In Defense of Dragonball Evolution

[estel_oliphaunt]

Uh... that's not a sentence I ever wanted to say, sort of turns my stomach and makes me feel sick. I just can't help it, when people bitch and moan about a movie and then get the facts wrong it drives me nuts.

First things first. This:

Comments

It could be worse.

[anonymous]

See, at least Dragonball Evolution wasn't pretending to be anything that it wasn't. Nobody acting in the movie took it seriously. Everybody (except James Marsters, apparently) knew they were in a cheesy, completely faithless adaption and hammed it up.

The actors were trying to make a movie that was So Bad It's Good. I'm not saying that they succeeded by any stretch of the imagination, but they took a swing at it. And honestly, had they done something a little more faithful, the actors could have been pretty decent for what they needed, anyway. Call Justin Chatwin Gohan instead of Goku, call Jamie Chung Videl instead of Chi Chi, and with a few extra actors it could have been a good (if very cheesy) adaptation.

They had the right elements there for the movie to be viewable, except for the unforgivable script work.

The way I look at it, Dragonball Evolution could have been as bad as Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li. Tgat movie actually manages to be worse in every way except for special effects than the original Street Fighter movie.

-Marshie

Re: It could be worse.

[estel_oliphaunt]

You are so, so, so wrong. They might not have thought they were filming Inglourious Basterds, but they thought they were doing something good. All the actors were signed up for three movies, for crying out loud, and James Masters... my god that man must be on drugs. I can't even count the number of times I heard him go on about how Shakespearean the role was and blah, blah, blah... there's no way he ever read the manga.

I'm pretty sure that the first draft of this movie incorporated a lot more from the manga, you can sort of see these things gleaming through, but either the director or one of the producers (I'm gonna say Rick Thorne, because he was behind 'Elektra' and several other comic-based movies I hated) changed as much as they physically could in order to make this appeal to a wider audience... despite the fact that I think Dragon Ball is the most universally loved anime spanning over every possible category of 'audience'...

The whole thing felt like a hack job. It's barely over an hour long. How many scenes do you think they had to cut out for that to happen? What would the movie have been like if it had been released as written? Worse? Better? I have no idea, this whole things frustrates me.

Ugh, and what's even more frustrating is that Stephen Chow was offered the directors seat... STEPHEN FUCKING CHOW!!! He could have saved that fucking movie. I guess he had better shit to do, like going to the horse's mouth and making 'The Journey to the West'.

Ugh, I don't even know what point I'm trying to make, you've got me ranting. All I know is that everyone involved with this showed up thinking they were gonna make a great TRILOGY of movies, realized they were all being ass-raped, and stuck around to collect their pay-checks.