Is it possible to watch too much Dragon Ball Z? Because I definitely feel like I've been watching too much Dragon Ball Z. And I can't altogether blame that on the fact that I was intending to review it here: truth be told, these things are kind of compulsive. In so much as I get the appeal - which, as you'll see, I still do and don't in roughly equal measure - that's definitely the level on which I most feel I've synced minds with the fandom. The franchise undeniably has a junkfoody appeal, and especially these movies, which tend to be short and easily digestible and full of sugary fun. Late at night after a long day, it's easy to turn to them in favour of the more demanding disks on the to-watch shelf.
And I realise that introduction was closer to criticism than praise, so I guess it's time to address the question of just what I made of this second batch (you can find the first four films here.) This time, let's have a prod at Dragon Ball Z: Cooler's Revenge, Dragon Ball Z: Return of Cooler, Dragon Ball Z: Super Android 13! and Dragon Ball Z: Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan...
It's taken five movies, or eight if we count the original Dragon Ball, but here, finally, we reach the point where Dragon Ball Z becomes everything I'd initially expected and feared it to be. The plot is this: An alien villain named Cooler turns up, there's a fight, then another fight, the end. And I'd love to say I'm exaggerating for effect, but no, aside from a brief introduction to set up said villain and a short, mildly comedic interlude and a fetch quest in the middle where young Gohan sets out to find medicine for his father that's probably the best sequence the film offers up, I'm entirely doing it justice.
And, like, they're not even particularly interesting fights! If there's a core problem here, it's that everyone involved seems thoroughly checked out, as though they've already lost interest in adhering to such an inflexible formula. So Cooler has the usual Dragon Ball hench-villains, but they're the dullest bunch yet, and if you'd told me they were reused designs from earlier films, I wouldn't have blinked an eye. As for Cooler himself, aside from a final stage that's somewhat different from the general Dragon Ball aesthetic, he's enormously dull, from his motives - avenging his brother, apparently a significant antagonist in the TV show - to his power set to his dialogue. We're told repeatedly that he's more than a match for Goku, and Goku takes a nasty injury early on to hammer home this point, but there's never a second where you feel any real sense of threat or danger.
I praised director Mitsuo Hashimoto the last time we saw him, at the helm of Lord Slug, but here he seems as disengaged as everyone else. And okay, my praise only went as far as commending his impression of series regular Daisuke Nishio, but that's still more than he manages on his second attempt. It's journeyman work, with only the occasional shot injecting any kind of energy. There are no dreadful choices or anything like that, but he's certainly not elevating the lacklustre material. And the animation is very much on the same level, which is a level noticeably below what the last three movies were managing; it's stilted and TV-like and full of trivial but noticeable flaws. To pick on one example that bugged me unduly, there's a point where Gohan has to climb a tower, and it's obvious that his movements aren't lining up with the background, as though he's Spiderman or something. It's the sort of laziness that hasn't any right to make it into a major franchise movie.
But then, I suspect that's the crux of the problem. If the Dragon Ball Z films haven't exactly felt as though they were the work of creators with a burning desire to express their deeply held visions, they at least had a fair degree of artistry and a sense that everyone involved cared about their craft. Cooler's Revenge feels like product, banged out to a demanding schedule. Of course, I'm conscious that I'm not the intended audience here, and obviously the fact that Dragon Ball Z is still going strong suggests that there are many people who want nothing more than what this has to deliver, even when that's only twenty minutes of uninspired action padded with a few scenes of nothing much. For me, though, the thought that this is what the series was happy to sink to, and the possibility that there might be more of the same to come, isn't exactly encouraging.
Given that Cooler's Revenge was comfortably my least favourite Dragon Ball Z film so far, you can imagine my enthusiasm to discover that said antagonist was back for another round, despite a very terminal ending the last time we saw him. And wouldn't you know it? Cooler, or rather his inclusion in a movie that would work a damn sight better with an original enemy in his place, is by far the weakest element. As much as I've learned to expect a certain amount of ludicrous improbability from this franchise, the explanation for his presence really does stretch credulity past its limits, and in completely unnecessary fashion. There's simply no reason to have him back, and its not as though he was that memorable in the first place.
Fortunately, Cooler isn't ruinous. Unlike in the last film, there's enough happening around him that he's not the drain he was there. It helps a great deal that we finally get the odd element that feels fresh and different in a series that seemed all too eager to grow stale as fast as it could. Though we've had plenty of alien incursions, Return of Cooler is the first of these to take place away from Earth, and that, among other things, gives it a bit of proper sci-fi flair that we haven't seen for quite a while. It helps, too, that Daisuke Nishio is back in the director's chair: while he isn't up to anything majorly thrilling (and if he was, the pedestrian animation would undermine it anyway) Nishio can at least be relied on to find the right tone for these movies, along with the right balance and pace. There's enough humour and exposition and spectacle here to avoid the perennial Dragon Ball Z trap of feeling like nothing except over-the-top fighting. Plus, the over-the-top fighting is actually mostly enjoyable, with an ingenious scrap against a mob of robots and Cooler's new form posing some unexpected problems that provide the sense of threat that was so lacking last time.
With all of that, it's easy to imagine a version of Return of Cooler that really succeeded, and rose to the top tier of what these movies are capable of. Only, it would have to not be called Return of Cooler, because, as much as the new version of that villain on offer is pretty neat and in all ways an improvement, they divert the film in needless ways that do it no favours. Without drifting too far into spoilers, we eventually learn that Cooler is allied with a second baddie, the gigantic planet-sized computer intelligence we saw attacking another planet in the excellent opening sequence, and once the details of that are in the open, it's tough to see how not keeping the focus on an omnivorous gestalt supercomputer wouldn't have made more sense that resurrecting a tedious lizard dude.
But, I dunno, twenty-four hours later and I'm not sure it's quite as big a deal as I took it to be at the time. Cooler's presence is undoubtedly stupid, but if you can get past that, there's a fair bit of pleasure to be had. As I say, Nishio's up to some solid work, the concept feels fresh, the action is relatively strong, and the series' regular composer Shunsuke Kikuchi delivers a particularly present and engaging score. Given my personal biases, it's perhaps the case at this point that I'd recommend any Dragon Ball Z entry that strayed from being a big old tedious fight, but anyway, I enjoyed this a good bit more than I expected to.
I always try to find positives, so here are some positives. Daisuke Nishio was a talented director who brought a certain warm, appealing tone to his copious Dragon Ball work, and was probably incapable of making a genuinely bad movie in this franchise. Wherever he's present, you're guaranteed a few cracking scenes and some superlative moments of animation. And Super Android 13! contains one of the best, in the shape of the introduction of two of its villains, a sequence that finds them marching through a busy city centre, oblivious to anything in their way, swatting aside anyone who interferes, and tracking down Goku with unwavering intent, in a manner that's both legitimately threatening and quirky fun at the same time, despite those being two tonal registers that clearly oughtn't to go together.
And with that, I'm out of positives. This was Nishio's second Dragon Ball Z movie to be released in 1992, after the unusually strong Return of Cooler, and the lack of inspiration is palpable. Actually, make that the lack of anything; even by the standards of a series that seems comfortable with substituting gigantic fights for actual narrative, this is a decidedly empty piece of spectacle. More so than any other entry, it boils down entirely to the formula of: some enemies turn up, everyone fights, Goku unleashes a super-special move, Goku wins. The enemies aren't interesting - one gets a slightly wacky design, but the other two are so bland that it balances out - and the fight isn't at all remarkable and the climax is more or less exactly the same as the climax of at least one more of these, so it's not even like Goku's whipping out a power or an evolution or a whatever that we've never seen before. For crying out loud, not only is it empty spectacle, it's recycled empty spectacle!
I can't even find it in myself to be annoyed by Super Android 13!; it is, after all, not outstandingly bad in any meaningful sense. Other than its lack of plot or originality - and okay, those aren't trivial issues, but they're far from new or crippling problems where Dragon Ball Z is concerned - there's not much that's flagrantly wrong. Actually, the comic relief is dreadfully lame, and given that Dragon Ball Z is capable of delivering perfectly respectable comic relief, especially with Nishio at the helm, that's frustrating; it wouldn't have saved the film, but it would have provided something to remember it by. And being unmemorable is more of a sin than would usually be the case, because this nonentity would be Nishio's last movie contribution to the series he made such an enormous contribution to, and it's without doubt his worst, and indeed probably the most perfunctory Dragon Ball Z film so far.
Watching Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan made me realise just how low I've set the bar here, or rather, to what extent I've had to make up a whole new bar to accommodate this series: more than once during its genuinely feature-length running time did I think, "Wow, this is actually like a proper movie!" It has a plot of sorts. It has characterisation and character arcs. It has rising action, and indeed, its big action climax doesn't even get started until halfway to the end. Also, and in no way coincidentally, it's pretty good.
That plot doesn't bear much probing, but then, we don't need Shakespearean levels of scene-setting here, what we need is sufficient context that the fisticuffs have some stakes and a genuine sense of threat once they arrive. And this Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan does markedly well, digging into the normally tedious background of Goku's Saiyan heritage and conjuring up a real demon of an antagonist to pit him and the gang against. Broly is actually quite dull when you get down to it, motivated by not much more than an unexplained grudge and an innate desire to do evil, but paired with a manipulative father and tarted up with Saiyan lore - and drawn as the Incredible Hulk's whiter, nastier cousin - he serves the film's purposes just fine. And crucially, this is the first bit of Dragon Ball Z in recent memory where I believed, however superficially, that our heroes might not win, or even might not survive. Broly may be a dumb, undermotivated lunk, but he's scary, and a significant step up in the franchise's endlessly escalating power level one-upmanship.
Director Yamauchi, who also helmed my two favourite Saint Seiya movies, is clearly a dab hand at this sort of business. He keeps the early sections pacey and engaging and the comic interludes peppy and on the right side of irritating, but he knows his job is to deliver one hell of an action climax and that much he certainly accomplishes. There's an argument to be made that it goes on too long, especially when the fight is so one-sided for most of its length, but it remains a proper spectacle. A lot of that can be chalked up to some intermittently stunning animation; in the early setup scenes, it's mostly at the level of getting the job done, but that's hard to begrudge once it becomes clear that the animators were saving their energy and budget for where they could show off to best effect. This is the first bit of Dragon Ball Z that's genuinely wowed me on occasions: a comet that's established to be terribly important to the plot and then isn't is at least a gobsmacking bit of craft, but there are plenty of wow moments along the way, usually involving destruction on an epic scale. It's easy to get these god-level battles wrong, but Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan mostly nails it, by retaining just enough of a human element but also by being so routinely thrilling that it's hard not to be drawn in.
Going back to my opening point, whether all this adds up to a good film in any wider sense is questionable, but then it's fair to say that judging Dragon Ball by the usual rules of film-making is a fool's errand. On its own terms, Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan does everything the series requires and does all of it well, while having enough meat on its bones to function as a proper narrative. Given how often Broly would be brought back - we'll be encountering him twice more in these nineties movies alone - it's obvious this entry had quite the impact, and for once, it's easy to see why.
-oOo-
I guess what's strange here, other than how I'm devoting such a lot of energy to a franchise that's absolutely not to my tastes, is how many of these I've finding positive things to say about. Cooler's Revenge and Super Android 13! were functional on their own terms and fairly dire in the context of the wider series, but that's two movies out of four that fulfilled my worst expectations, leaving two that took those expectations and managed to more or less turn them around. So, going back to my original point, I do sort of get the appeal: when all the stars align, and the balance of comedy and crazy spectacle and cartoon violence is on track, and the direction and animation are up to task, these movies can be a lot of fun.
Nevertheless - that's quite enough Dragon Ball Z for the moment!
No comments:
Post a Comment