Watching the 999 TV series then the movies back to back was a pretty bad case of whiplash. The first movie missing all the important parts of the TV series, the sense of a long journey and the character growth Tetsuro went through. The second movie felt like just a remix of the same plot points of the first. And then this movie, that just feels like a total disconnect from everything. Starts off bad right off the bat, you see the 999 flying and its rendered in hideous CGI. This is perhaps a bit of a contentious topic as CG becomes more commonplace or generallyaccepted but for me it always looks worse than hand drawn. It can still look good as an end result, though I think hand drawn would always look better. Some shows use it better than others, Last Exile is a good (and fairly early) example of good CG. But here its just disappointing to see.
ok CGI rant over

Then we get to the Tetsuro redesign, they had aged him up in the previous 2 movies and sorta looked like a young Harlock. But here hes back to being more of a young kid like in the TV series except hes so ugly looking now. I mean dont get me wrong, he was pretty dopey looking in the TV series and I always got a chuckle out of him and some of the side characters how ridiculously high their eyes were, but he was goofy looking in a sort of cartoon endearing way. Here hes just ugly looking though. The rest of the art is ok, some background arts are nice, some extra detail on characters here and there but not nearly as nice looking as the previous films or as charming as the TV series.

Story-wise, it sets up a new evil menace for Tetsuro and Maetel to contend with, but its just sort of random feeling and lacking in any of the personal growth side of story that the original series had. It could maybe blossom into something, but the main issue is this is only 50 something minutes long and is basically just an intro OVA to the real story.... that we never got. The ending is a cliffhanger before getting to anything real interesting. Maybe this is continued in one of the manga releases, I'm not sure. But as it is I really dont feel like you are getting much from this. I guess if you, like me, are also on a 999 binge you may feel compelled to complete the set but honestly you're time is best served elsewhere like watching one of the gazillion spin-off stories from this story's universe.