Review: All aboard The Galactic Limited Express for a fun (too-short!) ride amongst the stars

There's plenty of space out in space! Except for the in the prisons, which are at capacity with criminals and ne'er-do-wells, which means the six recently-arrested protagonists of the wildly titled Milky☆Subway: The Galactic Limited Express -- the Movie don't have to do jail time. But they have to do community service instead, cleaning the titular train.

What started as a graduation project for writer-director-producer Yōhei Kameyama and then became a webseries, this cinematic adaptation (which is now streaming on Netflix) mushes all of the show's episodes together while also adding in some new scenes as connective tissue. While the whole show is covered here, those original episodes are super short, which means this feature is barely even a feature, clocking in at only 47 minutes.

But what glorious minutes those are.

This movie is an absolute delight, brimming with the same sort of sci-fi misfit energy that made Guardians of the Galaxy such a hit. There isn't a lot of time to introduce everyone, so I was impressed how adeptly this handles getting the viewer up to speed with the characters. Smartly, rather than having six single individuals make up the cast, we instead have three pairs: cheerful alien Chiharu and cyborg Makina, who have been arrested for a slew of crimes (speeding, torching a police vehicle, etc.); towering, silent alien Akane and her diminutive sidekick Kanata, who have bene brought in for speeding; and cyborg pair Kurt and Max, whose work is generally shady, though they've been booked this time for illegally smuggling sugar, of all things.

I fell for these characters so quickly. We get a bit of backstory for them, but we're mostly in the moment, watching how they respond to their gradually-escalating ordeal, and seeing how they come to like each other and work together. It helps that, despite the small sliver of this world that we're witnessing, you can feel how much bigger the universe is. There's discussion about Kurt and Max's boss, an idol that Akane and Makina love, similar situations on trains that have transpired before, much to the consternation of Ryoko, a human police officer who's trying to rescue the gang. It makes this short movie feel like a special window into a massive universe, one that I am desperate to spend more time in, and one that I feel lucky to have visited at all.

The basic structure of the adventure is that the gang needs to get to the opposite end of the train, to the driver's car where they'll find the doohickey that will let them take control. Along the way, there are a few hiccups: a guard bot that shoots paralyzing darts, faulty vending machines, some doors that won't cooperate. Watching how these characters adapt and respond is a lot of fun, and I love the tentativeness of the forming friendships. A great running gag is that they all keep forgetting each other's names, which yeah, makes sense when you've all just met and weren't really planning to interact, since each pair was originally assigned to clear different cars.

I don't know what the future holds for this franchise, if Kameyama has more stories he wants to tell in this universe or if he's going to move onto something new, now that this sort of definite version of this story is out there in the world. My vote is clear, but Kameyama is clearly a filmmaker with a strong voice and a keen sense of humor, and I'll be happy to watch whatever he makes next.