Give me back the one and a half hours of my life

I am a huge fan of Dragonball series. I finished all of them-Dragonball, Dragonball Z, Dragonball GT -spanning over some 500 odd episodes in less than 3 weeks. So naturally, when I heard that a movie called Dragonball Evolution was coming out, I was jumping out of my boots. To cap it off, it dealt with the Piccolo saga, my favourite in the Dragonball franchise and Chow Yun Fat starred in it. Besides, the girls playing the roles of Chi Chi and Bulma were pretty smoking hot.

So hours passed into days and days into weeks. And finally the D Day had arrived. Dragonball Evolution was released. I downloaded it from the awesome IIT Kgp LAN and watched it. And the next few lines describe why I, a person who has seen the entire DBZ series atleast thrice, want back the hour and a half that I spent watching that movie.

For starters, if we define a similarity function S(x,y) giving similarity between two items x and y, then we shall have S("DB","Dragonball Evolution") -> 0. Goku fought Piccolo when he was around 6 years of age, not while he was in High School. And lets face it, Goku never went to High School. Chi Chi never had parties in her home, infact she met Goku once when she was a kid and Goku was looking for the Dragonballs. Piccolo never killed Grandpa Gohan. It was Goku himself ( thoigh unknowingly) in his Oozaru form. And so on and so forth....

Next, lets come to the movie. I have never seen a movie with such a weak script, pathetic acting and photography. And as for the special effects... heck!! the anime had better special effects man!! Justin Chatwin could never portray the simplicity and innocence of Son Goku. Instead, Goku is portrayed as a cocky and lovesick hormonal teenager. Chow Yun Fat---- man he sucked big time!! Where is the ludicrous idiot named Master Roshi?? Instead , we see Master Roshi as a kind and considerate man with virtually no weak points!! Where is his womanizer side man?? Without that, Roshi is just another martial arts teacher, maybe like Master Shen!! And the lesser I say about Chi-Chi and Bulma the better.

The only convincing role in the movie was played by James Marsters (Lord Piccolo). He did a good job in portraying the ruthless Piccolo and in highlighting the "pure evil" part of Piccolo. Thank goodness Piccolo was not portrayed as a guy who gave up his evil acts out of remorse. Atleast that added some charm to the movie.

As for the visual effects, I know its difficult to show all the stuffs shown in the anime, but still a little bit more of special effects would do no harm to anyone. The Kamehameha wave was just like wisp of smoke, whereas it actually looks like a huge beam of blinding light charging towards the victim. Pathetic!! Just pathetic!! And without the Kamehameha, Dragonball is just incomplete. Its like the soul of Dragonball.

I had high hopes from this movie, being a huge fan of the anime. This movie did have potential, but the director was an incompetent nincompoop. And thus what could have been one of the top releases of the year became nothing more than a one and a half hour long PJ. I wish someone had done a regular H G Wells and invented a time machine so that I could undo my actions for that hour and a half and not live with the regret of wasitng valuable time for the rest of my life......