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
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