TRIGUN: BADLANDS RUMBLE (2010)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

I've never read the TRIGUN manga, but I watched the anime teleseries during its US broadcast. I don't remember the series' hero-- wanted criminal Vash the Stampede-- making quite so much use of the old "I'll pretend to be an innocent goof in order to throw the villains off" schtick.  It's pretty overused in the 90-minute film BADLANDS RUMBLE, though Vash's modus operandi is secondary to his desire to save a young bounty hunter, the beautiful Amelia, from going too far down the revenge-road.  Vash's reasons for stumping around doing good deeds aren't even addressed. 

The film begins in Macca City, on a stock desert-planet in some far-future world.  When legendary bandit Gasback attempts to hold up a major banking-institution, Vash intervenes, using his goofus act to de-stabilize the situation, so that Gasback escapes without participating in a major-- and potentially bloody-- shootout with the local authorities.

Twenty years later, Gasback is still uncaptured, and a huge bounty is placed on his head by one of his former business-associates-- Cain Kepler, a fellow thief who "went legit" with his ill-gotten gains and wants Gasback put down.  A huge contingent of bounty hunters converge on Macca City to seek the bounty.  Among them is a young woman named Amelia, and Vash-- who has not aged, for undisclosed reasons-- who takes a protective interest in Amelia, much to her irritation.  Amelia also doesn't care about the bounty: she simply wants to kill Gasback for unspecified reasons.  When Gasback attacks the city with his fellow bandits, most of the bounty hunters have been celebrating too hard to put up any resistance.  Amelia almost gets the chance to kill her quarry, but in doing so she almost destroys the power plant that keeps the whole city alive in the desert.  Worse, Vash is apparently killed by Gasback's men.

Amelia, though sobered by her own boundary-crossing, resolves to pursue Gasback into the wilderness.  She's joined by Vash's longtime friend Nicholas Wolfwood, who carries around a huge cross which conceals a rapid-fire gun-- a probable tribute to the 1966 spaghetti western DJANGO.  The two of them have a shootout with Gasback's forces, during which Vash the Stampede shows up, revealing how he survived his apparent death.  The conflict concludes with what looks like a spaghetti western's version of a familiar film-trope from Japanese samurai films, which I call the "two swordsmen run parallel to each other while seeking the other's weakpoint" trope.  It doesn't make nearly as much sense when executed by opponents using guns, but it looks cool anyway.  In the end Amelia must choose whether to pursue her revenge or to imitate Vash's preference for sparing lives.

Both the character design and the score are faithful to the 1960s spaghetti-western aesthetic.  RUMBLE is no classic, but it's a better than average space-shoot-'em-up.