Thursday 24 January 2019

Dragon Ball Super: Broly (Film Review)


Even six years on, it's almost astounding to see Dragon Ball's resurgence. While it never truly went away, the franchise has seen a new explosion of popularity, and the ongoing story has only fuelled this element. With Super having brought back Future Trunks, Resurrection F focusing on Frieza's return and a reworking of the franchise as a while, many questioned where it would go next. The addition of Broly proved to be one hell of a surprise, to say the least.

Broly - or Anime Hulk as I like to call him - is one of those characters who is understandably popular, but never quite reached his full potential. The idea of a new Super Saiyan was fun at the time, and the original film is flawed but good. However, two dismal sequels and an inability to use Broly as anything more than a juggernaut meant that he lacked some much-needed depth. Well, this latest film not only gave him that but much, much more.


The Synopsis

Divided between various points in Dragon Ball's history, Dragon Ball Super: Broly follows the events of the titular Saiyan's life. With a substantial portion of the film set prior to Planet Vegeta's destruction and exploring the nature of the Saiyan race, Broly himself serves as a ghost of their past. Raised to be a berserker by his father, he is recruited into Frieza's army upon discovery and sent against Goku and Vegeta. However, neither Frieza nor Broly's father Paragus seems to truly realise just what they have set loose on the galaxy, or what might befall the Earth once he engages its defenders in battle.


The Good


The most prominent point of the film is how it serves as a new keystone for the setting as a whole. While the film could have simply focused on Broly's return and use as a living weapon, the push to better explore the universe makes it a cornerstone in the ongoing setting. We see Frieza taking over from his father, the introduction of scouters into his army, Bardock's actions leading up to the destruction of his planet, and the events behind Goku's dispatch to earth. All of that? It's just in the first act, before things really get going.

The whole point of the matter is that it joins up variations of events from Minus, Bardock: Father of Goku and Dragon Ball Z: Broly – The Legendary Super Saiyan, and forms it into a single narrative. Yet what is best about all of this is that it doesn't simply copy and paste elements. Readers will know my derision of the Star Wars setting under Disney and dislike for its ongoing events, especially with how it uses the Expanded Universe as a crutch. So, what's different between that and this? Simple - It doesn't use those stories wholesale. It uses the same basic elements as a starting point, examines them, and then goes in an entirely different direction. Better yet, it doesn't overwrite them, so you end up with two equally valid but very different versions.

Take Bardock for example - None of the events from his film play out in this one. He lacks psychic visions of the future, wasn't ambushed and almost killed with his team by Frieza's hit squad, or his warnings openly ignored. Instead, we see him mentally piecing together the possibility of Frieza's move, the risks of it, the realization that no one will trust his warning, and his decision to act out in another way - Sending Goku to Earth far ahead of schedule in case of an attack. He still goes down swinging when Frieza attacks, but his story less of an action piece, and depicts him as a consummate professional who still cares for his family. Equally, Gine is given a short but quite meaningful few scenes to display her relationship with Goku, further cementing the benefit of such a change.

The film has to cover a great deal of ground in a short amount of time, but it does so excellently. Rather than being overwhelmed by so many varied elements or coming across like a fanfic (See Star Trek: Generations for when this goes wrong) it's there to provide context to the main plot and add depth to the universe or characters. Just to continue with the above point of Bardock, while it's not stated, its strongly implied that he's coming to terms with the possibility of Frieza annihilating them in a single location, simply because it's similar to what he might do in his place.

Every time the film does add in something new, it always goes off in an entirely new direction from the original, or uses it to explore the events from a new angle. Sure, certain key moments still have to happen, but even the context behind them can dramatically change. This is evident in every part of the film, but it's at its strongest with Broly himself. The original Broly was impressive, exciting and provided one hell of a fun fight scene, but his motivation was questionable, and he devolved into a one-note character. By comparison, the one we have here is very different. He's simple, kind and surprisingly gentle until he needs to use significant force to oppose his enemy. In fact his relationship with his father is very different, as Paragus forces him into being a warrior with threats of violence, and barely keeps him under control. It's framed less in the manner of a chained attack dog than that of an abuse victim.

The character developments which play out in the film hinge both on playing off of events from Super as much as the past. Goku's relationship with Frieza serves as a backdrop to the narrative, and their odd rivalry/enmity which constantly shapes their lives. Broly's very presence in the story, and the overall outcome of events, stems from this. While this sadly leaves Vegeta playing second fiddle again, the fact so much of the film explores his people's history gives him more depth and meaning to his actions. It can show just why he displayed so much pride in his heritage, but also the demons which can come back to haunt him thanks to it. This is only further enhanced by the performances of the cast - all of who are well versed in voicing these icons - but also Chris Sabat's ability as an ADR Director. Short of, perhaps, Andrea Romano there are few people who can so expertly blend the vocal performances of a scene with the visuals on hand.

As for the visuals themselves? That's where this gets a little more complicated. Now, these are beautiful to be sure, with the sort of rapid and fluid moves rarely seen in the franchise. It lacks the FPS issues you might expect, or repetitive frames to capture the high-speed fights, and even pulls out a number of tricks which you would never have expected to see. Perhaps the biggest one among these is a full first-person sequence of one fighter attacking another, and a multitude of segments which push to display just how terrifying a fight between figures capable of nuking planets would truly be. Unfortunately, there's some bad which mixes in with a lot of this good...


The Bad


So, the visuals. This is where the other shoe drops. Once in a while, the animation choices become very, very odd in regards to how events are depicted. This isn't so much skipping details or missing things (in fact the only notable moment in that regard was Goku and Vegeta lacking faces in a long distance shot) but the choices themselves. The moves of Broly, Vegeta, Goku and Frieza are extremely fast and it seems as if director Tatsuya Nagamine wished to fully emphasise that. After a while, however, it starts to become very difficult to keep track of what's going on, and can even become white noise at points. It's something which could work well in moderation, but it lacks the pauses and shots to really help specific moments be distinct. The actual fight takes up just over half the film, but there are only four or five moments in total which I can distinctly remember. The others? It would take repeat viewings to truly tell them apart.

A further issue which arises from the film stems from the soundtrack. Some of it is good, even great, in how it seems to take cues from WWE wrestler intros and hypes up the next stage of the fight. Others? They just seem to fall into the background and merge together. It's akin to how the Marvel Cinematic Universe has many great soundtracks, and a number of excellently executed scores. However, as several of them have the same general notes and theme behind them, they blend in together. So you know it's good, but you just can't recall why or specific bits which spring out above all else. Furthermore, it lacks a distinct stand-out version of the iconic theme to help get you invested in the intro like the previous two films. There is a brief variation of it, but it passes in such a brief time that it is very easy to miss.

A further weakness is the film's use of characters, or rather the lack of them. Broly, Paragus, Frieza, Goku and Vegeta all have a place within the plot. Bulma even has enough decent moments to justify her presence despite taking an eventual background role, and newcomers Cheelai and Lemo both make a good showing. However, a number of others just rapidly show up and are then forgotten. Goten and Trunks both appear for perhaps a minute and are then gone, with Beerus doing much the same. Whis barely makes himself known outside of one admittedly fun moment, and Piccolo appears purely to get one scene across and then is gone again. Each is such a brief moment that it's hard to wonder if their involvement was fully justified, or if the narrative could have been streamlined to focus on its main cast over adding in someone else. And this is coming from someone whose favourite character is Piccolo, and thought Raditz deserved more screen time.

In fact, much of the film is very bloated as a whole. If the section covering the good elements seemed to be all over the place, it's somewhat akin to watching this production. It's trying to cover so much, compress in and rework so much background, that it seriously struggles to fit into any act structure. There's no definite beginning or ending to events, and a lot of strings are left dangling to be followed up on at another time. Rather than an individual story, it instead comes across as if this is a very pragmatic adaptation of a longer piece. There is enough material in this film to cover a major arc in Super, but it's ill-suited to a film as a result. This is, admittedly, likely a result of Akira Toriyama's original script being almost halved in length, but it is still a flaw. In fact, it would likely be one of the best reasons to adapt this into whatever follows on from Super, just to give it more room to breathe around the big fight.

Perhaps the biggest problem of all is something some people might argue against: Anyone who isn't up to date on events is going to be horribly confused. It's definitely made with fans in mind, and I will admit that was the main audience that this was intended to focus on. However, the Saiyan, Frieza Empire and many elements are given little explanation or introduction, while the tournament of power (and the alliance with Frieza) is largely name-dropped without explanation. Combined with hints that this will lead into much bigger battles, it isn't something which can just be viewed on its own and enjoyed.


The Verdict


Overall, this is both the best and worst that a Dragon Ball film can be. It builds upon the universe, reworks previous ideas and genuinely uses them to explore new things. It re-introduces a popular character as less of a generic doomsday device on legs and more of a person, and leaves the audience with a few major hints of things to come. At the same time, if you've not watched most of Super you'll be completely lost, and will likely be left trying to piece together all that played out between Resurrection F and this film.

Because of its undeniable flaws as a film, it's difficult to give this one a higher mark based upon my usual system even with all that it does right. It's definitely worth seeing if you are a fan, but otherwise I would suggest starting much further up the timeline or looking for a vastly better gateway into the setting.

Verdict: 6 out of 10 (or 8.8 out of 10 if you're a Dragon Ball fan)

7 comments:

  1. You're back!

    Honestly, I was a little worried that you had died or something, after the Long Silence after October. Glad to see you producing stuff again!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, it's been an interesting few months unfortunately. I'm going to try and keep a more frequent upload schedule from here on, but we will have to see what happens.

      Delete
  2. So I'm a DBZ fan and I didn't see this until recently, and that's mainly because I can't find it in me to care about Super or anything based around it. I honestly thought it was pretty shitty overall, to the point where I'd rank it lower than GT. As such I was iffy on this movie because it looked like it was still going to be Super, and in addition it would try to leech off a popular character from the old series, who they'd include for little more than name recognition.

    Now while I feel that's accurate, there were quite a few moments in the movie I enjoyed, I liked Broly's new origin story, I liked how it ended, I liked how it's expanding on outside events like what Frieza is doing and I like how aside from some mentions, it didn't do much with the Super series as a whole.

    That being said I feel like the movie was also kind of sloppy, and when I say that I mean that there were some scenes that seemed like they were happening in the wrong order. Broly fighting Vegeta while he goes through all transformations, sure, then doing it again with Goku who does the exact same thing? It really made it seem as if the characters were about as strong as the plot demanded them to be (more so than usual), rather than feeling like they've got set strengths relative to whatever transformation they're at. There were also a lot of scenes in which it seemed like they were trying to create a cool shot out of quick cuts and fast action, rather than building up to a neat spectacle and it made it much harder to tell what was going on, which made it harder for me to get into the fight. As a minor nitpick it kind of bugs me how they keep changing around how many wishes Shenron grants before he leaves, and I'm not sure if that's intentional or not.

    Overall I feel like your 6 out of 10 is fairly accurate, I wouldn't call it a bad movie since I didn't have a bad time, but I doubt I'll ever rewatch it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Honestly, as someone who did re-watch most of GT recently, I'd still personally rate Super might higher than it. GT basically didn't know what to do, and decided to fall back on a bizarre mix of Dragon Ball focus and DBZ story elements. Super did the opposite of trying everything, but I appreciated the fact that it was constantly experimenting, and tried to update some of its fights. Each to their own, but the fact that Piccolo, Roshi and Krillin were given decent fights and Future Trunks had a follow-up story was enough to largely win me over. That and, after they brought back Frieza and actually did some fun things with him, it's hard to hold bringing back Brolly against them. Especially when Toriyama's reaction was basically "This guy has a great look and seems like he could be fun, but dear God is his background stupid!" and fixed it.

      That aside, yeah, I'll definitely agree it had more than a few problems, and in retrospect the issue with Shenron really should have irked me much more than it did. The only reason I'm not holding the issue against Goku quite so much as usual is because, well, I can see him doing just that because of a desire to have an entertaining fight.

      It could have been much better, but compared with some of the DBZ films, it's one of the better ones in my opinion.

      Delete
    2. GT was definitely unfocused, I agree with you there, but compared to Super I feel like the better/more entertaining parts were still better than what Super did, though that might be because I felt a lot of Super was just a much worse version of the movies that they'd put out where lessons on things like proper pacing were entirely forgotten. I can't really say that Super had that much more focus either since most of its elements were something introduced in the last minute, as were a lot of the plot conflicts. Take the second tournament for example, I guess they realized that Buu could really easily win that (since even if he absorbed people they wouldn't technically be dead) so they removed him from it in a really lazy and unsatisfying way.

      Super did have good parts, but I felt they were really small parts in a very bad whole, and I was not a fan when they decided to start retconning stuff (Vegito comes to mind).

      As far as fixing Broly's backstory goes, you honestly don't have to do much. They tried to give him a dumb motivation in the first film, but all you need to do to fix that is by editing out the baby scene in the first movie, done. Do that and Broly's now just a monster who wants to kill things because he finds it enjoyable, which is exactly what he ended up becoming in the end of the first movie when he finally broke free of his controller, and it's what he was throughout the entirety of the second movie.

      As I mentioned I still like his new origin story, but I find it hard to say they're the same character when one's fighting because he was conditioned to do so by his father (and has been forced to do so his entire life) whereas the other was born with immense power and decided to do whatever he wanted with it, to the detriment of everyone else around him.

      On a final note, when you have some spare time you should check out Dragon Ball: Multiverse. It's a fan-made webcomic that I thought was really good, and maybe it's another reason why I was let down by Super, as it honestly felt as if Super was trying to do what Multiverse did, but it did it poorly despite trying twice.

      Delete
    3. The problem is that, in my opinion, the parts of GT which worked were either fleeting or quickly ruined themselves. While Super could be hit or miss, there tended to be a better ratio of pulling things off in my opinion, or when a mistake was made it led into something fun by comparison. Just to cite the example of Buu, that irked me as well, until they used it as a chance to reintroduce Frieza to the plot, and he became one of the best things about the arc. It was actually that element which I felt was much more interesting for the character than his resurrection in all honesty. As for repeating things that the films had done and pacing, I could forgive the former when they did it better (I actually enjoyed the Battle of Gods arc more than the film, but thought that the Resurrection F arc was weaker by comparison) or had something to work with. Plus, individual scenes tended to have better timing than past works or lacked the dragged-out feel which initially plagued Z, interfering with its own atmosphere at times.

      The odd thing is that i'm not sure if Broly is at that point overall. He's in a much more stable place mentally and lacks the sheer hatred which dominated his life. He still has berserker tendencies if pushed too far, but that seems to be a reaction than an individual choice. The way i'm looking at this is what he could have been if he hadn't undergone the trauma of being stabbed through the heart and then had Vegeta explode around him. Plus, his actions seem to be less out of enjoyment for murder than simply the way that he has been raised as an attack dog.

      I'll give the fan comic a look out of curiosity, but most of what you outlined I was fairly okay with at the end of the day.

      Delete
    4. I feel that's more how Super went for me personally, GT was usually bad but even though it didn't seem to know where it was going with its stories, it definitely seemed to know what to do when it got there. The buildup would be bad but the final parts were usually fun, whereas in Super the buildups felt nonsensical and the final parts had elements that felt they'd just come completely out of left field.

      The reason I really didn't like the Battle of Gods arc in the series compared to the film was because of the pacing, as I mentioned. Even minor things like over-dramatizing Bulma being slapped as if they'd suddenly just killed the character ended up irking me and made me feel like the show was telling me how I should be feeling about a scene rather than having me be caught off-guard by it. That might sound like an odd complaint, but DBZ is full of those other kinds of moments, take the original Frieza fight for example, when Krillin is impaled on Frieza's horn. It's shocking because it's quick and you weren't expecting it, and it's great for building a sense of dread. That sort of thing happens several more times in the fight and in future fights, like when Cell comes back at the end of his arc for example.

      Actually here's a thought I just had in writing this, maybe my dislike of Super comes more from the fact that (aside from some memorable scenes) it doesn't quite feel like Dragon Ball, it feels more like a run-of-the-mill series that ends up having characters you know, but that's about it. It feels more like an experiment or side-stories than an actual continuation of the original to me, and I think that might also be why I don't think it works as well.

      To address what you mention about Buu, I still feel that's a pretty poor way of going about it when they could've easily disqualified Buu in the first place (say he can't absorb anyone and some other characters are wary he won't remember it for some reason) and you'd still have Frieza back. I'm not going to look past a shoddy plot point just because it ended up leading somewhere cool, if we could do that then nobody would be bringing up Broly's original motivation and how they could've done that better.

      Speaking of Broly, I get that's his character now, but I wouldn't say the original character was full of hatred, I just think he was a sadist since there was plenty of people who he had no reason to hate but who he hurt or killed just because he found joy in it. As an example, in the second movie he takes his time in trying to finish off the heroes purely because he's having so much fun at watching them struggle (and it's what ends up causing him to lose the fight). That's why I described him as a monster. I will say that I was kind of disappointed that his more unique powers didn't show (in the previous two movies he had some rather interesting ones and a very unique way of fighting and attacking, and they seemed to have been forgotten) but that's really the most minor of nitpicks and I don't hold it against the movie at all.

      If you're good with the stuff I mentioned that's fine too, I guess it'll be just a difference of opinion then.

      Delete