Galaxy Express 999

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cWfk42Hs88endofvid [starttext]

This is it; the full-length movie of "Galaxy Express 999" in a good quality.

Plot: A twelve year-old street urchin named Tetsuro Hoshino desperately wants an indestructible machine body, giving him the ability to live forever and have the freedom that the unmechanized don't have. While machine bodies are impossibly expensive, they are supposedly given away for free in the Andromeda galaxy, the end of the line for the Galaxy Express 999, a space train that only comes to Earth once a year.
The series begins with Tetsuro and his mother making their way to Megalopolis where they hope to get jobs to pay for passes for the 999. Along the way however, Count Mecha and a gang of "human hunters" kill Tetsuro's mother. Before she dies, she tells him to continue the journey they started, and to get a machine body to live the eternal life she couldn't.
Intent on killing Count Mecha to avenge his mother, Tetsuro meets up with a beautiful woman, Maetel, who is the spitting image of his dead mother. Maetel offers him an unlimited use pass for the 999 if he will be her travelling companion to which Tetsuro agrees. Along the way, Tetsuro has many adventures on many different and exotic planets and meets many kinds of people, both human and alien, living and machine. Increasingly, Tetsuro realizes that a machine body won't fix all of his problems. In fact, most of the machine people he meets regret the decision to give up their humanity.
Eventually, Tetsuro and Maetel reach the Planet Prometheum, the final stop for the 999, but Tetsuro learns that it is ruled by the Queen of the Mechanization Empire, also named Prometheum. She is Maetel's mother, and controls the planet by entirely mechanized human components. Maetel's mission was to bring young humans for that purpose. Queen Prometheum plans on transferring Tetsuro's consciousness to a bolt for the heart of the planet.
Tetsuro doesn't understand why he has been betrayed by Maetel, but Maetel has plans of her own, and seeks to destroy the mechanized civilization. With the help of her father, Dr. Ban (who was only named in the film), whose consciousness resides in a pendant she carries over her neck, Maetel destroys her mother and the planet. The movie concludes as Maetel rebels against her mother, Queen Prometheum, and with the help of Emeraldas and Harlock destroys Planet Maetel. The movie also delves into the true nature of Maetel which is only hinted at in the television series. The body she visited on Pluto had been her original human body. Her consciousness was transferred to a succession of human bodies—including, most recently, one cloned from Tetsuro's mother—thus allowing her to live in human form forever and, in a sense, travel in time. Also, while Maetel's pendant only contains the consciousness of her father, in the movie it contains his consciousness, as well as the consciousnesses of the countless brave young people whom she had likewise led as saboteurs.
Maetel and the 999 bring Tetsuro back to Earth. After a farewell kiss, she and the train head back into space, presumably never to return.

Sit back, relax and enjoy the film.

Galaxy Express 999 characters/settings: (c) Leiji Matsumoto

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