Dragonball: Evolution (2009)

The entire assembly of the film crew and casting is WRONG (excluding the catering and the grip and electric guys). Asia has the first priority to watch such a bad film done by JAMES WONG. Why is he still getting work from Hollywood anyway? "The One" was badly done and James is just the worse director ever, I tell ya, he is walking on thin ice in the film industry. He has absolutely no vision of this film. Who hired him anyway? This film is so amateur done that it looks like student film. I can't believe 20th Century Fox distribute a student film worldwide. Btw, did they just put Stehpen Chow's name as the producer as a marketing strategy for Asia? The film ended with a hint of a sequel, and if it does, it will most likely end up re-shooting the entire film (remember of The Hulk). King Piccolo lacks of drive for him to destroy the world. Plot is flat, character drives are lame. Dialogs are stereotype. Ben Ramsey did a poor job as a screenwriter, he is lack of experience to write such an epic movie.

Casting: God damn it, wrong cast dude! Carla Hool, please go back home and do some home work first! Who hired the casting department? I recall the same casting director did the Forbidden Kingdom also cast this movie -- Popping AuYeung. She sucks! Did such a bad job casting in Forbbiden Kingdom and in Dragon Ball. I wonder why is she still surviving in the industry at all. Jamie Chung tries too hard to be cute, and she is ugly. Master Mutaito is a black guy? Emmy Rossum was great in The Day After Tomorrow but not in this movie. I can assure you that it's not really her fault, James just doesn't know what he was doing. Eriko Tamura as Mai is just a redundant character, the wardrobe department tries very hard to dress her up sexy while she is not. By the way, her boobs didn't override her bad acting and ugliness. She must have missed Acting 101 class.

Visual Effect: At some point of the movie, when Guko turns into a gorilla the visual effect was so poorly done that it looks some what like "Rubber Chicken". Did they slip in few shots done by stop motion? The face of Gozoru looks like it was done in After Effects, it doesn't look like 3D at all!! First scene of the film, Goku was training with Gohan, the matte painting of the house was so badly done that it looks 2D (cardboard stand) in the background. Blue / Green screen spill was all over, color correction sucks. Visual effect was done much like fresh grad student level. Hollywood have done so much super hero movies in the recent years, and I think the producers just hire the wrong bunch to do such a visual effects intensive film. I believe that Fox knew this film wouldn't go anywhere so they cut budget from hiring the good guys to work on this film!!!

Art Design / Production Design My recommendation is to get Stephen Scott, Simon Lamont and the bunch who did Hellboy to work on DragonBall. The original DragonBall story heavily involves with aliens and action, and I believe that they are the right group of guys to do this film. Their creature designs and makeup fits in this category. Piccolo looks like alien from Mars, one of those "Mars Attack" films from the 60s. Costumn in the entire film doesn't match the theme at all, looks like they shop wardrobe from Wal-Mart. The story will be more interesting if it were to take place more into the future (like in the movie Minority Report). The location of Master Roshi's house is totally mismatch to the surrounding backdrop. The matte painting of the city light

Fmovies: Hollywood plundering Japanese pop culture isn't something new. From "Americanizing" television series for the kids from Power Rangers to Ultraman, and adapting famed characters from Japanese film, games and manga to frequent disastrous effect, it still wouldn't stop the studios from going after one property after another. This time round it's the long running Dragonball series, because the assumption is that the built-in fan base would translate to instant dollars at the box office. Not.

You have to give the filmmakers a little bit of credit though, being either foolhardy, or just plain ballsy. It's a given that they cannot condense and distill the rich content into a surprisingly less than 90 minute movie, and live in the hopes of producing a sequel, or to generate a franchise (i.e. don't leave the cinema hall when the end credits start to roll). But what they successfully do, is to super-summarize the entire mythos by throwing out everything except the main gist of the entire manga, making it extremely simplistic in poor lazy-man standards in adaptation.

For the uninitiated, the film would serve as a quick launchpad to the original manga. For those with a wee bit of knowledge of what it's about (like myself), the film just treads along the same lines and doesn't offer you new information. For the fanboys, I guess you'll only get some kicks at seeing some of your favorite characters come alive, only that they look more Caucasian, and have a head full of hair when they're not supposed to (someone forgot to insist that in the contract?) That's all you're gonna get. Period.

As far as film-making and story-telling techniques go, you can see cliché after cliché being thrown at you, with the poorly and cheaply rendered special effects offering no consolation. Justin Chatwin's Goku is your typical teenager who possesses innate potential yet to be realized, and in his frustration he gets treated by peers as a loser geek. He lives with his grandpa Gohan (Randall Duk Kim in stereotypical know-it-all like in Kung Pu Panda), and develops a crush on school hottie Chi Chi (Jamie Chung). Goku's calling in life is to prevent an apocalypse from happening with the return of chief cardboard baddie Lord Piccolo (an instant shoo-in as one of the worst cinematic villains, ever!) and his temporary sidekick Mai (Eriko Tamura) who attempt to collect 7 dragonballs to fulfill an ancient myth. And of course Goku needs a Fellowship, in the form of irritating tech-wizard Bulma (Emmy Rossum last seen in the sinker Poseidon), mercenary Yum Cha (Joon Park who probably copied Rain's uninspiring cinematic turn in Speed Racer to a T) and Chow Yun-Fat the biggest name of them all here trying his darnest best to act cute as Master Roshi, who imparts skills in double quick time to Goku.

Speaking of time, or the lack thereof, everything is compressed. From two weeks to two days and the day of the blood moon shielding the yellow sun (OK so I made that up), everything moves at so fast a pace, that all you get are cheesy lines of dialog, and an excuse to paste some action sequences together. And James Wong certainly can't direct action (despite being at the helm of Jet Li's The One, which was of course bland and bad), opting to pay homage to Zack Snyder's slow-mo technique, and midway changing the style to having the camera being too close to the action, in the dark, coupled with quick MTV cuts that you don't get to see a thing.

And the rush job jus

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.

Dragonball: Evolution fmovies. This Movie plain and simple insults our intelligence, I mean I'm no Geek, but tham they were way off!, this should not even be called dragonball, because of stupid 20th Century Fox, now dragonball is ruined, if someone wanted to make a better movie with the real story that Akira Toriyama made, they made so many changes and mistakes that the dragonball that we know is gone forever, on Watchmen they made some changes but only so the essence of the show could be shown on film, but Dragonball is dead they killed it, I'm sorry Akira Toriyama they ruined your work and about every Anime , and dbz fan out there, like my Grandfather just to say "there's cheese all over that movie" It is illogical to spend the money on copyrights if you're not even going to use the story.

Zac Bertschy of Anime News Network, originally disgusted at Otaku decrying the film via leaked set shots and trailers even before the movie was released, gave the movie an overall F grade, admitting that "The fans were right." Criticizing the films lack of explaining plot elements to its hackmead storyline and lackluster effort by the actors, he suggested that the film "Might be fun when you're hammered and surrounded by friends. Or suicidal, and need something to push you over the edge."

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.

The story starts with Goku (Justin Chatwin of War of the worlds), who sets out upon his grandfather Gohan's (Randall Kin) dying request to meet the Master Roshi (Chow Yun Fat of Crouching tiger , hidden dragon) and unite all seven Dragon Balls of which he has one . In order to avoid the villain Lord Piccolo (James Marsters of Buffy Slayer) from succeeding in his objective to use the Dragon Balls to take over the world. And Goku's seeks is to get the mystical Dragonballs before the Lord of evil does . But in the meantime, the super powerful Piccolo along with his hoodlum are preparing to destroy everything that lives , and only the valiant Goku helped by Bulma (Emmy Rossum of Phantom of opera) have the power to stop them . Meanwhile Goku falls in love with his school mate Chi Chi (Jamie Chung) .

Dragon Ball are basically numerous spectacular fight-scenes with a tiny bit of plot movement, full of repetitive dialogue and flashy blasts of light and energy, but that hasn't prevented kids and teenagers from eating them up . It contains cartoon violence and minor sexual innuendo than anime series . Occasionally features stunted and disjointed action, as well as the hilarious but quite conventional characters fitting partially to animated series . The abundant computer generator images , which labor mightily to reproduce the source materials in some impressive scenes and eye-popping look . These adventures can be good for novices and youngsters age 10 should drawn into the story but not for the established fans . James Wong adapts the rich myth of the Dragonball series that grew from a Manga into various popular animated series by means of hundreds episodes that are brought to life with this 20th Century Fox and Stephen Chow ( Kung Fu hustler )production . James Wong is a good writer(21 Jump Street , X-files) , producer (Black Christmas , The others , Milennium) and director (Final destination 1 y 3 , The one , and X files episodes) , but his filmmaking in Dragon Ball is ridiculous and embarrassment . Rating : Below average .