DRAGONBALL: The Movie

[seawasp]

It is coming. Finally evidence in the form of a real trailer.

Kathleen and my reactions:

If that isn't "all the good parts" of the movie, this could be fun. It's not Pure Dragonball, which I'm sure will enrage the purists (it annoys me in some respects, but it would be a very courageous (and not very concerned with profits) studio/director who COULD do it pure without changes. But some of it looks very good and potentially SPIRITUALLY correct.

So I cross my fingers and hope.

Comments

[howardtayler.livejournal.com]

I've never played the game, nor watched the Animé. Had I not already known those properties existed, this movie would look like a corny-but-cool summer blockbuster. I would go see it, mock the dumb plot, but have a great time.

That's probably exactly what will happen anyway. How true it is or isn't to the original source material is irrelevant to me. I like when movies can stand on their own and be great movies.

[seawasp]

It's not irrelevant to the main target audience, of course. How much deviation they'll tolerate is an interesting question; obviously some of the aspects the filmmakers had to weigh was "how many original fans will this lose us, versus how many general public viewers will this gain us" -- and hope that they guess right on that.

It's also not entirely irrelevant to me on the basis that if you're going to make a movie "based on X", then it damn well should at least have the SPIRIT of X instead of just have the name X stamped on it to get the fanboy tickets on opening day. A *good* example of this was "I, Robot", which included hardly anything DIRECTLY from Asimov's Robot novels/stories, and yet which was very much an Asimovian Three-Laws robot story. A bit more action-adventure than he usually wrote, and they made Susan Calvin pretty (although they did NOT do a romance!), but it was in fact basically the right "feel and approach".

(The archetypal SF "bad example" is probably Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers")

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

It doesn't appear to consist of Goku powering up for two hours, so that's a plus right there. :)

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Ah, you're the other person who thought that the Will Smith I, Robot was actually in the spirit of the Asimov stories. For a while I was afraid I was the only one.

As for the trailer... I'm not a huge DB fan, but I feel compelled to point out to the purists that if you want to watch a "pure" Dragonball film YOU ALREADY CAN. It's not like there aren't a bunch of movies, not to mention umpty-um hours of TV, already out there.

Well, unless you're a manga purist, I suppose.

The trailer looks entertaining. Personally, I find the later DBZ arcs (that I've seen) to be more fun because at that point the power level has gone so far past "awesome" that it's wrapped completely around "ridiculous" and come back to "awesome" again; and I seriously doubt that this movie is going to play at that level. ("Oops, destroyed another planet. Gotta remember to angle my energy blasts up next time.") But it still looks like it could be fun.

[howardtayler.livejournal.com]

I thought I, Robot was a great take on Asimov's stories. Sure, they made it all but impossible to do ALL of them, but that's fine. They took all those logic puzzles and rolled them into one, fine film.

[seawasp]

The best DBZ arc is Cell, IMCGO. The Buu storyline had waaaaay too much of Teh Stoopid in it. Toriyama forgot one of the cardinal rules, which is that it's pretty damn easy to go from comedy to serious, but going from serious back to comedy is a much harder row to hoe, especially if you intend the same people to keep watching it. He SORT OF got away with it, but the Buu storyline would have been vastly better if he hadn't insisted on trying to switch drastically between "Late-era Cell DBZ" and "Early-Season Dragon Ball" modes every few episodes.

The power scale of the movie looks to be about what I would have guessed when I realized it was "Dragonball" and not "Dragonball Z" the movie: i.e., about the level of power we saw during the Ma Junior Budoukai; they COULD blow up the planet but the battles are generally "only" on the scale of strategic nuclear warfare.

[denelian.livejournal.com]

i agree - plus, the updating needed to make it relevent is what really, in my opinion anyone, made I, Robot perfect. the problem with old sci-fi is that it's OLD, and if someone makes a movie based on them, everyone but the total hard-core purists are gonna scream and run away... like watching a movie where the spaceship flys through "ether" - EVERYONE knows that "it" doesn't work like that.
i have this argument all the time with people :) purists miss that things evolve.

and oooooooooooh..."Starhip Troopers"... that was just CRUEL

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

Am I misinterpreting things or are they using the Dragon Balls directly as power sources? Odd...

[seawasp]

There's actually quite a few people who felt that way about I, Robot.

Insofar as the movie, sure, you could say that, but the difference between the live-action and animated is large enough that you'd sound silly saying that. Like saying to people who are fans of Spider-Man that they already had several TV series.

A really well-done DB/DBZ live-action movie would be a very interesting thing to see, and very different from the animated ones. Note also that the Japanese "movies" are, by American standards, very short and very simple. They usually have minimal plot even by DBZ standards and, well, you've already SEEN all the special effects. IMCGO, the best of the DBZ movies aren't necessarily the ones most fans prefer.

I don't agree.

[seawasp]

If you go back far enough that the ships ARE flying through the ether, you CAN'T update it without wrecking what makes it good. You don't change "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" to the 21st century, because it RELIES on the morals, geopolitics, and science of the day. Similarly, Skylark and Lensman have to be done the way they were written, or they fail. The best you can do is take some of the IDEAS and update them, but even then you often have to abandon part of their essence; Babylon 5, for example, used much of the background concepts of the Lensman series, but the essence of the series was utterly turned around in order to make it work.

[seawasp]

Not all THAT odd. Several of my RPG characters would've tried such a thing; clearly there's a lot of power IN them, maybe you can get it OUT.

Re: I don't agree.

[denelian.livejournal.com]

i guess it really depends on what is done to make the movie, and what the point of the movie was. i was pretty much saying take the IDEA and re-do the story, because you are very correct, most of the classics would be ruined by updating - and those that wouldn't be have already been updated (obvious example, Romeo&Juliet/Westside Story).

generally its the idea that i want, anyway. i've read a couple of the Lensman books, and while i like the ideas, i couldn't get into them. or the John Carter/Barsoom books. that's probably a generational thing...

but now that i am thinking about it, maybe some of them can be made without altering and without alienating. if they are marketed as fantasy instead of sci-fi... but they would have very small audiences, and so would have smaller budgets. like any of the various "Cthulu" movies that have come out in the past few years (i have seen at least 3). niche market stuff. that might work, and would be interesting to see...