Basically, the problems with this movie are: characters really bad, villains not scary, plot absurd, fight scenes short and ineffectual, bad dialogues, severe identity crisis since they seemed unsure if they had to follow the rules of our world or not... and most of all they totally missed on the recurrent theme of the dragonball series.
I’m not a big fan of the original story, which was very long and I never followed it really, but I know enough to say that the only thing it has in common with this movie are a few names, and that’s it.
For a minute, at the beginning when there is a voice narrating a story, one could still wonder at how the movie might turn out to be, but then we had a close up shot of a kid’s sweating eyes and nose and then we see this American looking kid who is supposed to be Goku... not the Son Goku I know, not even any other Son Goku the manga world has come up with. Son Goku is a very important figure in the mythology, and they reduced him to this...
With order now:
the narration in short: a warlord named Piccolo came from the stars bringing darkness and chaos to “our once peaceful world” , yeah right, and with his disciple Oozaru they almost annihilated humanity, until “a group of brave warriors created the Ma Fu Ba, a powerful enchantment that imprisoned Piccolo deep within the Earth”, and then Oozaru disappeared. Thousands of years of peace “until now”. Ooooh.
Goku (sic) trains with his grandfather, but complaints that he’s different and because of this he has no friends... it’s his birthday and grandpa gives him a dragonball as a gift. The four-stars ball. He says: “together, the seven Bragonballs will grant the holder one perfect wish”.
He goes to school on his bike, and the usual bullies with a shiny, rather kitsch car don’t stop and park over it, and then dare him to fight them but he doesn’t because he promised his grandfather never to fight because he’s stronger than normal kids.
-this bit already. Goku should be a cheerful boy with no care in the world, a always-positive figure, not a schoolkid complaining the other kids don’t like him. Son Goku’s charm is that when he’s not fighting he’s always positive, and true, and innocent, he’s very candid..
We see a woman dressed all in red - but with a hole in her outfit to show her breast - and a green man attack a Chinese village to find a dragonball, and it seems like they killed the girl even after she gave them the ball. I liked the Chinese girl. (supposedly Chinese, but am not sure, it’s not clear where anybody is at any moment, or even if the geography is the same as our Earth..)
Back to Goku in school, where we see that, of course, he likes the bully’s girl and feels awkward in school, and he has a chance to help her when her school locker won’t open, and he sort of does with his powers - his ki, that is - opening all of them at once. She sees that it was him, she knows about ki, and she invites him to her party even after he made a fool of himself - he clearly doesn’t know how to talk to girls, or to people in general for that matter, because nobody would like to hear that your name is stupid or not normal... and talking about names, ChiChi may sound strange when all the others are called Mary, John or Jack, but not so much when the others are called Goku, Bulma, Yamcha or Piccolo... so this whole dialogue was stupid.
He goes out without even saying a word to his grandpa, and later will say that every year they celebrate his birthday together with their own little ritual, seemingly undisturbed by the fact that he left the man alone without a word. He had a birthday cake ready for him...
Goku arrives at the party and is stopped by a whole bunch of bullies, but this time he doesn’t want to turn around and go home, he wants to meet the girl so he stays. He can’t fight though, because he promised, so he simply avoids every blow until they knock themselves out.
He talks to ChiChi who tells him that they’re actually alike, and he tells her that he knows nothing about his parents, he’s supposed to learn about them when he turns eighteen, that is this night. He feels something’s wrong and runs home. Green and Red have attacked Grandpa Gohan. He was doing very well against her, but he’s powerless against Piccolo, who is able to bring the house down with his powers..
Goku finds him not yet dead, he has just the time to tell Goku that Piccolo is back and he’s after the dragonballs, and tells him : “find Master Roshi in Paozu, tell him Piccolo has returned. To banish Piccolo from this world you must find the dragonballs before the eclipse” and “always have faith in who you are”. Goku buries him outside, just like that.
A girl, named Bulma, attacks him at his home thinking he stole her five-stars ball. She says she invented a DragonBall Energy locator, so she calls it DBE thinking it a cool thing, and she says she has a phd in Applied Dynamics because they have a lot of time to waste in this story. She’s not at all like the Bulma I remember. They join forces - he tells her she needs backup and she’s like: ok.... again, not much like the Bulma I remember. I don’t know much, but I have a memory of a strong-headed character who doesn’t feel she needs any help..
Looking for a ball, they find Master Roshi who trained Gohan, and he has the two-stars ball, so they have two now. Piccolo has at least three.
Realizing the world is in danger, they all go together, and arrive to a place where people train for a fighting tournament, and ChiChi is there too. Moving on, they meet Yamcha because they fell into his trap and fell down a whole and now he wants to be paid to help them. Goku tries various times to get out but can’t. They had seven days to save the world when they were in Roshi’s house, and now it turns out they only have two, and nothing’s happened so far, what have they done in this five days, travel? Really? :-/ Roshi tells them the story of Piccolo and the oncoming doom, until they find the signal of another ball (why only now, they’ve been sitting there for a while...) and all of a sudden he jumps out. If he could do it so easily, why didn’t he do it sooner, instead of enjoying camping and story-telling? He’s the one who keeps saying they have no time!
To get to the ball they walk on a burning hot vulcano feeling just warm, and they fight monsters that Piccolo created from his own blood, and defeat them by throwing them into the lava, then Goku uses their bodies - who just float there, don’t burn - as a sort of “bridge”, he calls it, actually jumping from one to the other until he’s on the other side. He finds the ball; Red tries to steal it but fails.
They have three now, but Roshi realizes - the genius - that there is no time to get them all (more than that, it is impossible to simply find them around since Piccolo has three or maybe all four), so he asks Sifu Norris (his master maybe, by the way he kneels down before him) to prepare another MaFuBa because he’s the only one who can do it, the boy won’t be ready in time...
Of course now Roshi tries to teach Goku the kamehameha, one of the few words the creators of this movie thought sufficient to make it a dragonball-story, but even this is not good. He shows him how to do it, saying he’s not ready but there’s no time (yeah yeah..), how to master his ki, how to “draw the power of the universe, channel it through you, focus it then release!”. It should be cool, but isn’t.
Roshi makes some strange, ridiculous moves while doing this. I don’t know, the ‘accumulating power in the cupped hands’ part is ok, the ‘going to the side before releasing’ only natural, but all that flipping of his fists like a 90s dancer was very strange and didn’t seem right at all. To me anyway.
Thing is, he looked more ridiculous than powerful.
Goku tries alone, but honestly with a bored face and a giving-up-already attitude it was doomed to fail, but then Chichi arrives and tells him basically that if he succeeds he can kiss her so he tries again and does well. Later Red steals their balls looking like ChiChi, (now she’s a shapeshifter apparently), but the real ChiChi sees her and tries to stop her; they fight and Goku wants to help but doesn’t know which one is the real one, and choses the wrong one, hitting the real ChiChi. Red shoots him but Roshi saves him with a kamehameha directed to his chest, cpr more or less.
Piccolo has now all the seven balls, so they must hurry to the Dragon Temple. Roshi interrupts Piccolo’s ritual and Goku changes into his yellow fighting suit, I supposed it belonged to his grandpa but fits him perfectly, complete with tight belt. He confronts Piccolo in a cocky way (like, when did he become so confident?) but Piccolo explains to him that he’s in fact Oozaru, that Goku is only a shell and Oozaru will come out and side with him. Right enough, Goku immediately transforms into a huge beast who goes after the others, and yet he hurts nobody, basically does nothing relevant.
Yamcha gave Bulma the ball and stayed behind to try and stop Oozaru, but we don’t see their fight because nobody comes out hurt and it makes no sense that Oozaru wouldn’t hurt him or go after Bulma. Anyway, Red does go after her, they fight and then Yamcha shoots Red. Her fate remains unknown since we know no more of her.
Roshi does MaFuBa on Piccolo but it’s not enough and is defeated. Oozaru finishes him off while Roshi tells him “don’t leet Oozaru destroy the Goku in you” before dying.
After a lot of growls Goku is back to himself and his form; some more stupid dialogue and some more growling, and he uses Oozaru’s power for a super mega kamehameha that knocks Piccolo out, and the eclipse is over and still no dragon has been summoned (still, why necessarily during the eclipse? why Piccolo needed it so much?). Piccolo is knocked out and left there, nobody caring about him anymore.
They are all sorry that Roshi died, so they take all the seven balls and summon Shenlong the dragon and ask him/order him/wish that he “give life to Muten Roshi”. Wish granted, the dragon flies away and the balls are scattered all over.
Roshi comes back to life, and they all decide to go find the dragonballs again (poor Shenlong, of course he scatters the balls all around the place, he probably hopes they never find them).
Before that, though, Goku has his girl to think about. He goes to say sorry-I-hit-you to ChiChi. She kisses him and tells him that she let him hit her. It would make sense because she knew who he was while he thought she was the bad Red, but he doesn’t accept that and she says: “if our relationship is to go anywhere we need to settle this” and they prepare to fight before the credits start...
-where to begin: ChiChi started as ‘the popular girl’, then ‘the pretty girl who can’t open her locker’, then the fighter who wants to win, then the supporting girlfriend who offers herself as the prize if he succeeds, and all of a sudden she’s all I’m stronger than you, all the while smiling and blinking like popular girls do in school movies. Problem is, it was not an evolution of the character, it was simply absurd. She’s a fighter but is happy to play the ‘pretty girl’ part at school because they wouldn’t understand (talk about being yourself..), she knows about ki but can’t even open her locker, and yet she thinks she can beat him?? And Goku, he agrees to fight even if now he knows that he’s not from this world, he has a supernatural strength because he’s actually Oozaru, which she ignores completely. She’s also totally recovered after he hit her, when he’s supposed to be much stronger than normal people. If he fights seriously, it will be unfair, if he doesn’t it will be offensive. Absurd.
Also, they missed completely the whole point of dragonball, which was to go further, never accepting your limits but breaking them. This movie’s message was simply “be who you are” which in a way was not much help since he was both Goku and Oozaru at the same time, actually he was Oozaru before growing up as Goku. The word Limits is never spoken in this movie.
The fight scenes... well, they were totally plain, short and boring; Goku and Piccolo should have shown a strength out of this world, but nothing happened. Piccolo, who could bring a house down only with his powers, can’t use that power to retrieve the balls when Roshi’s intervention makes them fall. A lot of talking about the seven dragonballs being their only hope, and then a lot of talking about the enchantment being their only hope, and at the end Goku succeeds in defeating the enemy with one kamehameha that he had previously used only once decently (to light three candles..).
Piccolo is not scary at all, and his long coat makes me think that they still thought of him as Spike...
After the big credits, before the small ones, we see a pretty young woman preparing some kind of potion for someone sick - she takes a towel with her, universal signal that someone in the movie is unwell - and goes to a room where someone’s sleeping, until he turns and we see it’s Piccolo. Obviously he didn’t die, that’s not surprising, but this ending made me wonder if they were keeping a door open for a possible sequel, were they really expecting such a success??? Did they really think the movie was good? Come on.. :-/
Goku - Justin Chatwin - well at least he could pass for a teenager.
Piccolo - James Marsters - can’t understand if he was trying too hard to be serious or if he didn’t give a damn and was like ‘let’s say these stupid lines and go home’..
ChiChi - Jamie Chung - she definitely could pass for a teenager.
Bulma - Emmy Rossum
Roshi - Chow Yun-Fat - looking much better than the real Roshi.
Red (Mai) - Eriko
Sifu Norris - Ernie Hudson
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