DRAGON BALL Z: RESURRECTION ‘F’ (6.5 out of 10) Written by Akira Toriyami; Directed by Tadayoshi Yamamuro; Not rated; Running time 94 minutes, In limited theatrical release via Fathom Events starting August 4, 2015.
I’ve never seen a movie or an episode of “Dragon Ball” or “Dragon Ball Z,” which means that this film was my first exposure of any kind to the immensely popular animated universe. The film opens with bizarre imagery that made me wonder if the movie had begun or if I was still watching company logos and credits start.
But the “F” in “Resurrection ‘F'” stands for “Frieza.” He was a bad guy, apparently, and died, cut into tiny pieces and sent to a sort of purgatory. The buffoons left in his “Frieza Force” steal a collection of Dragon Balls that allow them to ask a wish of a dragon that appears and brings this big bad guy back to life so that he might get revenge on, not the man who killed him, but a guy named Goku. And the entire Earth.
The film plays out as one giant fight, overlong fight. There’s really not much to the story, but I get the distinct impression that if I were at all invested in the mythology, I could have mistaken this for the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.
Since I know nothing about that mythology, I have to judge the film based on its own merits.
The first thing that surprised me was how funny it was. There were some great bits of humor, almost all of them involved a cat god that was a living embodiment of a world destroyer. He wanted nothing more than to enjoy things like pizza and strawberry shortcake, and for the culinary acumen of Earth, he allowed the planet to avoid destruction.
The second thing that surprised me was the quality of the animation. Since “Dragon Ball” dates back at least twenty years or more, I assumed we’d get a style of animation that would look more at home on VHS than on Blu-ray, or even a movie theatre screen, but the animation was gorgeous. The colors were vibrant and the choreography of the fighting sequences reminded me of an animated version of a Jackie Chan film. It looked really good.
The thing that made no sense to me, though, was the story. It’s not structured how stories normally would be. The film shows the try-fail cycles through the eyes of the badguy, which is a fine device, but he never actually fails. He wins the entire time, until the very last second when he doesn’t. Sure, he has minor bumps in his road along the way of his revenge, but he wins pretty much every battle and then gets to fight who he wants when he wants. He’s so effective that the heroes need to pull a “Superman: The Movie” and rewind time so they get a do-over to save Earth.
The stakes were silly, but I suppose if you’re invested in the heroes, watching them get their asses kicked for an hour would up the stakes. For me, not knowing who anyone was, it seemed like the “Golden Frieza Power Hour” and then he lost at the last second.
Overall, it was an entertaining distraction and it was almost enough to convince me to consider watching the series but for one thing. I was told by the person I was watching it with, a major “Dragon Ball” fan, that the events in this film seemed super-condensed and that a storyline of this magnitude would ordinarily play out over an entire season (or “saga”) of the show. And since the story was so thin and basic to begin with, I can’t imagine wanting to watch it stretched out over episode after episode.
The film was charming, funny, and well-animated. Nothing in the film upset my sensibilities, but this is one that’s almost exclusively for fans of the series.
As a standalone film, this is a 6.5 out of 10. I imagine I’d’ve rated it higher if they would have done a better job contextualizing the universe for those of us who would be using this as our introduction to the franchise.