban (Kousei Tomita) and his nephew Kenichi (Kei Kobayashi) arrive in Metropolis in pursuit of Laughton and are plunged into Red's plot. When the duke's maniacal adopted son Rock (Kohki Okada) attacks Laughton's hidden lab, Kenichi and the waiflike android Tima (Yuka Imoto) flee into the city's subterranean slums and fall in love. Despite a protracted series of chases and violent shootouts, there's little excitement and less character development. Director Rintaro (Hayashi Shigeyuki) borrows heavily from Fritz Lang's 1926 Metropolis, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, but his staging makes much of the action hard to follow. The film takes an unintentionally hilarious turn when Ziggurat crumbles to Ray Charles's "I Can't Stop Loving You." The computer-generated skyscrapers, machines, and airships offer dazzling vistas of an overscaled and sinister deco-dystopia. But Tezuka's flat little characters, with their big eyes, round noses, and bubble-shaped feet, don't fit into that realistic three-dimensional environment. (Rated PG: contains considerable violence and grotesque imagery) --Charles Solomon
Cowboy Bebop The Movie / Metropolis Reviews:
why buy them together? 
2005-08-15 - These are both quality flicks. You can probably find them for cheaper individually.
"Metropolis" is visually stunning. Though the plot can most flatteringly be described as abstract and the actual characters that inhabit this gorgeous CG landscape are unfortunately drawn like they belong in the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," it's still worth seeing.
"Cowboy Bebop: the Movie" is built on a plot that was supposed to be an episode, but it does two essential things to escape this irrelevancy.
1. It stands on its own as an introduction to the series (even as it adds character and story depth to the series for those who have seen it and know it well.)
2. It changes the pacing from a conventional episode. The first half is, for the most part, a rather light-hearted caper chasing a terrorist of unknown motives and confronting the sketchy intentions of a private military medical lab. Midway through, as the character stories are fleshed out, it becomes a haunting and disturbing psychological piece revolving around one of director Shinichiro Watanabe's favorite themes: characters obsessed with their past.
Through it all, the story is contant (punctuated but not distracted by a large number of nods to defining moments in the show). The film is beautiful animated and the soundtrack just might be one of the greatest in movie history.
But I still don't quite see why these two are being sold in a pack.
Great Movie 
2003-08-07 - Cowboy Bebop: The Movie
The series was good, the movie was better. This movie is enjoyed slightly more if you've already watched the series, but is still fantastic without any previous knowledge of Cowboy Bebop. The best R-rated cartoon I have ever seen.
