Dragonball Evolution

This Movie plain and simple insults our intelligence, I mean I'm no Geek, but tham they were way off!, this should not even be called dragonball, because of stupid 20th Century Fox, now dragonball is ruined, if someone wanted to make a better movie with the real story that Akira Toriyama made, they made so many changes and mistakes that the dragonball that we know is gone forever, on Watchmen they made some changes but only so the essence of the show could be shown on film, but Dragonball is dead they killed it, I'm sorry Akira Toriyama they ruined your work and about every Anime , and dbz fan out there, like my Grandfather just to say "there's cheese all over that movie" It is illogical to spend the money on copyrights if you're not even going to use the story.

Zac Bertschy of Anime News Network, originally disgusted at Otaku decrying the film via leaked set shots and trailers even before the movie was released, gave the movie an overall F grade, admitting that "The fans were right." Criticizing the films lack of explaining plot elements to its hackmead storyline and lackluster effort by the actors, he suggested that the film "Might be fun when you're hammered and surrounded by friends. Or suicidal, and need something to push you over the edge."

This is a total butchering of what I had held great hopes of seeing. The movies attempts to follow the dragon ball story line, meanwhile adding a "modern" spin on it (ie. chi chi's castle, and Master Roshi lives in a regular semi whats up with that?). What the viewers want to see is a storyline that follows the cartoon series without any changes, and additions. Overall, the plot is weak, the characters do not look like the cartoons (ie. Yamcha, Master Roshi), the 2D cartoon series had better special effects than the movie (and the series had NO special effects, thats how terrible it was). I created an IMDb account JUST to comment on how they butchered Dragonball for me and I hope that Hollywood is smarter next time as to when they bring such a strong fan based series onto the big screens or they will only infuriate more of the audience.

Watching DBE i can immediately tell the directors and everyone else involved have not watched more than a few episodes of the entire Dragonball series. The characters are only similar in name and the story feels like they chewed it up and spit it out and whatever stuck to the storyboard they went with. I wont ruin the story but its nothing like the anime, as i said before the characters are only similar to the anime by name. It almost seems like they wanted to make this movie as bad and as far away from the original story as they could. The only time an actor or actress acts like their anime counterpart is when they are first introduced speaking mainly about Master Roshi and Yamcha.

For one of the most action packed animes around they sure did the opposite with the movie. I can count the number of fight scenes with one hand and count how long they lasted with two hands. Its pretty pathetic when the first fight scene with Goku and the "bullies" is the best and he never threw even threw a punch. The big screen debut of the Kamehameha is sad and pathetic and all the Ki blasts look like different color fire balls. They don't look pure energy (like they are in the anime) but just like slow motion fire.

I could go on for hours about what they did wrong. If you have never seen the anime series don't watch the movie. The story is probably too confusing for anyone who doesn't know the entire back-story of the anime. The movie only gives you the who and the what but no why. In fact i think why sums up the entire movie. Why did they do this and why did they do that is all i was thinking during the entire movie. At the end of the movie all i could do was ask "Why did they make this movie and who did they make this movie for?" This is not a movie for the fans or anyone who has never seen the anime. It feels like they made this movie for the people who hate the anime.

As a fan of the series I will award this no points and may god have mercy on their souls.

This movie is just plain disappointing to say the least. I don't care if this is an adaptation of Dragonball. The only reason why I gave it a 3 out of 10 rating was for the special effects and production value which were semi-decent. I don't understand what was wrong with the original storyline that needed to be changed and messed with. It's the original storyline that made fans love Dragonball in the first place. "If it ain't broke don't fix it." I think this movie would do a lot better if they stuck with the original story and had better casting. The real fans would flood the theaters to watch it which would bring hype to the movie for new viewers that don't know about Dragonball, kind of like how Watchmen did. Street Fighter was horrible and they expect to do a sequel to it, this movie was a travesty...I guess next up will be Thundercats and Voltron for Hollywood to mess up for me. Thank you Hollywood for ruining my childhood memories.

Hollywood plundering Japanese pop culture isn't something new. From "Americanizing" television series for the kids from Power Rangers to Ultraman, and adapting famed characters from Japanese film, games and manga to frequent disastrous effect, it still wouldn't stop the studios from going after one property after another. This time round it's the long running Dragonball series, because the assumption is that the built-in fan base would translate to instant dollars at the box office. Not.

You have to give the filmmakers a little bit of credit though, being either foolhardy, or just plain ballsy. It's a given that they cannot condense and distill the rich content into a surprisingly less than 90 minute movie, and live in the hopes of producing a sequel, or to generate a franchise (i.e. don't leave the cinema hall when the end credits start to roll). But what they successfully do, is to super-summarize the entire mythos by throwing out everything except the main gist of the entire manga, making it extremely simplistic in poor lazy-man standards in adaptation.

For the uninitiated, the film would serve as a quick launchpad to the original manga. For those with a wee bit of knowledge of what it's about (like myself), the film just treads along the same lines and doesn't offer you new information. For the fanboys, I guess you'll only get some kicks at seeing some of your favorite characters come alive, only that they look more Caucasian, and have a head full of hair when they're not supposed to (someone forgot to insist that in the contract?) That's all you're gonna get. Period.

As far as film-making and story-telling techniques go, you can see cliché after cliché being thrown at you, with the poorly and cheaply rendered special effects offering no consolation. Justin Chatwin's Goku is your typical teenager who possesses innate potential yet to be realized, and in his frustration he gets treated by peers as a loser geek. He lives with his grandpa Gohan (Randall Duk Kim in stereotypical know-it-all like in Kung Pu Panda), and develops a crush on school hottie Chi Chi (Jamie Chung). Goku's calling in life is to prevent an apocalypse from happening with the return of chief cardboard baddie Lord Piccolo (an instant shoo-in as one of the worst cinematic villains, ever!) and his temporary sidekick Mai (Eriko Tamura) who attempt to collect 7 dragonballs to fulfill an ancient myth. And of course Goku needs a Fellowship, in the form of irritating tech-wizard Bulma (Emmy Rossum last seen in the sinker Poseidon), mercenary Yum Cha (Joon Park who probably copied Rain's uninspiring cinematic turn in Speed Racer to a T) and Chow Yun-Fat the biggest name of them all here trying his darnest best to act cute as Master Roshi, who imparts skills in double quick time to Goku.

Speaking of time, or the lack thereof, everything is compressed. From two weeks to two days and the day of the blood moon shielding the yellow sun (OK so I made that up), everything moves at so fast a pace, that all you get are cheesy lines of dialog, and an excuse to paste some action sequences together. And James Wong certainly can't direct action (despite being at the helm of Jet Li's The One, which was of course bland and bad), opting to pay homage to Zack Snyder's slow-mo technique, and midway changing the style to having the camera being too close to the action, in the dark, coupled with quick MTV cuts that you don't get to see a thing.

And the rush job just doesn't stop at the narrative or the action. Special effects wise, they look really cheap, and I wonder whether Producer Stephen Chow would roll his eyes at what would be extremely pale when put side by side with his Kung Fu Hustle done many years ago. Ayumi Hamasaki's contribution of the theme song Rule sounded really bad as well (I may get flak from her fans), and I guess having some Asian participation doesn't legitimize what is essentially a poorly done movie. Not even Chow Yun-Fat's star status could save this, and you wonder what figured when this is the movie that he gave up Red Cliff for.

This is basically a movie that only children below the age of 5 will enjoy tremendously, despite having to see 6 half-balls, contributed courtesy of the 3 lead female characters, being continuously flashed on screen, thanks to some neck plunging wardrobe (where's that malfunction when you need one?) Totally bland and really uninteresting, I would suggest sticking to the manga instead.