A movie I have found in the dark year of 2021 with truly strong female characters.

"Space Adventure Cobra" isn't as entertaining as I remembered. It's too good-natured to dislike openly, and I appreciated the fact that the hero is actually very unusual for an adventuresome protagonist. But I also found it impossible to follow or care about.

The movie begins with a pre-credits sequence showing Cobra performing some heroic action. The credits come on with music and slow visuals that are straight out of any James Bond movie. So I thought, oh, I get it, Cobra is like a spacefaring James Bond. When the Bond-girl stand in, a female bounty hunter was introduced, that seemed a safe bet.

But then the duo were attacked by a flying alien head, and Cobra's efforts to stop it were a failure - the bounty hunter lady saved the day. And she wasn't interested in Cobra, although he was interested in her. But when she realised who he was, she seduced him, rather than the other way around.

Cobra is actually a pretty hapless character, not suave at all, though he is charismatic. The movie is probably more about the lady and her sisters, who are imprisoned on a planet somewhere, and she wants Cobra to help her save them - although she hardly seems to need his help.

I wasn't able to interest myself in any of this, and nor could I focus on it for long. It's pretty boring and confusing, and just seems like style over anything else - and the style isn't even that great.

With AMAZING animation, beautiful soundtrack composed of hidden references (did somebody say "Superman" by Richard Donner) and highly influential, since somebody that goes with the name of James Cameron must have noticed the scene with Crystal Boy walking into the flames and then translated it four years after into an actual live-action movie named Terminator. It's incredible how many of these Hollywood directors copied or "were influenced" by anime, isn't it?