Review of Dragonball Evolution (2009) by Colginator — 13 Aug 2015

Dragon Ball is an epic saga of a kid named Goku, who travels the world to find 7 mystical balls of power to stop them from falling in to the hands of evil. In his travels he constantly overcomes his own limits to defeat any opponent in his way, protect his friends and become the greatest fighter in the world. It was a great anime that had many memorable characters and some of the most impressive action sequences on television. Dragonball Evolution on the other hand is an hour and a half of disappointment, watching as franchise that has such an enormous fan-base be ruined, losing all the charm that made the anime it was based on great to begin with.

Obviously it's understandable for a film adaptation to make changes from the source material, but there is so little here that even resembles the anime that it's based on. It does keep the basic story the same. Goku and his friends are still trying to collect the dragon balls to prevent them from falling in to the hands of the likes of the evil Lord Piccolo. They also try to incorporate various other mythos from the show like the Kamehameha wave, but they fail at doing it well. All of the explanations of the universe and Goku's powers are rushed over so quickly that people new to the series will be lost and loyalists of the franchise will be annoyed at how poorly these mythos are incorporated in the film.

Also whilst the characters share the same names as their anime counterparts, this is about as far as their similarities go. Goku's personality is changed from being a light minded fool who cares about only doing good and being the best fighter he can be, to being a typical teenage kid who spends most of the film having a crush on Chi Chi. Roshi's nothing more than a generic master who Goku finds. Bulma is just a Lara Croft type character without any of the attitude that made her character enjoyable. The character closest to their anime counterparts ends up being Lord Piccolo, since at the least he looks like the villain that he's based on. Everyone else suffers from worse miscasting than The Last Airbender movie with all the cast having nothing in common with their respective roles.

It's also a dreadfully made film on a technical level, with director James Wong taking the epic world destroying fights from the original anime and turning them into amateuristic sequences that seem like they were made by a film student. They use a mixture of awful choreography with the fighters moving slowly and fast paced editing where each shot will last no more than a second at a time. Plus for a film with a 45 million dollar budget, the effects really suck. When the 2D cartoon that the film is based on looks more realistic than the effects do, it's pretty obvious that you screwed up.

This film fails in every way. It won't appeal well to people unfamiliar to Dragon Ball since the characters and story are so generic, whilst being a terribly made mess of a film. And fans are certain to hate it since it fails to recapture anything that made the franchise great to begin with. It doesn't even feel like a real film. It feels like one of those parody trailers you see in something like The Simpsons that spoof how bad Hollywood is at with adaptations got turned into a real film. If you want to enjoy Dragon Ball just stick with the anime.