I finished Netflix Cowboy Bebop last night.
Honestly, I enjoyed it overall, but it was a 7/10.
Cast and Cast Dynamic = great. Faye is not anime-Faye, but she's fine in this version of the story. Vicious was unfortunately miscast, he's just too much of an obnoxious punchable face even when he has normal hair.
Story structure = good. I actually think, the way the season is plotted and the eps play out, even all the extra Vicious stuff, is pretty well done. The vicious stuff makes sense in the end since they're going for two separate character arcs (Spike & Vicious) that come together for the finale.
Directing = ok. I was going to say "good" until I got to the flashback ep. This director cannot do any of the Noir stuff. The flashback ep was very poorly directed. Same with Jett's flashback ep. A better director would've had slow-mo, smoke and maybe gone B&W. Directing is decent, but very CW.
Writing = bad. The story beats are fine, but the dialogue is pretty bad. A lot of the cast issues & memes are just a good cast working with bad dialogue. A lot of the dialogue is stupid juvenile like a 15 year old kid wrote it.
In the end I'd say that on its own it's a 7/10, but in the rankings of anime & videogame adaptations to live-action, including all the Japanese live-action films adapting manga/anime, that it's pretty good and probably in the upper 30% of adaptations quality-wise. I was satisfied as a fan of the anime.
I'm not going to say that this was the best anyone could expect from a live-action version of Cowboy Bebop, because I think with a different writer and a more stylish director it could have been better, but I will say it was better than I expected and the anime fans troll train of memes was pretty stupid and basically just a "It's not exactly what I want so I hate it".
That being said it's fine there's no S2. S1 covered a truncated version of the entire anime. I was worried it wouldn't cover the whole thing, but it did in its own version and it's fine as it is.
