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A Surprising Review of Dragonball: Evolution
04-14-2009, 08:13 AM
...from Ryk E.
Spoor, fanfic and pro sf author and Dragonball otaku.
Short version: the trailers deliberately lied and it's a lot more like canon!Dragonball than we'd been led to believe.
I may actually watch this now...
--Sam
"Cha la, head cha la..."
They actually kept the capsules? Well, the movie's already exceeded my expectations. I'll try to hit it this week.
Murmur the Fallen
Unregistered
You really need to expunge all memories of the original manga and anime in order to have any sort of enjoyment for DBE.
Also: ignore nagging suspicions of racism.
Also: Do not expect Oscar-worthy acting.
It is what it is, which is a sci-fi kung-fu mystic action movie, much like the original Dragonball only with more sexual tension and less potty humor. So with
that in mind I enjoyed it a fair bit. It had punching and kicking and loss and growing up through fighting.
So yeah.
Let's put it this way: it was better than Eragon.
-murmur
Damning with faint praise, I suppose
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I... it was bad. They did a bunch of Dragonball stuff, and just proved that a lot of that stuff doesn't work outside a cartoon. Like, seriously, the final
battle was bad. Really bad.
The story was disjointed. The acting was horrible (even from Fat and Marsters). The special effects were laughable (fear my ball of brightly colored dust!).
I laughed at the hair gel joke. That was funny. Oh, and Bulma's fight with evil shapeshifting ninja skank was actually more interesting than... anything
else. Though I have no idea what kind of accent the actress was trying to pull off.
-----------------
Epsilon
Ah, they did a credit cookie. They think it going to get a sequel!
"Random suspicions of racism"? Please don't tell me you are yet another of those people who think it's racist that an alien monkey from a
planet ruled by a dog isn't "Asian" (because, of course, all Asians are a homogeneous ethnicity). If you meant something more specific from the
movie, I'll reserve judgement.
Seeing it on Sunday. Oh, what fun!
There has been a LOT of fanboy whining over Goku not being "Asian" (it's always "Asian", not Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, et
cetera, because they're all pretty much interchangable, y'see!). This despite the fact Asia does not exist in DB world, that Goku was based on a monkey
and later retconned into being an alien superman, and that the world the story takes place in is ruled by a dog. As is probably evident, I find that
eye-rollingly stupid and debateably more racist than they think the movie is.
I'd really much rather whine on the fact that Goku starts as a teenager and has to go to