A Retrospective on Dragonball Evolution

A long time ago, Dragonball was pretty damn popular.  I watched it, and likely whoever is reading this did too.  It was so popular in fact that it got turned into a live action movie.  This just seems crazy to me.  Anyone who has seen it would probably think it couldn't be done.  Sadly they were right. When this movie came out, I used to see most big action summer movies at midnight.  I have since stopped doing that as the crowd tends to make my experience pretty bad.  But in the case of Dragonball Evolution, I was glad to be there.

No one going to see the movie expected it to be good.  The theater seemed to be impressed that anyone was going to see it.  The theater didn't fill up, but it had a lot of people in it.  The crowd was just a bunch of fans of a franchise that only a few years prior ended it's run with Dragonball GT in the US.  We were all fans, going to see a bad live action version of something we were all fans of, and plenty of us grew up with.  It was a celebration of the show, and its fans.  I was an event more than a movie. The weird thing is it felt like more of a tombstone than a movie.  It was like we were remembering a fallen friend and having a little party to celebrate their life.  This was the end of an era.  Anime was about to have it's big overload and finally fall back into its niche crowd where it belonged (Though admittedly it is a large crowd.)  Much of the fans were becoming or already had become adults.  But mostly we were about to be assaulted with the onslaught of a different beast of summer blockbuster. This beast was a continuous record crushing, season after season super hero event that is still going on.  Before all that, movies were a bit more like this one, or the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat movies when it came to summer action flicks.  Now one could argue that we have a much better breed of film in our modern times.  But the event was like a send off to days past, a last film in a series of movies like it.  We were here to celebrate.

Now people don't even remember this movie exists.  I sometimes think on it and realize that for me, summer action ended after this movie's arrival.  We had so much fun in the theater for this though. People dressed up, there were staged fights, we all talked about our favorite moments, and we watched it's death.  Dragonball is hardly gone however.  I have a DBZ shirt, there have been a couple of new animated movies, and a new series is happening.  This is where a lot of us jumped off not only the Dragonball train, but the train of being young and getting into things like anime.  I decided to re-watch this cinematic tombstone with fresh eyes and just let it happen, with bias in check, but the problem is those feelings of old kept coming back.

This is the story of not so ordinary high school student Goku who is training with his Grandfather, and on his 18th birthday Grandpa is supposed to reveal some secret to him.  Instead Goku goes to a castle mansion place where there is a high school party and his classmate Chi Chi is there.  Anyway, a green guy named Piccolo comes and destroys Goku's house, killing Grandpa in the process.

With his dying breath, Grandpa tells Goku to seek out Master Roshi and get his help to defeat Piccolo and save the world.  Pretty heavy stuff for a high school student who is a bit on the low IQ side.  Not long after, the girl from Phantom of the Opera points a gun at his head, looking to grab his Dragon Ball.  Well she is named Bulma and she wants them to do science stuff with.  Goku informs her that they are mystical wish granting orbs and informs her of his recent quest.  So she accepts this new found discovery and follows him to Chow Yun-fat's house which is on a small island in the middle of a big city.

Goku trains, and in the mean time Piccolo and his gun toting assassin make bug creatures of Piccolo's blood to fight them.  The group gets trapped by desert con man Yamcha.  Seeing they could have gotten out anyway and discovering they are looking for some balls, Yamcha follows them.  There's also the plot where Goku finds out Chi Chi is a fighter and is joining some tournament which is largely brushed over.

They go to a volcano to get a Dragonball and fight the weird bug things Piccolo made.  Does this sound like Dragonball to you?  Other than the names and what not, it really isn't.  According to the movie's lore Piccolo was sealed away by seven masters after he and Oozaru attacked earth.  We all know Goku is Oozaru, so does that mean he is 2,000 years old?  The answer is no.  Goku is not the same Oozaru that was under Piccolo's control, I think.  The movie doesn't at all explain this stuff, it just happens.

There is a scene where Chi Chi helps Goku learn his Kamehameha thing and then they bang.  A very short time later Chi Chi is apparently stealing the Dragon Balls, but it isn't Chi Chi.  It is that assassin of Piccolo's who is a shape shifting person and she gets away.

Then Piccolo has the Dragonballs and tries to summon Shenlong, Goku turns into Oozaru who is only a few feet taller than everyone, and somehow fights off Oozaru to become Goku and win against Piccolo.  All these things in the movie happen by the hour and sixteen minute mark when the credits roll.  A couple minutes after the credits start, we find out that Piccolo is still alive!  I never expected a sequel spoiler at the end of this, but it did happen, just like the Super Mario Bros Movie.

This movie is very short.  Getting through it takes an hour and twenty five minutes, and about seven of those are credits.  That is sort of a good thing because the movie isn't very good.  It also isn't boring however.  There is always something going on.  So much so that we learn very little about any of the characters before it ends.  I think the pacing is a little too fast.  The movie needed another fifteen minutes honestly, or just to be two movies with lots of character development.  Luckily they did not have the budget for that and kind of knew ahead of time that it would suck, so they kept it short.

I think years down the road people might appreciate this movie a little more.  Usually people talk about it with hatred.  I think of it with fond memories of a time that has now past.  This is the kind of movie you watch with some friends on a night where you watch bad movies.  However this one will be pretty fun because you can then all talk about a thing you used to love.  I used to buy shirts, videos, card games, trading cards, action figures, and video games of the Dragonball franchise.  It was part of who I was when I was young.  This movie is also part of that.  Part of it's explosion into pop culture, just as much as the Super Mario Bros movie, Spawn, or even the Double Dragon movie was.  It fits in with those sorts of movies and even isn't the worst example of that type of movie.  Enjoy it with some friends down the road, make fun of it, and talk about one of the things you loved when you were young.