Thirteen Years after the original series, Badlands Rumble tries to recapture the brilliance of one of the top Five Anime title of all time, but can they in just Ninety minutes?
Story - 4/10
Just a heads up, there may be some spoilers here as you can't talk about the faults of the series without bringing up a few little surprises. You've been warned.
Vash is back to his old tricks again, trying to save the world while not hurting a fly, but this time he'll come face to face with the consequences of his actions. Twenty years after saving a notorious robber from being double crossed by his crew, Vash finds himself in a town controlled by those former thieves, and the man he saved, Gasback, is out for revenge (he sure took his time.) Word is out about Gasback's arrival, so the Bernardelli insurance agency sends its two best to insure the safety of the towns prized statue, which is insured at five billion double dollars, and of course those agents just happen to be Meryl and Milly. Also heeding the call of his arrival are the best bounty hunters around, all hoping to get paid to protect the city, and maybe just catch him for the extra loot.
Along with those bounty hunter is a beautiful girl that catches Vash's eye. Now for long stretch of the show Vash follows her like a puppy, he learns a bit of her cliche backstory and the writers use all this drivel to pad the movie with fluff.
In the end the story plays out like you pretty much expected from the minute you saw the female bounty hunter. All in all a drawn out episode.
And heck, all of this would be fine if there weren't gaping plot holes. So we know Wolfwood was found by Gasback in the desert, so he was there for Twenty years? Did he not die back when he collapsed in the church….and Vash, Milly and Meryl buried him? It's not like he was shot and wandered off never to be seen again, we know he was killed. Yet when he shows back up in town and three of our main characters go on like it was expected. Also how'd he get his gun back? Vash had taken it and used it in his battle against Knives. Oh yeah, about Knives, did that whole thing just resolve itself? Was he killed, did Vash tend to his wounds and turn him into a good man? Some answers to what went on in those twenty years would have been nice, at least ones that pertain directly to our story.
They also try to explain away a gripe I had with the original series, about how all lives are equal and no one should kill, despite how not killing one person may end up causing the deaths of hundreds of others. Amelia tries to push home that point, just as Wolfwood and Legato did before her, but instead they have to end the series talking about how if Gasback died, then Amelia would have never been born, once again trying to justify the deaths of thousands all because Vash’s refusal to kill Gasback resulted in one new life. That just so happened to be a pretty girl.
Animation - 5/10
From the start the film is packed with one of the biggest downfalls of anime, bad CGI animation. The original series was near perfect when it came to animation, why they had to fall victim to the times, when they were just so good, is beyond me. I guess the lure to make things easier had them go cheap over well made.
The rest of the animation was very well done, but I feel the look of the old Trigun series helped convey the idea of a barren planet. Everything was just a little too clean and polished, where no one looked as if they were in dire straits or struggling to get by. If it was a stand alone movie, with no series behind it, I could look past the choice, but it seems to go counter to the original.
Finally the character design. Our original four are the same as in the series, which besides Vash, can be seen as a little problem as they should have aged twenty years, if not more as we don't know the time that past between Vash and Knive's fight and the bank robbery. Here and there it seems as if the dimensions were a bit off, Vash and Wolfwood would look stretched at times, as if they cropped and then altered the shot to fit the screen. The two new characters, as well as a majority of the background characters, were lazily done. Gasback is a repurposing of Brilliant Dynamites Neon, Amelia is a character model we've seen a thousand times before, and a majority of the bounty hunters look like recolored members of the Gung-Ho Guns or Nebraska family.
Trigun was a great example of "Less is More" and for the film they forgot that.
Sound - 4/10
The great music from the series is gone, replaced by a couple imitation copies of songs we heard in the series. Even the opening and closing bits are pretty disappointing.
Worse than the imitation music are the imitation voice actors (FYI this is for the English version). They decided to get new VO artist for everyone but Vash, and their attempts at trying to get similar sounding people made it painful. If they just got new actors we could have just dealt with it, but instead everyone just sounds like they did their recordings and then added bad pitch effects to them. Even JYB, who is usually spot on, just couldn't hit that mark of perfection he had in the original series, but he was still top of the line.
Characters - 4/10
Since the big four characters are pretty much exact to the series, there's not much to talk about, heck they’re exact to the point they used Milly's broken gun strap gag yet again.
There was a little bit of a change in Vash, where as in the series he was seen as a goofy guy who awkwardly tried to use charm to gain the affection of women, here they made him into more of a creepy lech, where he was at times he was getting right up to the line of what is considered assault.
There are three major characters we can discuss, Gasback, Amelia and Caine, none of which have an ounce of originality.
As I said in the animation section, Gasback is basically Brilliant Dynamites Neon, same body style, similar clothing and same M.O. He's a big time bank robber who now wants to get revenge on those who've done him wrong.
Amelia is another cliche, a hurt girl who wants revenge on her father for leaving her, so she becomes a mighty warrior, or bounty hunter in our case. I couldn't count on fifty thousand hands how many times we've seen this character in movies, tv, books and comics.
Finally there's Caine, who is slightly different than what we've seen before, but not by much. A wimpy thief who turns on his boss and then becomes the boss. The only real bit of originality I mentioned was the metal he has grafted to his face due to the pounding Gasback gave him in the bank. Now he's a sleazy politician who only cares about himself and money, how original.
Overall - 4/10
Even knowing it would have never been as good as the series, I was very disappointed in the movie. It played out like a long episode, adding nothing to the backstory of any our beloved characters and just leaving 1,000 open ended questions. What could have been a great film, such as the Cowboy Beebop movie or oddly the K-On Movie, just seemed like a way to milk some cash out of loyal fans by hyping things up and then just delivering a weak effort and a cliche story.
Even worse than that is how the movie basically spits in the faces of fans, telling them all they knew was actually a lie, and all the emotions they felt were all for naught.
It hurts me to have to give the movie an average rating, since I loved the series, but it's just not close to being a 10/10 quality like the show was.
Positive Reasons for Score:
* It’s Trigun?
Negative Reasons for Score:
* Unoriginal story in almost all possible ways.
* Leaves many plot holes and contradicts the original series.
* Pretty pointless when it comes to the greater Trigun world.
Ways to make the show better:
* Don’t make it.
* Either Look back into Vash’s past, make a spin off with the Gung-Ho Guns or go into Wolfwood’s past.
* If you go forward follow Trigun Maximum or show how Vash tried to save Knives.
* Don’t disrespect the viewer with the changes to the story we’ve already known for years.
Screenshots
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