I’m convinced that you cannot make a good Dragonball live action
movie. So far there have been three
attempts to make a live action “cash-in” off the Dragonball franchise. While I
have not seen the Korean movie from 1990, the two I have seen were both awful.
I mean, they were so bad that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay
choose water-boarding over watching them! I can only imagine how bad the Korean
movie is. Why are these movies so terrible? The answer will also help explain
why such a movie should never exist…
Now, I am a fan of the Dragonball franchise which is
comprised of three separate series: Dragonball, Dragonball Z and Dragonball GT.
Is the franchise flawed? Definitely. Does it run on for far too long at times with
unnecessary padding? You betcha. That said, it would be foolish to discredit
the impact that the franchise has had on action cartoons both in Japan and America.
Right away I must point out that there is a big difference
between making a comic book movie like Iron Man and making a Dragonball film.
Yes, I know Dragonball started as manga, but even that followed a long
storyline of continuity while most American comic books work on either
stand-alone stories of smaller story arcs, usually being no more than twelve
parts. The problem is that with a good writer a somewhat original story can be
written for a character like Iron Man while still including major plot points
from the comics. (For instance, the first Iron Man borrowed from the origin and
the Iron Monger storyline.) It is far more difficult to write a decent
Dragonball script that essentially gets all the characters together, have them
hunt for the dragonballs, establishes a villain who probably also wants the
dragonballs, have Goku train and get more powerful (as he always did in every
storyline) and have him wage an epic battle against the villain. If it were
just those plot points it might not be so bad, but it gets a lot trickier.
For one thing, there is just too much continuity. Hundreds
of episodes were made for Dragonball and Dragonball Z. I just don’t think you
can tell an adequate story that establishes both Goku and whatever villain he
is facing while giving screen time to fan favorites. Today’s movies aim to be
around ninety minutes to allow for more showings at cinemas and thus more
money. You can get away with two hours with some genres like drama and some
action. Occasionally you will get a very long movie like Lord of the Rings,
Harry Potter and The Dark Knight that will be allotted extra time to cover more
ground with the story, but studios will only give this special extended length
to features guaranteed to get people in the theaters. Dragonball, whose heyday
ended about a decade ago, holds no such guarantee. So with a length of one
hundred twenty minutes tops, how do you tell a good story without butchering
the source material too much (making your fanboy demographic very angry in the
process), give screen time to all the necessary characters and give the audience
the satisfying epic fights and battles they come to expect from a popcorn flick
such as this? Unless you are making all original bad guys or basing it off one
of the stand alone movies, I don’t think you can.
Now you have to consider what the target audience wants from
the film and in turn what the studio will want to ensure the biggest profit.
First of all, most Americans are really only familiar with Dragonball Z, but
the story started with Dragonball… which in of itself was comprised of 153
episodes. Kind of a lot to skip, don’t you think? Also consider that Dragonball
followed Goku from around age 5 until adulthood (the series ended with him
getting married to Chi-Chi) and all throughout Goku learned new techniques and
became a better fighter. However, studios would rather the movie jump to the
huge world shattering fights of Dragonball Z since a lot of Americans found the
original series boring. (For the record, Jonny Prophet and I both agree that
Dragonball is the best of the three series.) So do you tell a slower story that
builds up Goku gradually and risk that the earlier films don’t make enough to
continue the franchise or do you cash your chips and start with Spirit Bombs and Super Saiyans in the hopes of having a box office hit and risk
telling a disjointed story that pisses off the fanbase? Secondly, you run the
risk of having another situation like Spider-man 3… trying to please everyone
and ending up with too many characters for the time allotted. You want to see
Picollo, right? What about Vegeta? Are you still going to introduce Goku’s
friends and allies such as Master Roshi, Bulma, Chi-Chi, Krillin and Yamcha?
That’s a lot of characters in a movie that is supposed to establish the hero
first and foremost. Even Dragonball Evolution, which limited the characters to
Goku, Bulma, Yamcha, Chi-Chi, Master Roshi and Picollo (I know there was some
ninja chick, but she was just filler), ended up having too many characters to
juggle and made for a story that felt very rushed… and crappy.
I also have to make this point. When making this movie, how
do you visualize it looking in your head? For the life of me I cannot envision
this movie ever looking good with flesh and blood actors. In Dragonball Evolution
we already saw that Piccolo looked like a weird green vampire thing. Do you
really think Vegeta can be made to look any better with his long spiked up hair
and widows peak? How about Freeza; would he be CGI or would, God help us,
someone be wearing a rubber costume ala’ Godzilla? Maybe you can do a stop
motion thing with Andy Serkis! And what
would a Super Saiyan look like with its blonde hair sticking up and energy
aura? I just do not see it translating well onto the big screen.
See, modern superhero movies have found a nice balance
between costumes and superpowers meeting our reality. Even Thor, the most
fantastical of the modern superhero films had a somewhat down to Earth feel.
The problem with Dragonball’s world is that it doesn’t have a firm grasp on our
reality to begin with! You have humans co-mingling with anthropomorphic
animals, dinosaurs randomly walking around, advanced technology like robots,
flying cars and “capsules” that can make almost anything portable! It works in
a comic and cartoon, but on a big screen… not so much. This is why Evolution
tried to establish itself in essentially our world which right off the bat meant
the movie had lost a major element to its charm and severed a link to the
source material that left the end product kind of flat.
Casting is also a big issue. If the movie is made in America, then
it will be expected that a white male will fill the title role of Goku… hence
the casting of Justin Chatwin. (Because lots of Canadians are named Goku,
right?). I like Justin Chatwin, I enjoyed him in The Chumscrubber and love him on Shameless, but he had no business doing Dragonball. I could never
get used to a white guy playing Goku… it’s like a white guy playing Othello!
It’s just not right! The problem is Hollywood
only really works with a few Asian martial artists, ones who are fluent in
English and are recognizable to the US market. Yes, a few are
introduced like Jay Chou as Kato in last year’s Green Hornet or Rain in Ninja
Assassin or even Jang Gong Don in The
Warrior’s Way, but I haven’t seen them popping up recently (in Rain’s case
because he joined the South Korean army).
Another casting issue is that all of the characters in the
Dragonball universe have very unique appearances and above all come across
cartoonish… being a cartoon that can be expected. Some characters might look
alright, such as Krillin, Nappa and Yamcha (somehow, even though Dragonball
Evolution cast an Asian guy as Yamcha, they still managed to screw it up by
giving him bleached blonde hair!). We already saw that Picollo looked like ass
in Evolution, how bad would they screw up Vegeta, Freeza and Cell? Crappy
looking characters can ruin a movie’s reputation before it even hits theaters…
or did we forget the movie version of Parallax?
Dragonball Evolution is proof that just because Hollywood can do it doesn’t
mean they should. Yes, we can do great special effects and CGI nowadays, but
that doesn’t replace a good story… unless your name is Michael Bay,
then it’s your bread and butter. The truth is I don’t think that there is a
good way to tell a decent story using the Dragonball universe within the Hollywood system. The way the series is set up is like
that of a long-running serial that builds off the previous long-running serial.
Having five hundred and eight episodes allows for a thorough exploration of the
show and its characters. Having a hundred and twenty minutes just leads to a
confusing, jumbled mess… with explosions.
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