Night of Destiny

So I just saw Dragonball: Evolution.

Let me give you a short preface to this. I am a lifelong Dragonball fan. It was one of the first anime I watched when I was aware that anime was not being made by the same people as American cartoons. I love DB and DBZ to death, and will defend them to no end, which I have had to do a surprisingly large number of times. I get the issues people (geeks) have with DBZ, I have constructed a pretty solid case on why they don't matter to me.

ANYWAY. I got to see this movie with Steve and Eric, the two people who, by FAR, come home the least out of all my friends. We watched DBZ together as kids, and besides Pokemon it was the biggest thing that brought us together and made us such epicly awesome compatriots. That we all happened to be home on the opening weekend of this movie was nothing less than a miracle, the universe excersizing its will and probably expending the equal effort it would take to create world peace and end hunger and badtimes just to make this event special for us.

We knew it would be ridiculous.

But we couldn't have known what we were truly in for.

There's roughly two minutes of the movie, the first two minutes, that make anything approaching sense. What follows is essentially an hour and a half (it feels more like twenty minutes) of near-constant referencing of things the average moviegoer will never encounter, while trying to cram years worth of story into what some might call a "plot."

It's AWESOME. I loved literally every second of it. I don't understand how they expect people who don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of DB to understand the slightest bit of what goes on. Yamcha is introduced, and serves almost no purpose but gets to join the good guys for the last 1/3 of the film. Goku's origin is entirely contradictory; he was originally a demon monkey but also came to Earth on a meteor as a baby and would not turn into a demon monkey until his 18th birthday (also he serves Piccolo somehow).

The level of technology in the world ranges from archaic to unreasonably futuristic, the latter of which comes with no explanation (it should be pointed out that this is accurate to the source material, only here it feels disjointed and awkward in a way it didn't in DB). The plot moves at breakneck speed, with no time for thought (such as, "why did you just say we don't need to bother finding the Dragonballs anymore when we just wasted half a movie on it).

Like I said, in context it's all absolutely incredible. The ONE thing that actually offended me in any way was the Dragon itself. For people that seemed to comb the manga for things to reference in obvious but completely nonsensical ways, they seem to have forgotten what made the Dragon cool, and in fact what asian dragons are even supposed to look like. It's a tiny thing, more like a salamander really, also I'm pretty sure they used the head from the American Godzilla movie. Luckily it doesn't talk and is onscreen for all of probably a minute and a half MAX.

I'm just so glad I saw this. I have not had this much fun at a movie in god knows how long. It is just so PERFECTLY preposterous in absolutely every way. There are actually scenes or elements that are genuinely, completely unironically cool, but the majority of the movie is a giant set of references, only they lack any substance. They're either too subtle or way too obvious, and in either case the average person will have absolutely no idea what's going on. It's like they went through the manga and looked for shit to throw in but didn't actually read to find out what any of it was about in context. For a reg'lar old person it makes for a terrible, disjointed, meaningless mess but for the three of us it was nonstop fun.

I'm still giddy. This movie was so freaking awesome. It did exactly what I needed an American-made Dragonball movie to do, and at the same time it made me look back fondly on an awesome story that I will always love.

Too bad there were only eight other people in the entire Odyssey theatre there to see it. And also four guys that came in for about six minutes before leaving.

Let's get started on that sequel.