Finding the good in the bad can be difficult sometimes
When a young warrior named Goku comes of age and must defend earth against an evil alien named Lord Piccolo, things get rough. Goku must obtain the seven Dragonballs (no snickering) and with their combined power use them against Piccolo.
I’m not going to be that reviewer who has to seem witty to get his point across when it comes to Dragonball; I will open and honest. This is quite possibly the worst movie that I’ve seen in my life. Let me explain to you why this film fails.
There is literally no character development for any of the films personalities. Outside of the backstory at the beginning, we don’t really get to know Goku very well. He is just thrown into the story and then asked to be the lead without any warrant or warning. Sure his grandfather bites the big one at the hands of Piccolo’s assassin, but he understands as much as we do why he’s there and how important he is. We’re completely left in the dark. This is just one example because every character in the film is thrown into the story the exact same way. You don’t know these people, you don’t get to know these people therefore you have no connection with them. For example, when Bulma shows up and starts trying to kill Goku you never get a healthy introduction for her. Outside of that, Goku immediately befriends and trusts this woman who nearly killed him. In what warped universe would you immediately (almost instantly) befriend someone trying to blow your head off? Think about that.
The editing and script were horrible. Let’s reverse that and start with the story. As I just explained, there is poor character development in the film. You don’t get to know any of these people and even if you did, you wouldn’t care. The responsibility of that lies solely on Ben Ramsey. Prior to this film he had only written two other pieces (which I haven’t and won’t be seeing) and he’ll be writing Luke Cage. Ramsey has no concept of continuity as the story jumps from one place to another without any reason. He seems very interested in progressing the story, but not interested at all with explaining how we got to certain plot points. It’s as if he just didn’t care about the whys and just wanted to focus on the action and witty lines. For example, when you jump from the death of the grandfather to burying him to finding another dragonball in a large city to going to a house to going to the desert to going to a volcano (there are no in-between bridges) it gets really confusing really fast. Nothing seems to fit in the story the progression seems very disjointed. There are no amount of actors or actresses who can make your audience forget that they shouldn’t worry about story details (see Star Wars prequels for examples).
As for the editing, it just didn’t work. Outside of the action sequences, which were mostly neat, but sometimes goofy, the broken story made the editing bad. I’m sure editors Matt Friedman and Chris Willingham were just beside themselves when they were piecing this thing together. When/if you watch this film you’ll understand that when your team climbs through certain mountain passes, emerge successfully into a volcanic area and retrieve a dragonball in the middle of lava only to have it taken away by someone who clearly didn’t have to go the same route as you, that’s just going to be an editing nightmare. And it’s nightmare not because the shots don’t go together, but because they don’t ‘logically’ go together.
Let’s move on to the Blu-ray portion of the movie.
As bright as a dragonball
With bad there is good and the good is the HD. Thanks to an already colorful comic and show, Dragonball Evolution looks really sharp in HD. The costumes, the locations, everything about the movie screams pretty when it comes to the Blu-ray side of things. This movie looked better than movies that deserved more acclaim and I simply can’t take that away from it. The audio and video looks fantastic and if there’s anything that should be appreciated about the film it’s this.
As for features, it’s loaded:
– Goku’s Workout Featurette
– Goku’s Quest Game
– Deleted Scenes
– Brian Anthony “Worked up!” Music Video
– Gag Reel
– Fox Movie Channel presents Making a Scene
– Fox Movie Channel presents Life After Film School with Justin Chatwin
– Digital Copy
For a movie that was so disastrous on so many levels, it actually has some good special features.