Swedile at the Movies: Dragonball Evolution

In 2000, X-Men hit the silver screen, starting the Golden Age of Comic Book Movies. But now, with popular superheroes starting to run out, and with Ant-Man dreadfully looming on the horizon, Hollywood seems to be trying to branch out into other adaptation films. With the release of last year's Speed Racer, the race began to start the Anime Movie genre. Not to give away the ending of my much-belated Speed Racer review, but I felt that as a movie trying to be an adaptation of an anime, it succeeded where it needed to, and it probably helped that the anime in question was steeped with Western concepts and tropes. I enjoyed the movie and felt it was a step in the right direction. Then Fox got Dragonball. I saw the Dragonball Evolution movie the other day, and is it the breakout film in the anime genre?

....huh, well. Let's get cracking. As always, my Batman & Robin Movie Gradation Scale shall be used as my meterstick.


Story/Adaptation:

2000 years ago, the alien Piccolo and his minion Oozaru decended upon the Earth to reap its benefits and raze its populations. However, mystics banded together to seal Piccolo away. It's present day, and highschooler (*ack!*) Goku just turned 18, and recieves an ancient relic known as a Dragonball from his grandfather. However, Piccolo escapes from his prison (somehow...), and now seeks all seven Dragonballs so that he can summon the dragon Shenlong to grant him one wish; the power to enslave mankind. Goku, along with the hermit Master Roshi, bandit Yamcha, and PhD in...tactical weaponry Bulma, travel across the globe to prevent Piccolo from ressurecting Oozaru.

Umm....yeah. Wow. Before I go on, I want to stress that I am not a huge Dragonball fanboy. I watched it as a kid, and I enjoyed it for what it was, but it was not among my all-time favorite things. As such, know that this review does not come from the perspective of one who's childhood had been raped (unlike the people I went to the film with). This is a review from the perspective of just going to watch an adaptation with no real expectations. That said, this story was shit. It was entirely derivative and largely pointless. The producers of this movie took something pretty original, and turned it into your average hollywood action buster with some vague threat to meet at the end of the movie, and hollow character relationships that struggle to make you care.

To talk specifically about their success at adapting the source material, I'll say that the result was.....conflicted. At times, they did things that sort've surprised me. Little fan nods that only the fans would care about, like referring to Goku as "Son Goku" (his Japanese name) at one point, or showing that Roshi kept a collection of ladies underwear catalogues. This sort of stuff was thrown in to appease longtime fans, I'm sure. Then you've got your basic elements; the Dragonballs, Namekians, Capsule Corp., all the basic stuff that really need to be in a Dragonball adaptation.

However, these little nods often butt horns with the other interests of the movie makers, namely appealing to demographics. Instead of being a socially oblivious little boy, Goku's an awkward teenager with angst and girl troubles. He goes to parties lifted right out of The OC. Yamcha sounds like a surfer. In a better film, the director, writers, and other crew members working together cohesively might have been able to merge the geek and the contemporary and have it flow and make sense and feel, if not right, then at least believable. But in DBE, the two fight for screentime to the detriment of the movie. Never once does the movie feel like it's in agreement with itself, which is ironic, considering how much Goku rambles on about being at one with the two halves of himself (BIG SPOILER GOKU IS OOZARU WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THAT COMING DERP).

Speaking of Goku being, Oozaru, they don't explain anything in this movie. Piccolo's just....out and about at the beginning of the movie. This is fine, they'll just explain later, I thought. It might have been an interesting plot twi---oh right, the movie needs a plot to have plot twists. As it turns out, it's never explained how he gets out. Nor is it explained how Piccolo's servant Mai can shapeshift...or even who the hell she is. Where the hell did she come from? Was she trapped with him, or did he recruit her? Did she break him out? Nothing at all is explained. Goku's history and the Oozaru thing is equally vague. Was the original Oozaru Goku? Was it an ancestor? Is Oozaru some spirit that overtakes Saiyans (they did say Goku fell from the stars in a meteor)? It's all just very muddled. They often don't attempt to explain anything, and what they did attempt to explain was so befuddling it would have been better left to my fertile imagination.

The one bit of adaptation I actually liked was what they did with Roshi's house. In the anime/manga, he has a little house on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. In the movie, he lived in an old tennament building on a tiny island, where all around has been dug out an excavated, and surrounding that is a giant city. That was pretty evocative of the old house without being a direct translation, and I liked it. The only thing that would have been better is if someone graffito-tagged "Kame House" on the front. That would have been excellent. But other than that, huge flop in both story and adaptation departments. The characters were lifeless, dull, and often entirely unlike their inspirations, and the story was confusing in the way that elements felt missing and other elements were thrown in at the last second. Epic fail.

Casting:

Wow. Just, so bad. There were three halfway decent people in this movie; Chow Yun-Fat as Master Roshi, James Marsters as Piccolo, and believe it or not, Justin Chatwin as Goku. Allow me to explain further.

Chow Yun-Fat, for his part, seemed like the only fully-realized character in the movie at all. As much as he didn't look like him, he sort of acted like Master Roshi; a skilled master as well as a perverted old man with quirks. He had moments, however brief, of gravitas. It wasn't an Oscar-worthy performance, but it was at least a performance.

Marster's Piccolo had no overt faults on his part; he was the traditional chilling, heartless villain. His major flaw was that he was barely in the movie at all. He needed more lines, more screentime. I feel he could have done better. He was still a little hammier than I would have liked, but it was not cringe-worthy overall.

As for Goku, my problem with Goku was in how he was written. He was the generic, blank hero from every lame Hollywood action movie. There were moments, however brief, of the Goku we know and love, and I got from Chatwin that had the movie been written with that personality in mind, he could have performed. However, he was asked to be a lame dork with angst and cold feet around girls and just being the average movie teenager, and to that degree, he delivered. I just feel that, were he asked to play, you know, Goku, he could have delivered there too.

And that's all I have to say. The rest of the cast read like they were reading lines translated by Babel Fish.


Special Effects:

Decent. Nothing really exciting, nothing disappointing. Slight Shakey-Cam Syndrome, but not enough to annoy me. The one effect I actually liked were the Dragonballs themselves. I liked how the stars in the center floated around a foggy interior. It was a neat effect. That is all.


Music:

N/A (that is to say, not worth my time)


Product Placement:

Actually, none that I noticed. Surprising, being a Fox movie. Ironically, they did stuff in the movie like they were doing product placement, but with non-existant products (ie Capsule Corp, and some...retro Robot or something). This was kind of interesting, and yet at the same time, it makes me feel sick, because even non-products get product placement in a Fox movie.


Humor:

I don't know, the movie was pretty funny. On, you know, a schadenfreude level. Their actual attempts at humor failed. Except Roshi sneaking a grab of Bulma's ass. I think I laughed then. Maybe. And only then because it was a reference.


Direction:

James Wong failed on pretty much every level. I couldn't follow the plot, what I could follow was boring, I didn't care about the characters, and the film felt decidedly nothing like a Dragonball movie. It was Dragonball on a cosmetic level only. This has got to be the shortest "Director" section of any of my movie reviews, because there's nothing good enough or bad enough to go in-depth about. It was merely average; lazy and hackneyed as always. Thanks, Fox, for setting the bar so low.


FINAL SCORE:

3/4 - An overall bad, useless movie, with a few saving graces.


Yeah, not a 4/4. There were some things I liked. Like I said, Chow Yun-Fat's performance was ok, there were some fanwanks that I appreciated, Kame House and the Dragonballs were adapted to the screen well, and it wasn't like it was boring or sickening. But it's largely a pointless movie. The producers clearly had no love for the property. They just saw something that was popular and thought it would make a popular movie, while at the same time gutting almost everything that made it popular in the first place. When will they learn to stop doing that? Instead of being a decent adaptation, with changes being made only for the sake of storytelling in that medium, they just add as much as they can so it can be minimally appealing to everyone while not being overly appealing to anyone.

So, is this the start of a wave of Anime movies? Well, with the news that Keanu Reeves will be playing Spike in an upcoming Cowboy Bebop movie, as well as the Evangelion movie being in development hell, it seems that it'll be the thing that tinsel town tries to make the next big thing, while not really appreciating the material at all. Well, we'll see anyway. I personally hold out hope that at least a few good movies can be made (Evangelion looks like it's struggling to the surface with the constant efforts of people who truly seem to love the source material). But if this is the "evolution" of the anime movie genre, I'll stick to reading backwards, thank you.

As for me, I'm off to find 7 mystic orbs to wish for...Spider Powers. Yeah, I wouldn't even wish this movie better.

- Silent G

Swedile at the Movies: Watchmen

Silent G's journal, April 1st, 2009:

This city's afraid of my reviews. I've seen it's true face. Saw Watchmen twice to make sure. Zack Snyder possible communist? Must remember investigate later.

Batman & Robin Gradation Scale as always.

Story:

In an alternate history where superheroes exist and have been subsequently outlawed, Edward "The Comedian" Blake is murdered in cold blood. Fellow masked vigilante Rorschach, who's become completely psychotic over the years, investigates his murder and is positive that a "Mask Killer" is going around. He warns his fellow superheroes Nite-Owl/Dan Dreiberg, Silk Spectre/Laurie Juspeczyk, Ozymandias/Adrian Veidt and Dr.Manhattan/Jon Osterman, but they're all too concerned with mounting political pressures boiling over in the Cold War. As the plot develops, we find out what sort of people would really become superheroes, how their presence would affect world events, and ultimately discover a plot far more disturbing than a simple mask killer.

I'll get into more of this when I hash out the "Adaptation" section, but that's basically the story.

Casting:

Not bad, overall. Jackie Earl Haley as Rorschach was pretty damn inspired. He looks like the guy, he sounds like we all imagine he sounded, and he plays the part mostly well. My only gripe here is he didn't seem as detached as he does in the book, but it's a minor disappointment. He makes up for it whenever Rorschach freaks out. Creepy.

I also really liked Patrick Wilson as Dan. Other people were less impressed by him, but I felt he captured perfectly that 80's nice guy I'd always imagined and then some. He was the heart of the film, and he did the character proud.

Malin Akerman as Laurie was easily the weakest link in this group. I wouldn't say she was bad at it per se, but she had the challenge of playing Laurie, who came off as very three-dimensional in the book. In the movie, she was just...there. How she got top billing is beyond me.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian was excellent. He brought the character to life for me. He's such a depraved asshole who you really feel bad for by the end of the film. Easily one of the best performances of the movie.

Billy Crudup as Jon was...slightly mixed. I think he did a good job of portraying this person who really has no connection with people, maybe even too good. But it felt hollow at times. I don't think the film explained as well the little things about Jon that make him matter. But also, often times he was downright chilling how inhumanly he reacted. Not a bad performance, it just faultered in places that may not have been his fault.

Oh, Adrian. Adrian, Adrian, Adrian. Played by Matthew Goode, he was the least interesting of the main cast, which is a shame. Ozymandias has this gravity to him that I wish had been translated over better. I think Goode deciding to give him a German accent was far too cliche for most of us. I will give the guy props, however, during the ending; he kicked ass. The movie really pulled off the way the comics showed how flippin' fast his is well with the use of the Snyder Slo Mo. He also had some good speaking moments in this last act, but a lot of it was still cliche. Really the only part I think was ill-cast. Jude Law would have been great here.

Everyone else was mediocre to bad. Carla Gugino's Sally Jupiter was depressingly bad. Her character is one of the many emotional anchors to the book, and her final scene was touching. Here, she was just a lush, and even the final scene was hammed up. Stephen McHattie's Hollis Mason was decent, though. Can't wait to see more of him in July. I also liked Matt Frewer as Moloch. Slightly goofy, but that's probably how he was ment to be in the book, I could never tell reading it. And just everyone else was mostly meh.

Music (Both Score and Soundtrack):

Score first. It was bloody perfect. Tyler Bates really channeled the scores from 80's movies like Blade Runner, Taxi Driver, and other similar films. It made me feel like I was watching a movie made in the 80's at times, which is just perfect. Absolutely awesome (though admittedly, some pieces were a bit dull).

As for the soundtrack, which consists of period-accurate songs, a lot of people have given it hate (with the exception of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are-A Changin'" used during the opening sequence, that was universally loved, myself being no exception). The complaint is that a lot of them felt out of place for the scenes. I didn't feel this. I barely noticed. The ones I did notice seemed appropriate to me. About the one I had issue with was Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" used during the sex scene, and that's mostly because they had the perfect chance to use "You're my Thrill" and they didn't. The soundtrack was good, and I rarely say that.

Special Effects:

Pretty good. Jon was really the main factor here, being made by having Crudup wear a suit that recorded his movements, and put those movements and a digital scan of his face onto a digital skeleton. This had it's really really good moments, and it's bad moments. Sometimes he looked like an actual person, and others he looked like he belonged in Shrek. Still, the times they succeeded were incredible. It seems to me a case of just needing more time to touch up on post production. It succeeded in mostly not seeming like CGI, so I say kudos over all.

The other stuff was ok. Rorschach's mask was cool. Archie the Owlship looked appropriate. Bubastis looked kind've CGish all the way through, but she was in the film so briefly it really didn't matter. Mars looked cool, but there's not much more for special effects to be said, really. If you're the type who goes to movies for their effects, I doubt you'll be disappointed.

Adaptation:

This is the big one. Was it adapted the way all the comic book fans wanted it to be adapted? Or was the general public pandered to once again? Well, you know what? On the whole, I'd say they were pretty damn faithful. All of us fans who sat hoping for a panel-by-panel direct translation were, I now realize, being unrealistic. I mean, I never truly expected it, but I had hoped. But looking at it now, some changes they made were okay for the medium of film, and did not detract from the feel of Watchmen. And there were certainly examples of shots taken perfectly from the book (I giggled when they perfectly reproduced the first page of the book). Some things were omitted, and some things were explained more in-depth or made fact where the book only hinted. And I'm cool with that. While I would have loved to see Max Shea or Rorschach's landlady or the "Crime Busters" or the Squid, I think that for the most part, the film still captured that true Watchmen essence.

That is, until Adrian said he did it 35 minutes ago.

I had real problems with the ending. And not the problem I thought I'd have, with the engineered "alien" monster being replaced with a machine that mimics Manhattan's powers. The way they explained why that would bring countries together sort've kind've made sense. Not as much as the squid made sense to me, but enough that I could move on. My problems were with the little cosmetic changes that made the ending feel very Hollywood, where the whole movie sturggled to be so un-Hollywood. Someone had to see Rorschach die and go "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" Someone had to hit Adrian and give him a stern talking to and a glare as they walked away. Manhattan had to kiss the girl on his way out (THAT was random).

Just in general, the whole moral defeat of the book is just gone in this version. Snyder promised the same "Moral Checkmate" of the original ending applied, but it did so only on face value. You don't feel like the characters feel like they're morally oblidged. They're just oblidged for some reason. And taking away Jon's final line of "Nothing ever ends" from him and giving it to Laurie was downright criminal. That line was so chilling, and it's what gave Veidt second thoughts. In the film, it's just Dan yelling at him that does that. The whole thing is reworked in such a way that basically all the same things happen, the same things are said, but it's made palpable to the Hollywood execs that believe making people think will affect their bottom line. And that to me is just sad.

But I will say this; it could have been a total write-off. They could have made this movie 5 years ago, and if they used the script they had for that stage of production, I wouldn't have even gone to see this movie at all. So props must go out to the men and women who took a risk on something so different, and keeping it true for the most part. It's just a shame they fumbled in the final quarter.

Direction:

And the person at least a great deal responsible for the ballsy-ness of this film is Zack Snyder. He says he's a fan, and it certainly shows. There was much love put into this movie, this adaptation, and I know a lot of his changes were made from two vantage points: one of a filmmaker trying to make sure that the property works as a film while still staying as true as possible to the original source, and the other of a filmmaker who has to appease his producers, who are putting the money in for this, and who want to make sure that the film will appeal to many people. Considering that he had to deal with all of that and made a film I am happy to call a "Watchmen" adaptation? I'd say he succeeded on a pretty profound level.

My one complaint with him is he seemed to want to amp everything up, where the book might have been more subtle. In some places this was cool. Adding some screen time to a prison fight is nothing to complain about. But at other times it felt strained or out of place. The sex scene on Archie was uncomfortably long. The fight with the Knot Tops consisted of things like punching a guy's bone through is arm and stabbing another in the jugular. Stuff like this that was overdone just a tad too much made me feel like Snyder was a kid playing with this awesome toy, and just going wild with it. But again, these complaints were pretty small, inna final analysis.

FINAL SCORE:

1/4 - A damn good movie with one or more flaws too glaring to make it perfect.

Yeah, as much as it pains me to do so, I really have to give it a 1/4 for now. There's my problem with the ending, which I explained in depth above. But there's also the human element that was missing. The whole movie was about superheros and their lives, and we barely see the people on the street. In the book, we see their lives, their trials and tribulations unfold, and it makes it all the more sad when they're all killed in the blink of an eye. It just made the movie feel kind've hollow. I never once expected the movie to rival or exceed the book; the book is a work of art. But I had hoped the movie would do it's best to portray the human element so present in the original work. In this cut, the movie sort've fell flat. That, combined with the ending, has produced this score.

However, all is not lost.

This cut is merely the theatrical cut of the film, the one shaved down so it would hit the more palatable 2h30m mark. The actual cut is actually close to 3 hours, and this cut will be released on DVD. I am very excited for this version to be released. Most of what was cut was Bernie and Bernard, as well as Hollis's murder, and all the other human scenes I missed. There's also even a super duper cut in the works that will incorporate the animated Black Freighter film recently released. So, dear reader, expect an update review in the coming months, because I WILL be reviewing these other cuts separately from this one. I'm hoping that it will stack up better than this one, because Watchmen, on a moral level at least, truly deserves a 0/4.

This one's for you, Alan!
- Silent G