Dragon Ball Super: Broly Movie - Dec 2018 (JP) Jan 2019 (US)

Lulcielid

Lulcielid

Eyes of the Lord
AKA
Lulcy
Came from watching the movie (premiered yesterday in my country) and I have some complicate thoughts.

The good stuff

It's a dead horse at this point but it can't be overstated, the animation on display is huge leap in quality and complexity for the franchise, no other Dragon Ball movie have ever looked this vibrant and dynamic, with many exciting camera angles, composition and super awesome action sequences.

The movie does a fine job in giving a personallity to Broly and making him a more sympathetic character by recontextualizing some of his old character traits, adding new characterization and removing others:

His rage and violent & dangerous nature is now a byproduct of the harsh upbringing he had and being trained solely so that his father could take revenge instead of him being like that since childhood.
Broly now is an innocent soul, that despite all still has some respect and affection for his father, forced into violence by his father desire for revenge rather being borned as an uncotrollable rage machine.
His sadistic demeanour and personallity is completely gone.

Minus is given some emotional weight, an improvement over its original souless bullet point "story" that was that one extra chapter from the Jaco the Galatic Patrolman manga (I almost cry, which made go WTF, what kind of witchery was that?)

Chelye is a fun character.

The OST is fire! Norihito Sumitomo was at first a very underwhelming composer in one or two hits for every dozen underwhelming pieces (composing music for the series since Battle of Gods), started to show improvements during the second half of SUPER and now in Broly he made one hell of an OST.

The mix stuff

The opening 20 minutes of the movie do a bit too many time jumps without enough foreshadowing or warning, feeling that it's skipping beats too frequently.

While the "Goku's cry made baby Broly mad" is no longer there there's still nothing in the movie connecting Goku with Broly, thematically speaking. He's just there for the action.

While Broly's new characterization is far better than his OG incarnation is a bit of a shame that for about 40 minutes (that's how long the fight last from Broly first strike to Vegeta to the last ki blast being fired) that character is being burried by his more wreaking strenght machine character. Now the movie does (slightly) build to Broly eventually turning very savage but I think they went a bit to long with that (40 minutes!!)

While 40 minutes of awesome fighting is pretty cool, it's also...perhaps a bit too much, like it needed a bit more breathing room.

The Bad Stuff

Minus is part of the movie, and no matter how much more emotion they added to that it could not change the fact that the "story" of Minus is just bad, speacilly for breaking the narrative and theme from one of the franchise best Arc (on a tangent, I recommend watching the DB Dissection series by MistareFusion, the only channel that does critical in-depth analysis of DB plot & story from a structure and thematic level).


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At the moment I'm having a hard time scoring the movie but I can say of the four Broly movies, this one and the first belong on the good half of this (not quite) quatrillogy of Broly movies.
 
X-SOLDIER

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Loved this endlessly

We went to the premiere. After the previews, everyone clapped a bit when the Funimation logo popped up, but then the 20th Century Fox fanfare played… In the little space of silence when it ended, someone in the back of the theater yelled, "LET'S DO THIS NERDS!!" and everybody absolutely erupted in "YEAH!!!!" and loud cheering into the Toho logo opening.

Many thoughts:

The Dragonball Minus and history stuff was really good in how it expanded things a bit. Seeing the way King Vegeta was placed under Frieza's rule (cracking the scouter in his hand). The king being jealous of Broly's potential and Paragus leaving to save him gives all the motivations here that matter for later inciting events. You get some context for how dangerous and contemptuous Frieza is.

The bit with Bardock and Gine gives an interesting perspective on a few things. The way Bardock gets suspicious of Frieza's actions is very similar to the way that Goku changes from his goofball self into a really serious tone. You get that sort of dichotomy from his parents. You also have the sense that Bardock hates the Saiyans being slaves to Frieza, and to some degree sending Goku off to a safe nowhere world is also him defying their purpose in the face of his suspicions - and they planned to bring him back if Bardock was wrong.

While Radditz, Nappa, & Vegeta are all off-world, and raised under the same idea that they were sent off to conquer, and regardless of their motivations, there was no guarantee of Goku ending up as a hero, and no way to prove otherwise. Then we get the timeskip. Fun character picking up from the tournament and Vegeta chewing out Goku over resurrecting Frieza.

So, we get the background of Broly being genuinely innocent, and just constantly driven mad by the moon, until his Paragus needed to cut off Broly's tail. Cheyle is just fantastic, and I really love her dynamic with Broly, and you really believe what's going on with them. Then Frieza manipulates Paragus' rage to bring them to Earth (with the Dragonballs as amusing character-centric macguffins that get to the idea of vanity and perception of the characters by their peers, but really just bringing everyone into an abandoned wasteland for the big fight).

Vegeta hates Frieza.
Frieza hates Goku.
Goku has a rivalry with Vegeta.

Then we toss in:
Paragus hates Vegeta.
Frieza sees Paragus and Broly as tools.


This is where (beautiful fighting and powering up), I really love the layered progression of the fight. They all meet as Saiyans. Vegeta is a subject of revenge with no connection to it other than not having the ability to've taken his father's title as King. Goku is just interested in them.

Broly vs. Vegeta directed by Paragus' vengeance. When you see Vegeta as Super Saiyan God, he wants to end the fight but can't, and Broly loses control.

Frieza gets more impressed, and things get swinging, and before they get TOO crazy, we get Goku just wanting to have a go. The way that he tries to end the fight in Super Saiyan God by freezing Broly and talking to him is a big point I'll come back to, and watching Broly turn those tables on him was a REALLY awesome moment.

We get the Piccolo "You ok, dude?" moment to tease the fusion, and the fight goes Blue vs. Broly, and that's where we see Frieza go to abuse what he knows by killing Paragus to make Broly go Super Saiyan — but he keeps the Ozaru eyes to show that sort of uncontrollable madness he has with his power.

Then we get the double team with Vegeta wondering why Goku's letting shit get out of hand, and things amp up.

Then we get SUCH a satisfying break, where Broly sees and goes in on Frieza, as Goku & Vegeta duck out to fuse. As we're getting comedy relief of fusion training, we get a SOLID HOUR where rage-madness Broly is just wrecking Frieza (which he deserved), and that schadenfreude was DELICIOUS.

Then we get to the Gogeta vs. Broly (with that amazing little Whis tease and nod), reality-shattering energy clash and just turning everything up to 11. Gogeta blue, and it becoming apparent that Broly doesn't have any way to shut it off, and they'd've killed him if not for Cheyle's timely and fantastic intervention to shut everything down.

The way that Goku comes to visit Broly and Cheyle wraps up the REALLY important arc connection that was lacking to connect Broly himself to everything. We see Goku follow up on the conversation with Broly that he wanted to have before when he went SSG. Goku massively respects Broly's power and sees that Broly is genuinely a pure-hearted Saiyan. When Goku introduces himself and then WILLINGLY gives Broly permission to call him Kakarot feels really huge. That loops back to Minus, where Goku isn't sure if he was sent away to Earth be a monster like Broly was, but he sees that same hope in Broly that his parents had for in him. He takes pride in his Saiyan name, not just accepting it like he does with Vegeta, he OFFERS it to Broly specifically.

That specifically pulls in to the ominous threat just before that Frieza makes from a distance. He knows where Broly is, and WANTS Goku to train him. He wants Broly to get his power under control, and not go crazy, because he experienced an hour of getting the shit kicked out of him because of it. However, given how he exploited Paragus' death, the BIG fear is that Frieza is gonna take something Broly cares about hostage to control him. He won't kill them, but that gets Broly mad, and also makes it so he's somewhat helpless to retaliate, which makes me super nervous.

The best part about that is that it tightens in the Frieza, Broly, Goku relationship in a way that wasn't in place for this film. What THAT does is it leaves things in a place where Frieza's hatred towards Goku is focused through Broly to tie up the two of them in a difficult battle, which can then leave Vegeta in the difficult position of helping Goku or taking down Frieza in a way that you could leverage for some DAMN fine sequel content.

Lots of massive cheering as soon as the credits rolled from the whole audience. Still hyped as all fuck from how thoroughly I enjoyed the hell out of it.





X :neo:
 
X-SOLDIER

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
It's a total trip being surrounded by a big crowd of fans for special showings like this. It's very different from premiers of other big genre films, because basically everybody there is a fan, and there're very few people just checking it out out of general interest. I also always forget how VERY diverse the DBZ fanbase is, and that it's a lot less made up of just nerdy white kids than a significant chunk of other anime have a tendency to be by comparison.




X :neo:
 
Interslicery

Interslicery

.....
My town doesnt get big excited over movies. The most interaction I saw (with any movie) was back when they showed the Frieza movie, and they had the trivia with the cast.
My theatre was mostly white guys in their 20's-30's, but a decent chunk of girls, and one guy brought his 4-5yr old.
 
The Twilight Mexican

The Twilight Mexican

Ex-SeeD-ingly good
AKA
TresDias
I unexpectedly found myself with the opportunity to go see this a couple of times this morning.

I'm not sure what this says about me, but I recognize that this is by far the best Broly movie yet still very much prefer the original. I definitely love this reimagining of Broly as an innocent powerhouse, but I don't know that "Dragon Ball" has ever offered us a more intimidating opponent for its heroes than the original, sadistic, seemingly unstoppable Broly.

So I surprised myself a little there. :monster:

I also surprised myself with feeling super interested in the Planet Vegeta stuff the first time I watched it, but just kind of wanting to get through it quickly the second go round. Maybe because it wasn't actually all that interesting once you knew what it had on offer? And probably because I'm also not that big a fan of "Dragon Ball Minus."

On that note, I'm going to have to disagree with you, @Lulcielid , that the film didn't offer much in the way of a thematic connection between Goku and Broly. To the contrary, I thought it went out of its way to do so by incorporating "Minus" and featuring both boys' fathers making efforts to save them -- and also genuinely loving their sons.

Even if Paragus was a tad blinded by his vengeance for a while toward the end of his life, he seems to really love Broly here, which I'm not sure was the case with the original Paragus.

So, between these matters, and a couple of other things, the movie actually does a little more with theme-ing than you might think. Paragus even gets executed in a similarly callous "matter of utility" way to Beets, the fellow Saiyajin that he executed early in the movie. Their wound is through the heart in both cases as well.

Granted, the heart-shot execution is one of Freeza's signature moves anyway, but it strikes me as a deliberate parallel. :monster:

Anyhow, cool fight choreography, interesting reimaginings of some classic characters, fun new characters (I really dig Chiley), and absolutely gorgeous visuals. A good DB movie that definitely leaves me looking forward to where DBSuper goes next.
 
Castiel Strife

Castiel Strife

Pro Adventurer
Have to agree with Twilight that in ways I prefer the original story of Broly, minus the movie turning into One Punch Man at the end. With that being said, this was absolutely the right direction for them to go with Broly's character. It adds more depth and allows them to go in all sorts of directions in the future for his character development.

And speaking of Super, if it does continue as Super as I expect, I wonder if they will retell this story in episodic format the way they did Beers and Golden Frieza? I'm not entirely opposed to it, but I was pretty surprised when they decided to start Super off with the retellings of those.

But anyways, back on track to the movie - definitely one of my favorites in the DB series. This was also the first time I made it to a premiere, and the first time ever seeing DB in a movie theater, so that was an awesome experience. The animation was definitely top notch, and I thought the pacing was extremely well done although the beginning did have a few dull moment- ah, who am I kidding? It's DB - there's never a dull moment! :)
 
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