THIS IS THE ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION TO THIS POST, WHICH WENT ON A STRANGE JOURNEY . . . A JOURNEY INTO THE WEST . . . A QUEST FOR A WISH . . . and how that wish went unfulfilled. Why did this introduction not result in a successful post on first attempt? Read on . . .
To say my expectations were low going into Dragonball: Abomination (sorry, Dragonball: Evolution) would be an understatement. Even using that cliché to describe it understates the degree of understatement. This is a movie that deeply disappointed me even before it was even released – originally, it was to be a big-budget, live-action Dragonball movie starring Chow Yun Fat and produced by Stephen Chow that was released on my birthday.
It became clear early on that all was not right with this production. The leaked production stills were way off the mark in any sort of reasonable stylistic approach to the material, people were complaining that Goku was a white high school student, as opposed to the child Monkey King of ancient China. It began to come out that it was being directed by the Final Destination Guy, that the studio executives were doing their usual thing and forcing awful failures of artistic decisions on the production out of their own vanity and pigheadedness, and that producer and legend in his own time Stephen Chow had been effectively cut out of the loop. The release was delayed almost a year, presumably for Pluto-Nash-related reasons.
When it came out, the marketing was disastrous. It lost its “built-in audience” almost immediately, and it never found another one. There’s almost universal belief that this movie is awful, but even hardcore Dragonball fans have pretty much refused to see it.
Until now.
What I got, well, it was certainly a failure. A huge failure. It deserved to bomb with every megaton in its payload. But it wasn’t an accident. It was something quite a bit worse. It screwed everything up on purpose.
Now, the fanboy in me could bitch and moan about it all day — there’s plenty for any fanboy to bitch and moan about. But let’s put that aside for a moment, and ask the real questions — find the real reason why this movie is the way it is, and why it failed in what it attempted to do.
This will be readable for non-Dragon Ball fans and probably include some good lessons. Because with a failure this big, there are plenty of lessons.
Power up, it’s time to Read More . . .
The movie gets to the point where they cut away so much of what made the piece work, that what was left was a series of non-resonant symbols that seemed uncomfortably out of context — all attached to crappy teen romance fresh out of the CW.
And who the eff watches Dragon Ball for the romance? There is zero romance in Dragonb Ball. Okay, one time, Krillin has that crush on a robot, but only once. The rest of it people are either making sex jokes or they are married, either because of a joke gone wrong or because they’re lonely and happen to be hanging out. No romance at all. Just everyday life, loving the one you’re with, settling down and having kids, and getting in titanic kung-fu battles to determine the fate of the planet and the universe.
AHEM
Okay, that’s better. Anyway, this post was about form and function in storytelling, how they are related by more than just taste and coincidence, and how when a piece is really well integrated, you can’t just pull things out of it and expect its other virtues to continue to persist. And also, you shouldn’t always assume that the thing that makes a narrative successful is its details — its setting, its costumes, its character’s names. Really good stories do something more, which you can’t so easily extract.
Supreme, by Alan Moore. Check it out if you haven't. I enjoyed it.
It’s sort of like how Superman is a really crappy comic book character most of the time. He’s way overpowered, and to make stories interesting that involve anyone else (like the Justice League cartoon), you have to somehow weaken him or take him out of the story.
Except, you know, some of the best comic books ever made have Superman in them or Superman comparisons (like The Dark Knight Returns). There’s something about Superman that can play a role in really great stories — and something about him that is just totally awful in others. Goku and friends pretty much work like that, which is why the original Dragon Ball series, nearly all 18 years of it, are awesome, and why pretty much every attempt to retell it in a spinoff or a movie has sucked Dragon Balls by comparison.
Well, then, you know what happened?
My computer glitched erased all of it. A huge post. Something I could probably never write again. It made me pretty angry. How angry, Vegeta?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ5s1YBpvx4
Actually, angrier than that. How angry, Captain Ginyu?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg5n0-M8lKs
Actually, angrier than that. How angry, Cell?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyT4ADefTVQ
Yeah, pretty frickin’ angry.
So, here’s what I’m going to do. . .
Here’s a graphic of the Syd Field paragidm. Please read Syd Field’s stuff. It’s pretty much essential for OverthinkingTM the structure of contemporary movies, because they’re pretty much all either based on it or based on a common ancestor.
This is where movies come from.
Notice what happens — I’ve stacked three single-arc storylines in a row, noting that there are events for full stops after the confrontation without resolution, where the action halts, and you immediately begin a new setup, before you finally get to the conclusion. It’s sort of tantric plotting.
Also note that there’s also a feeling of superplot — that the overall structure of the piece overlays the rhythms within the piece, but doesn’t eliminate their complexity.
The only way this is possible is if the individual elements of the story are very simple, very similar and very repetitive. There’s an emergent complexity, but the basic structure is still there.
So, now we repeat the operation. We take that plot structure we made before, where we repeat the same thing three times — say, three different, similar kung fu fights, most of which don’t end in a proper resolution, but lead to further setup, which point to a larger structure — now become nine kung fu fights, with three overarching mini-story arcs, and one big story arc that connects all of them.
You can even see an overall shape begin to emerge. There’s an aesthetic even to this potential chaos.
This is how Dragon Ball plots work. You take extremely simple actions, clear characters, elegant tropes, and you repeat and repeat and repeat on various levels to explore all the possible resonances. Keep in mind that this only works in a basically comedic way of looking at character arcs, where the characters never wander too far from where they started. You need very iconic, consistent characters to endure the complexity of all these arcs without dissolving into mush.
A Hollwood movie that looks to build its structure only once is not going to explore any of this aesthetic space, and it’s a big part of what makes Dragon Ball successful and enjoyable. So if you wanted to make a Hollywood movie about Dragon Ball, I’d figure out a way of thinking of the structure like this – probably by using individual shots and sequences as the basic building blocks, building the trope on that level, going from there until you flesh out your storyboard, then calm it all down and humanize it without crushing the underlying structure.
By the way, the math-savvy among you have already recognized that I am comparing Dragonball plots to fractals, mathematical objects created by iterated algorhythms that end up with an emergent shape on a macro scale that differs from their shape on a micro scale. Now, granted, this isn’t a true fractal, because its iteration is describable by Euclidian geometry, but a lot of the Ian Malcolm quality pseudo-intellectualism still carries over.
(I am usually very skeptical of this sort of interdisciplinary theory, but anger has clouded my judgement).
But basically, if you repeat the algorhythm enough and look at the object on a macro scale, it begins to take a clear shape:
Okay, the Z is added for no reason. But it wouldn't be the first time a Z was added for no reason. And it won't be the last.
My status on Facebook right after I saw this was something like "Somebody should have put this movie down. They don't let horses run with three broken legs."
Which doesn’t really bring me back to Dragonball: Abomination, but it does mean I got in some quality overthinking.
What is wrong with the movie? A LOT. I’ll close by going over a quick list.
The necessary evils
A lot of the characters are conflated, so that they take details from one character and port them over to another character. This is kind of an awful technique, but it’s useful in managing to recreate memorable franchise scenes without adding exposition, and, used properly, it can help streamline a franchise film’s running time considerably.
This movie has a lot of conflations. Enough that the “necessary evil” rises to the level of “failure in execution.” Almost none of the characters resemble their depictions in the comics or the TV show in meaningful ways. It’s really like they stole the costumes and made a random movie.
It’s an I, Robot level of fidelity to its source material with, inexplicably, far fewer martial arts fights.
Piccolo is conflated with Vegeta and The Emperor Pilaf.
Goku is conflated with Gohan at the beginning of the whole Great Saiyaman nonsense, except without the liberating nonsense.
Grandpa Gohan is conflated with Krillin (the fact that he’s alive at the beginning of the movie should be hint enough as to what’s going to happen) and with Mr. Popo (he even preserves Mr. Popo’s over-the-top racism by having a watermelon patch)
Master Roshi is conflated with Jiraiya from Naruto (they port in training scenes from Naruto and make the kamehameha into a rasengan — a two-directional rotating wind technique. No joke. It’s a really weird choice, but Jiraiya is based on Roshi anyway, so I guess the comparison begs to be made, and I might just be seeing shadows)
Mai, who isn’t a character of even minor note in the original material, is given a much bigger role and conflated with Oolong the shapeshifter during his terrorizing phase, and also with Piccolo’s henchman Tambourine, and also with random generic sci-fi lady in a boob suit, a la Mystique, half the cast of Farscape or Cleopatra 2525 (which might have the highest ratio of theme song quality to actual show quality in television history).
Yamcha, well, he doesn’t do a damned thing. He isn’t even Yamcha.
Chi-Chi is given a much bigger role that is completely different from her original role. I suppose if Goku is Gohan, then Chi-Chi is like Videl, except she doesn’t really do anything Videl does.
The whole love plot in this movie really really sucks, and goes a long way toward ruining it. But doing it in the first place is probably forgiveable. It is Hollywood — they lose their lunch or something if people have some sort of motivations in their lives other than love, determinism, self-sacrifice, mind control, or somebody else yelling at them about the aforementioned things. Hasn’ t a Hollywood writer ever met anyone with a hobby? People do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. But I guess it’s too much to expect the Dragon Ball movie to be the one that breaks the mold.
The venal sins
Goku is white. This was the first sign that something was terribly wrong with this movie, but I don’t really mind it, because Goku is an alien and half-monkey, so his race shouldn’t be that important. Besides, to a lot of white people, Goku looks white. But no, it’s pretty clear Goku is supposed to look Chinese, and it would have been nice if they’d cast him as a Chinese guy. On the bright side, it makes it pretty clear that he’s adopted.
The whole thing takes place in a modern-day world with only minor variations from the present. Like, there’s some vague advanced technology, like the Capsules, and the various kung fu fighters, but the world is really mundane and lacks any sense of adventure or whimsy. Plus, a lot of locations that are fairly fantastical are made really boring. The castle of the ox king becomes a McMansion in Beverly Hills or something. Master Roshi’s hut, instead of a tiny island lost in the ocean, is a small apartment in a city.
But again, these are not what ruin the movie.
The mortal sins
The sense of whimsy is almost entirely absent, and the soundtrack is punishingly wrong. Dragon Ball is funny. It’s silly. It’s absurd. This movie is never going to have credibility. So, why is so much time and energy put into somber, reflective scenes, characters moping around, and this constantly dissonant, grinding, driving score that is really unpleasant to listen to? It’s hard to say this about a movie that makes no goddamned sense, but the whole thing is way too serious in all the wrong ways.
It isn’t funny. Well, Chow Yun Fat is really funny when he first shows up, but they kill that quickly. Dragon Ball needs jokes to cut the tension. Jokes and overblown reaction shots. And it doesn’t have them.
Where are the fights? Oh, there are action sequences, but the fights you hoped and dreamed to see in the big Dragon Ball Hollywood movie never happen. There are chase scenes, there are scrambles, there are skirmishes, there are training scenes, but there is never a point in the movie where two characters square off, stare each other down, talk trash for a bit, then have a multi-stage kung fu fight. That is the bread and butter of the franchise. Dragon Ball without the fights is like Transformers without the robots. Like, they just stay cars the entire movie (so that would basically be Herbie the Love Bug, the latest reboot of which had Lindsay Lohan in it, and Megan Fox’s career suddenly makes sense).
There is one scene (ONE!) that lasts about thirty seconds near the end of the movie that looks vaguely like a fight from Dragonball Z. Vaguely. For less than a minute. If that sort of fight had been 80% of the movie and the story totally blew, a lot more people would have watched this movie and bought the DVD (instead of, apparently, just me. You’re welcome, Mr. Yun Fat.)
That’s the biggest unforgiveable sin in the movie.
The characters are confusingly hesitant. People just don’t want to do things in this movie. Goku spends the whole movie figuring out whether or not he is going to stop dicking around and start training seriously and fighting, when we already know he already trains seriously and fights, so his hesitation makes no sense. There are a lot of “Get the Hell on with it, why are you sitting around?” moments in this movie.
It’s another good improv rule that carries over well into certain types of scripted work. Let your characters be good at things already, and have them do stuff rather than talk about doing it. If they are good at what they do, we get to watch them do it well, which is fun, and then they get to move on to what the scene is really about. This movie fails on this constantly.
The whole bullshit with the solar eclipse and the prophesy and the idiotic poem and the horrible “Maybe I don’t have to destroy the earth” moment at the end of the movie.
Just to add insult to injury, this movie contains almost all of my least favorite awful action movie plotting crutches. People escape supernatural mind control just by wanting to, which they for some reason couldn’t do before they did it. Things that have perfectly fine reasons for happening need to happen because of some sort of irrelevant prophesy or destiny that is talked about a lot, but which never exerts any binding force on the characters’ actions and is a waste of everybody’s time.
Ugh, I’m starting to get a stomachache again just thinking about this piece of trash.
Thankfully, I decided to reward myself for watching this movie by also buying myself a copy of the #1 movie in America:
I’m getting psyched! Time to power up once more!
Have you ever wanted to watch a specific movie to feel better about an unfortunate turn of events? Sound off in the comments!