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Thoughts on the Dragonball Movie |
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Written by Storage and Disposal
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Thursday, 02 October 2008 01:49 |
Thoughts on the upcoming Dragonball movie.
Ugh. All right. I can't say that I'm really looking forward to this movie. I admittedly enjoyed watching the cartoon. I liked the strange characters, the emphasis on training as opposed to people just having the super powers they use to defeat villains here in the states, and I actually liked how drawn out the series was. I can't think of very many other cartoons that would put such an emphasis on what the heroes do when they aren't in the middle of an adventure. Okay, I admit it, it got pretty damn boring, but it's still an interesting thought to me. When I heard they were making a live action movie about it, I was less than ecstatic. But still, I'll be seeing the kamehameha and other energy blasts on the big screen with super powered live-action people flying around. That might be worth seeing. Then I thought, "Well, maybe just a rental..." I work at the theater now, so I'll probably just watch it for free here. Honestly? I'm not looking forward to it much. I'm more looking forward to the first trailer so I can get a feeling of how truly ridiculous it will be. Now I know what some of you are thinking. "How can you judge a movie before you even see it? A number of movies have suffered from shitty promotion and still turned out to be good!" And all right. You got me there. But I have 4 reasons for expecting the worst.
1. Director
James Wong. Have you heard of him? If you said you didn't, I think I know why. I wasn't familiar with him, so I had to wikipedia him. The only movie series he's really been famous for is the Final Destination series. Yeah, the man responsible for Final Destination 3 is being held responsible for the first Dragonball movie. He's bringing the cinematographer and special effects supervisor from that movie along for the ride, so that isn't looking too promising. Granted, I didn't bother seeing Final Destinations 2-3, so maybe I'm being unfair. I saw the first one and thought, "Well, that wasn't really too bad... Could have been a lot better, but I was expecting worse." Then they made a sequel and I thought, "How could they make a sequel out of such a movie??? What new ideas could the possibly add aside from trying to find different ways of killing undeveloped characters I don't give a shit about? If I want to see that, there's much more promising movies that I can waste my time with." Maybe I'm being unfair, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
2. Hollywoodization
How many American movies based on Japanese movies can you think of that match up to the original? I read that they're moving on to South Korea with plans to remake Park Chan-wook's Oldboy and a remake of A Tale of Two Sisters will be released in January 2009. From what I've read and seen, the only thing they seem to be doing well is taking away the edge such movies have to make it more accessible. They don't care about what makes any of these movies great. All they see is success overseas and a chance to replicate it over here. Some are mediocre, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you can't top the original, don't even try. If movie remakes are horrible, what chance does a remake of a series have? Well, we've seen how well Speed Racer did. It didn't exactly match studio expectations.
3. The Cast
In the face of such premature criticism, I expect them to at least try to prove statistics wrong. So what's the cast like?
Oh, come on! That's Bulma and Goku? If this is Dragonball, shouldn't Goku be a kid? And look at him! He might as well be Elijah Wood. Justin Chatwin? Who is that? What did he play on? oh, he's Robbie from War of the Worlds. Has he played on anything else? SuperBabies: Baby Genuises part 2... Shit. And Emmy Rossum. She has some talent, but what's with the blue highlights? Oh, Bulma had blue hair in the cartoon. Well, if you're going to give her blue hair, just give her blue hair. At least she's hot.
If it's anything like the cartoon, they'll emphasize her breasts and appeal to at least one demographic. And I still might be kind of harsh on them. Chow Yun-Fat is cast as Master Roshi. He's not very old, but they could do a lot worse. And judging from this picture, they've adapted his perverted tendencies.
So maybe they didn't get everything wrong.
4. Sweet Jesus, Look What They Did to Piccolo!
Someone put on their Artistic Freedom shoes and walked the hell all over him. At the very best, it looks like a villain from the actor's (James Marsters) TV shows like Angel or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm not saying those shows sucked, I didn't watch much of them, but when you have a budget of well over 100 million dollars, you should be able to come up with something better. I mean, he looks like he would fit well in a Power Rangers rogue gallery. Speaking of which...
What are these guys? Putties? Could it get any worse?
All right, so it looks like they took second-hand costumes from Power Rangers and that movie Dungeons and Dragons and threw them in a blender. That's 4 strikes and I haven't even seen a trailer for this movie yet. But who knows, maybe they'll pull something decent out of their asses. All I'm saying is so far it definitely doesn't look that way
This article was done by Storage and Disposal
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I never liked the bald headed little **** in the show, so that part is good 
And the artwork looks so freakin COOL! 
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There is no way this can turn into a good movie.