Trigun: Badlands Rumble
ANN; IMDb; TV Tropes; Wikia; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Crunchyroll; Hulu
This film came out in 2010, but I didn't see it until 2025. It's based on the manga and anime TV series Trigun. I didn't like it as much as I liked the series, but I have to wonder if I would have liked it more if I'd seen it fifteen years ago. But at least it made me slightly nostalgic for the early years of Adult Swim.
It starts twenty years in the past, when a guy named Gasback and his gang robbed a bank. His gang ultimately turned on him, and would have killed him if not for interference from Vash the Stampede. Vash also prevents Gasback from killing his gang. Gasback escapes and continues his life of crime, and by the present day has a huge bounty on him (though not as huge as the bounty on Vash). His gang also escaped with the loot from the bank, and over the years each of them invested their share in various enterprises. The main gang member was a man named Cain, who is now mayor of Macca City. He had invested in a massive power plant, as well as having a huge statue built of himself. The statue has been insured for a large sum by an insurance company, which sends Meryl and Milly to Macca City to determine... I dunno, something about the statue. At the same time, a ton of bounty hunters have come to Macca, believing that Gasback was going to show up to rob the city. One of the bounty hunters is a badass woman named Amelia, who is accosted by several bad guys on the ship that's heading for Macca. At first she manages to fight them off, but they eventually get her under control, and I expect they were going to rape her. But Vash rescues her, in his usual goofy way. Then throughout the movie, he follows her around and basically sexually harasses her. (I really didn't like that aspect of the movie, it wasn't cute or funny. I don't remember Vash acting that way around women in the series, but he probably did and I just didn't think too much about it at the time.) Anyway... Gasback and his new gang do eventually come to town, accompanied by Wolfwood, who has temporarily become Gasback's bodyguard. And we learn that Amelia isn't actually after a bounty. She wants to kill Gasback, whom she blames for the death of her mother when she was a little girl. She is also upset with Vash, who she thinks shouldn't have let Gasback get away 20 years earlier.
That's all I want to reveal of the plot. I've set up the story and characters well enough, I think, and I don't want to spoil how it all plays out. All in all, it's not a bad story. I thought Amelia was a pretty good character. And I'm wondering if all the destruction that happened at the start of the movie is supposed to be the thing that Vash has been blamed for, all these years, which is what initially got a bounty placed on him. I don't think that was made explicit in the movie, but it seems like a distinct possibility. And I find that interesting, if it's the case. But I didn't like Vash in this movie as much as I probably did in the series, though if I ever re-watched the series, I'd probably end up liking him less than I did when I first watched it in 2003. (And I don't think I ever loved him as a character, even back then.) Anyway, I'm glad I've finally seen the movie, just because I had wanted to see it for so long.