Dragonball: Evolution

What is wrong with this picture man? Nothing personal to James as a director. I love his Final Destination series, but I think James is NOT the right person to direct this million plus dollars franchise. Why James is hired to direct this movie in the first place? It is a big mistakes. Like having Ang Lee directing the Hulk. Hiring an Asian to direct an Asian animation epic doesn't mean the movie will turn out great. The director must have a vision of the given materials.

The entire outcome is a disaster and disappointment. It is understandable that the film isn't exactly the same as the original comic, but the characters and the plot just suck as a film on its own. From observing the promotion materials of Dragonball, it seems that Fox doesn't want to do this movie at all. The posters suck and the trailers suck. The studio spends a lot of money on making Marvels and DC comics into movies, look how successful those films had become. The studios should pay more respect and faith in Asian materials.

To me this whole thing isn't making any sense at all because there are established fans across the globe, and Dragonball comic and cartoon itself has last more than TWO decades. This is why I think 20th Century Fox was putting money into this project initially. Everyone is looking forward to see a Hollywood version of Dragonball. Soon as I saw the first teaser, I knew I shouldn't put up in any hope into this movie. Even though I went to see the movie without any expectation, the movie still suck! Despite the led down of the Dragonball fans, it creates negative impulses to those who is new to Dragonball.

Dragonball is a hot cult in Asia and it hits the western market because of the stylistic action and fight sequences. However, the martial arts choreography in this movie is another led down. Not to mention the screenplay, the production design of this film is not consistence at all. Wardrobes, props to makeup, nothing fits together! Not only nothing in this film resembles the original DB, it is a disgrace. No wonder they use the word "Evolution". But when they say evolution, I don't expect the studio turns something respectable like Dragonball into rubbish. I've seen a live action version of Dragonball shot by the Malaysian years ago. Although it is an exact duplicate of the animation. But the movie is far better than Dragonball Evolution.

A lot of us are looking for a remake of this movie.

This movie is just plain disappointing to say the least. I don't care if this is an adaptation of Dragonball. The only reason why I gave it a 3 out of 10 rating was for the special effects and production value which were semi-decent. I don't understand what was wrong with the original storyline that needed to be changed and messed with. It's the original storyline that made fans love Dragonball in the first place. "If it ain't broke don't fix it." I think this movie would do a lot better if they stuck with the original story and had better casting. The real fans would flood the theaters to watch it which would bring hype to the movie for new viewers that don't know about Dragonball, kind of like how Watchmen did. Street Fighter was horrible and they expect to do a sequel to it, this movie was a travesty...I guess next up will be Thundercats and Voltron for Hollywood to mess up for me. Thank you Hollywood for ruining my childhood memories.

For manga and anime fans around the world, the story of Dragonball has to be at the top, or at least in the top 3 of their most beloved manga/anime stories ever written. There is already an existing live action Dragonball movie called Dragonball: The Magic Begins (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122050/) made in Taiwan back in 1989. That movie tried really hard to stay as close as possible to the original story of Dragonball as written by Akira Toriyama, but it ended up being more of a comedy. The entire story also only went up to the Pilaf storyline, which was way before the first Piccolo appearance. This movie, although aged and not exactly a direct interpretation of the Dragonball story, was still appreciated by most fans due to the comedic entertainment value.

Now, another live action Dragonball movie has come, called Dragonball: Evolution. When the first few pictures of this movie appeared on the internet, a lot of the fans already predicted that the movie would turn out horrible because the characters don't look like themselves. The characters were heavily changed and westernized too much, especially Piccolo, the main villain, who didn't look like the one from the manga and anime. Fast forward to a few weeks before the latest Dragonball movie was released, a trailer was leaked on the internet. That trailer spelled the certain doom of the movie to the fans of the show. Most of the comments described the movie as "Not Dragonball, but another action movie".

This writer was fortunate enough to be invited to a private screening of the movie, and boy was I surprised! I was already expecting the movie to be bad and not a "real" Dragonball, but what I witnessed was something much more horrible! Granted that the movie was really different, but the way the movie progressed, the introduction of characters, the fight scenes, oh wow, you'd think it was a movie created by elementary kids who had no idea what Dragonball was about, except for the "Kamehameha" move and the 7 dragon balls, just with the financial backing of a millionaire.

Everything seemed rushed in the movie and characters would just pop out of nowhere and decide to join together to beat Piccolo. The love angle in the story seemed forced as well, everybody was simply out of character. Goku's a powerful but lame school boy, Chi Chi's a martial art school girl who can't even open her own locker, Master Roshi's some crazy dude living in the city (at least he still wears a Hawaiian shirt and seems a little perverted), Bulma became Lara Croft and Rambo combined in another body with a bizarre voice, Mai (originally one of Pilaf's hilarious henchmen in the manga) became a cold blooded, shape-shifting killer, Yamcha became a weird cross between a desert bandit who can't fight and a hobo with unwashed hair, and Piccolo became a weird vampire whose outfit seems to be inspired by the Matrix. I think only Grandpa Gohan was close enough to the original character, except for the way he exits the movie early on.

The fight scenes were lame. Dragonball was about epic sized battles that could not be contained in one location. Characters would get punched through mountains, cities would be destroyed, the earth would rumble and split up due to the massive forces of the fighters. In this movie, everything seemed so lame. Even the Kamehameha attack was used to light some candles! Talk about total weakening!

The only "good" things about the movie were the special effects, although the energy blasts seemed very weak.

My advise is, if you're going to pay to watch this movie, DON'T DO IT. Listen to what almost everybody has been saying because they're right, the movie is worse than what you currently have in mind!

Let me just start off by saying that there are no redeeming qualities to this movie at all. The multi-million dollar budget has amounted to a teen drama mixed with power rangers. The final product is insulting, to say the least.

The creators of this horrible, horrible adaption should take a good long think about what they have done and why they should have just followed the source material instead of taken it for granted. Do they really think that the entire Dragonball fan-base is this stupid? Akira Toriyama probably has a noose around his neck right about now.

To finish this off: The acting is atrocious, the butt-rock scattered through the soundtrack will make you want to punch the guy running the theater in the face, and the story is basically the manga's, but cut up, put into a blender, stuffed into sausage skins, and stitched back together with an American flag tied around it.

If you want your Dragonball fix, just buy dvds of the show instead, skip the movie, and if you don't skip it, then at least don't pay for this thing. I heard that a sequel is already in the works, and we don't need a trilogy, that would be three of these movies too many.

As a Dragon Ball fan this was clearly not anything even similar.

As a movie fan, this was atrocious.

Its hard to understand what kind of drugs all the people involved were in