I had high hopes for this.
Wait, no.
I had almost no hopes for this. I had a glimmer of something which might in some alternate universe have resembled a hope. However, what this movie actually appears to be is not merely bad, but a nightmarishly awful destruction of everything good about Dragonball and Z.
The problems:
First, Shia LeBouf is a problem, though he’s not per se bad. He is quite effective in certain roles. I didn’t mind in the Transformers movie, where he was relatively ordinary and didn’t detract from the overall story. However, he is not an action star and probably won’t be for a good many years, if ever. He doesn’t have the build and his attempts to look fearsome merely make him look retarded and constipated.
I don’t blame him. He is, for some ungodly reason, heavily in demand and he wants to ride it as far as he can. Good for him.
Two, no Krillin. This is actually bad because Krillin was always more accesible to the audience than some other characters. He’s cunning, funny, and strong. He always played well off the innocent, amiable dunce Goku. And it’d be nice to see a real buddy movie.
Three, Piccolo. Well, Piccolo did look silly. That was part fo the charm. The new Piccolo is OK, but… he looks like a man with a skin condition pretending not to be a man with a skin condition. He looks like a cheap alien from Star Trek (the original series) or an old Dr. Who episode.
Four, Bulma should be involved, but… she really shouldn’t be waving guns around and shooting things like this was western. Guns don’t work real well.
Fifth, the whole thing just seems to have totally lost the charm of DB. Dragonball, depsite the probable death of civilization on a weekly basis, was ultimately a whinsical, magical world of relative innocence. This movie is trying to hard. The tech is fun and silly, it’s “cool” and slick.
What is not a problem:
White vs. Asian actors. This is not a big deal, people. Dragonball was not about Japanese people. Heck, most of them were aliens, and they actually borrowed more from Japan than the humans. Earth-people (the ones who were not talking animals) actually seemed to me to be pretty generic.
