Hopefully it will be awesome. Hopefully…
New Review – Dragonball Evolution
The new review has been posted: The surprisingly not bad Dragonball Evolution. It isn’t great, but I didn’t feel angry for how stupid it was after it was over like a certain other 2009 film involving people fighting that will be the next review. Instead we get this crazy fantasy brainless film that makes you think about balls. Dragonballs. And yet, the only dragon in the film, we don’t know if he actually had any balls. Something to ponder. Complete with clip and lots of pictures, read it today!
Dragonball Evolution (Review)
Dragonball Evolution
2009
Directed by James Wong
Written by Ben Ramsey
Dragonball is a famous manga and anime series from Japan that has fans all over the world. I am not one of those fans so I don’t give a crap how they deviated from the source material. If you just want to read a review that complains about that stuff, then I am sorry, this is not the review for you. If you want to read a review that complains about other stupid stuff and yet still gives the film a fairly positive review, then you have hit the jackpot. Also, there is a monkeyman in this movie, and a CGI dragon. Just saying.
Dragonball the anime is about some dudes who spend 99% of the show charging up for the 1% where they fight and someone gets blasted only for them to fight next week after more charging up. It is the most popular show that has ever existed in the world. The movie decided to ignore the charging up and instead do some sort of “Find the Dragonballs!” plot. Fine with me. The film then basically becomes a low-rent Star Wars ripoff, or at least that same stupid farmboy mythology that everyone does. Sure, that legend has been around forever and Star Wars is known for borrowing elements wholesale from other myths itself, but all of those stories now just end up being compared to Star Wars, like it or not.
And where were the fistcams we were told about? I don’t remember any fistcams in the film. Maybe they realized it looked stupid.
Justin Chatwin does a good job with the normal teenager parts, but the sections where he is vowing revenge, questioning people about stuff in the dragonball mythology, or calling upon dragons to resurrect his master all come off as very badly acted. He just isn’t a good genre actor at this point, but he would be find chatting up some girl on 90210 or something.
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Dragonball Z will have fistcams!
VFX supervisor Velasco Shaw employed what Wong calls “fist-cams” – from the noted company Iconix – that are so small they could be attached to an actor’s fist, allowing a character’s punch to come right into the audience. “It’s a kind of ‘fist POV’,” Wong elaborates. McLachlan contributed the suggestion of using new high-speed digital Phantom cameras to create super-slow motion for key action sequences. “We did a lot of research and development with the Phantom cameras,” says McLachlan, who had discovered the-then experimental photography on YouTube. In the YouTube video, a balloon filled with water was popped, with the “action” caught at 1000 frames per second. McLachlan and Wong were impressed with the results. “The most spectacular thing about it was that the water retained the shape of the balloon before it fell,” Wong remembers.
Here are some bonus pictures of Jamie Chung, who plays Chi Chi: