Trailer Tuesday: Dragonball Evolution

Dragonball, the Japanese animated series, was a little after my chief cartoon-viewing time. This said, I remember tuning in once during what seemed to be an interesting and intense fight - spiky-haired hero Goku versus the diminutive, yet highly disturbing villain, Frieza. Cool, I thought, this may be worth watching. 20 minutes passed and the battle wasn't over. In fact, maybe 10 seconds of combat had been covered, and both characters had yet to utilise more than 1% of their power (holding back seems to happen a lot in the series!).

To cut a long story short, I made sure to watch the show the next day, and the next, and the day after that. And before I knew it, 5 weeks had passed... and the battle still wasn't over! Eventually it culminated with the destruction of a planet, but after that I lost interest in the plot - which seemed to involve time travel, Goku dying and sprouting a tail, and cyborgs, among other things.

The point is that Dragonball the cartoon was epic and ridiculously overblown. By comparison the live-action American film, Dragonball Evolution, looks like your bog-standard martial arts film with fantasy flavour. There doesn't seem to be a single constipated grimace in sight. This is disappointing, but not at all unexpected of Hollywood.


Of course it doesn't help that the cast is essentially all young unknowns - with the one exception being Chow Yun-Fat as Master Roshi - and the film is directed by James Wong, whose credits are pretty much restricted to The One and Final Destination.

Frankly I don't have high hopes for Dragonball, even though I'm not especially emotionally invested in the project. I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised by an at least average, not mediocre, film but going by the trailer I'm not sure we even have that to look forward to.

Anyway, for anyone interested here's the Wikipedia plot synopsis for Dragonball Evolution:

Goku (Justin Chatwin) goes on a journey to find Master Roshi (Chow Yun-Fat) and gather the seven mystical Dragon Balls before the evil Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) can. Along his way, he meets Bulma (Emmy Rossum) who then joins him to help him in his mission. When arriving at Roshi's place, he is not welcomed with an embrace but has to fight Roshi. Roshi soon learns that Goku is the grandson of Gohan (Randall Duk Kim) and thus trains him to prepare him for the ultimate battle with Lord Piccolo to prevent him from collecting the powerful Dragon Balls.

Dragonball was initially supposed to be released during the tail end of the 2008 American Summer. Eventually though it was postponed until 2009 for additional post-production work and reshoots. It's now set for release on 8 April. No clue when it will be released in South Africa but I would expect it to be around the April Easter holidays to cash in on all the kiddies bored during their school holidays.