DRAGONBALL: Miracle no Zenkai Powaa!

[seawasp]

Just got back from seeing Dragonball: Evolution!

To my great surprise and gratification, THEY GOT IT RIGHT!

For those who are Dragonball/DBZ fans, the best way to describe this is: it's like one of the movies. It's an alternate continuity, one that won't fit with any of the original... but it's got the SPIRIT.

One of the brilliant strokes of genius is that the original trailers deliberately mislead you. There are deceptive cuts and a few actual outright changes of dialogue which make you think one thing when another is true -- and the "other" is much BETTER than you expected. They successfully managed to hide a lot of the Real Dragonball Stuff from us until the premiere, which is a hell of a job.

Spoilers follow after the

The essence of Dragonball was preserved. It takes place on a version of Dragonworld -- it may be called Earth ("Chikyuu"), but it's Dragonworld. We have Capsules, and bizarre technology, wierd mixes of cultures... it LOOKS like a Toriyama world, made real.

As I rather expected, they fused Gohan and Goku in terms of personality. This actually works well in that it allows us to introduce Goku in an at least somewhat familiar setting.

(Worries about him being a loser being beaten up... no, he's not. He has been made fun of, but it's not because he CAN'T fight...)

Chatwin, I'm happy to say, does this version of Goku well. He gets the innocence and awkwardness of the Gohan aspects, and when the time comes to be more "Goku", he shows it perfectly. Okay, his hair isn't nine inches high, but it's spiky in a very Saiyajin way.

Rossum *IS* Bulma. Yes, they've given her some action sequences, but I think that improves her character in context.

Chow Yun Fat was, as I said earlier, the RIGHT choice for Mutenroshi/Kamesenin (the original seen in my icon above, doing the Kame Hame Ha). They toned down his Ecchi nature, leaving just enough of the dirty old man to keep him the same somewhat, er, earthy character.

James Marsters was, in fact, the PERFECT Piccolo. He sounded like Piccolo, he moved like Piccolo, and yes, he was very much GREEN like Piccolo Daimao.

The changes in plotline... mostly work very well. It is, as others have said, fairly short; I hope there's more on the DVD release.

And the final battle IS Dragonball, right down to the final KA...ME...HA...ME...HAAAAA!

Oh, and one of the lies told in the previews? The mystics who banded together did NOT create the Dragonballs. They invented the Maa Fubaaa, a technique an awful lot of DB fans forget about, to capture and imprison Piccolo. The Dragonballs are, in fact, what they were always supposed to be, and the Great Dragon Shen-Long DOES make an appearance.



So in short, I strongly encourage anyone who likes DB/DBZ, or anyone who'd enjoy a quirky super-martial-arts movie, to go see this one.

A good end to a rather bad day.

Comments

[shana.livejournal.com]

Great! I'll try to get to see it soon.

[howardtayler.livejournal.com]

Okay, I was asking people on Twitter to talk me away from the ledge. You're coaxing me to jump.

SO CONFUSED.

[seawasp]

Look, man, who are you going to listen to, some twittering people or one of the longest-term Dragonball fanboys and probably the ONLY pro SF author to have the balls to publicly espouse Dragonball as one of the great works of our time?

[its-a-sekrit.livejournal.com]

I loved the movie and plan to see it again.

I saw areas that I thought they could have expanded or might have edited down for time. I hope, hope, hope that means there will be a longer version in DVD. I could have watched more.

But, I enjoyed it immensely the way it was.

[howardtayler.livejournal.com]

I couldn't find anybody to go to the movies with me tonight. Seven, maybe eight phone calls?

But yeah, I'll go ahead and see this.

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

I have to say that making trailers which lie about the movie in such a way as to make Dragonball fans not want to see the movie is a stroke of utter stupidity and not genius at all.

But now I actually kinda want to go see it...

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

I'd hoped it would be something like this -- that the makers got the spirit of DB and its characters, even if they (were forced/felt like) changing everything else -- character appearance, personal history, and relationships; the milieu and technology. If fans have accepted three versions of Tenchi, two of BGC, an uncountable number of Gundam and Transformers variations, and a live-action Cutey Honey, then mere changes shouldn't disqualify this film. (Whether it's competent as a film is a separate matter.)

There have been several cast interviews on SciFiWire.com in recent weeks, which gave hints of what the makers had changed; but you can't always trust actors to get all the details right, even if James Marsters says he's watched most of the three TV series with his son. (And then there's the active disinformation campaign promised by Michael Bay for the second Transformers movie.)

And although "Trailers Always Lie" is a reliable expectations-calibrating guideline, I have to agree with midnightlurker that making it less appealing to DB fans was a (bad, puzzling) choice. (But can you tell from online dissent? Web fora seem to be dominated by posters who live to be irate and contrarian.) An opening-weekend box office of $4.7 million in eighth place implies, however, that it didn't appeal to much of anybody.

[seawasp]

I am of mixed feelings about the misleading trailers. A part of me finds them stupid, for the reasons you and Lurker state. Another part of me considers it sheer genius in that it got across the ATTEMPT to get the spirit of DB, while not SPOILERING ME! I really detest previews overall because they seem tailored to give away some of the stuff that'd be a lot cooler to see unfold in the theater.

And the DB fanatic fanboys were ALREADY flaming about it before the trailers, since there were plenty of (often misleading) leaks from the set. So I'm not sure there was anything they could do to recapture that group.

The opening gross is not encouraging, no, but then I think they waited WAAAAAAAAAAY too long to do this. The first attempts/rumors go back more than 5 years. If they could pull it off this FAST -- one year start-to-finish? -- they should've done it back when DBZ was the hottest thing since sliced bread. Now's actually the time they should be doing a Naruto live-action, or FMA if they're fast off the blocks.

[seawasp]

As I said in my reply to Lexomatic, I both agree and disagree on the trailers (see that reply for detail).

Go see it (fast, before it vanishes; it's worth seeing on the Big Screen).

It's this year's Speed Racer, something that ought to have sucked beyond belief but turned out good instead, and that's still gonna bomb in the theater.

(it's not as GOOD as Speed Racer, which was AFAIC nigh-on perfect -- for instance, I think they chose the wrong guy for Yamucha, and they didn't use him as well as they could have either -- but it's the same kind of thing in that it's an adaptation that WORKS)

[seawasp]

Let me know how you like it. Are you at all a fan of DB/DBZ, or not? There are aspects, of course, best appreciated by those who know the original.

[seawasp]

I would be VERY happy with a much longer Director's Cut.

[shana.livejournal.com]

It was a lot of fun.

I want to see the fight with the bullies in slow motion, because I'm not sure Goku actually hit any of them.

[seawasp]

He did not hit a single one of them. He gave his word to his grandpa, and he kept it. They hit each other and other objects. He never laid a finger on any of them.

[shana.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought, but it was so fast I couldn't tell for sure. It was a perfectly beautiful fight.