Dragon Ball Z Movie 08: Moetsukiro!! Nessen, Ressen, Chougekisen

Welcome to the complete and utter letdown that is Broly. For a non-canonical character, Broly receives a massive amount of praise. People often cite this movie to be the best DBZ film. Not only is Broly not the best DBZ film, Broly is just plain bad.

I don't have nostalgia for DBZ. If you do feel free to put your hands over your ears and exit the review. I first watched DBZ (as well as the original Dragon Ball) in 2015. I loved Dragon Ball and DBZ was great as well, albeit with a lot of faults. So I do enjoy the series a lot.

The main ... issue with the movie is Broly. Broly represents everything that was creatively wrong in DBZ. He shows up and is completely invincible until time is running out on the feature. Most of this movie is the Dragon Ball Z trope of Goku and friends getting their butts kicked until (literally) the final 5 minutes of the movie. It's not even a back and forth affair. For some this makes Broly a cool bad ass. For the rest of us, we see it for what it is. It's the same played out lazy fight scene Dragon Ball Z thrived on, except this time it monopolizes a feature length film.

Broly's backstory isn't special either. I am certainly glad they explained how another Saiyan is wondering around, but that doesn't make it intriguing. I think the movie wanted you to feel for him a bit, but then it switches back to Broly in the present time acting what I would describe as foolish and you feel nothing. Broly has nothing interesting about him. He is just a goofy monster.

Should you watch this movie? Of course. It's part of DBZ history. A lot of people love it and you need to at least give it a watch. Just be ready, because this movie movie will let you down.

I have to say, at one point, I thought this anime was going to be half decent. Primarily, it has a story that, though painfully transparent, is quite complex when measured against other Dragon Ball Z movies. They actually spend about half the movie (rather than the usual 5 - 10 minutes) setting up the inevitable brawl that we all know is coming. But having gotten everything set up, this movie is actually let down by the fighting. It's just so... uninspiringly dull. The way Goku seems to be only half seriously going about his usual job of kicking villains' butts and the way they ... keep throwing in crappy jokes meant that in the end they completely failed to create a decent battle atmosphere. There's also a certain consistency missing from the movie. For one thing, Vegita's change of heart is so badly done I was completely unconvinced. And if they could transfer ki like they did in this movie, why the hell did Piccolo have to do it the harder way in the last Dragon Ball Z movie that I watched (movie #4)?? Speaking of Piccolo, his appearance is becoming kind of boring and predictable too - he makes this surprise entry in the middle of the battle in this movie... except it's no longer very surprising when I've seen him make exactly the same kind of entrance in just about every other Dragon Ball Z movie that I've watched. They really need to think up some new "twists". And the ending... I can't believe how badly this movie failed at creating a climax at the end. It just sort of... ended, and that was that.

This movie COULD have made it up to a 5. Hell, it almost made it up to a 6 at one point, but it goes downhill so fast in the last few minutes that I had to do some serious down marking.

From all the descriptions and everything I had heard about this movie, it sounded a lot more interesting than the four DBZ movies Cartoon Network kept replaying every couple of months. The other elements of the movie were poor foundations for the story. Before I had seen this movie, the story sounded fair (6) but with how everything else turned out, it's only a 1.

The art is good. It's obvious you're watching Toriyama-style. DBZ is a big show so it's not as if they can afford to concentrate their budget on one movie.

The soundtrack is fair. The English and Japanese audio tracks fit depending ... on your tastes/mood. With the English dub, you get bgm that's loud and frequent. Sometimes listening to the rock after a while made me feel irritated but it fits fine.

As for the Japanese track, I prefer Goku's dub voice since I've heard it a lot longer having the dub to watch when growing up. The original BGM is much quieter than the rock used for the English track which let me focus on the animation a lot more. When anyone was yelling, I liked having the English rock going on compared to the less energetic original bgm where sometimes there'd be none playing.

After about a third into the movie, we learn more details about the legendary Super Saiyan and how the people affected by it feel. It was here I was let down. The characters didn't seem as impressive anymore. I didn't enjoy this as a movie anymore but down to the level of a filler.

I'm not unattracted to the sequel or the rest of the movies I have yet to watch. It'd be great if the sequel turns out to be a lot better than this one though it won't be the next DBZ movie I check out next time. It'll have to wait until I see another first.

Next December, the highly anticipated “Dragon Ball Super Movie: Broly” (which will finally fulfill the wishes of many Dragon Ball fans of bringing the character to the canon) will hit theaters, so I decided to check once again “Broly: The Legendary Super Saiyan”, the first of the 3 old DBZ non-canon movies featuring the villain and also the most popular and favorited one probably along “Fusion Reborn”, only to confirm my bewilderment on how can the former hold this distinction.

First of all, most of the old DBZ movies tell a story that either just can’t fit in the chronology of the main story (implying ... a continuity break) or unnaturally interferes with it in a questionable way, failing to build much interest in the audience due to the sense of irrelevancy and/or discontinuity, and this one is no exception. Right in the midst of the confrontation against Cell, and knowing how their world is in danger thanks to his presence, Goku happily accepts Kaio’s petition to investigate and deal with a threat coming from the southern galaxy without even knowing how much time this is going to take him, and Vegeta, who only wanted to fight Cell as soon as possible to prove himself, receives an invitation of another saiyan survivor called Paragus not only to become the king of a restored saiyan empire in a new planet, but also to fight against the legendary super saiyan who, according to Paragus, is causing havoc in the aforementioned galaxy, represents a threat to the new empire and Vegeta is the only one who can defeat him. The saiyan prince, who always heard stories about him, doesn’t even ask him why he would represent that since he was supposedly one of theirs, and tempted by the possibility to restore the glory of his race, also accepts to leave the same as Goku, both completely forgetting about Cell’s imminent threat and whose name, despite this, was curiously never ever mentioned throughout the entirety of this movie, as if that threat had never existed in the first place.

How is the audience supposed to buy this? Was it really that hard to add just a tad of credibility by just dedicating a few lines of the script to this situation? Just a simple “hey guys, let’s make this quick, remember we have to go back to Earth soon to fight Cell!”? I know this lack of credibility and realism is present in many DBZ movies, but that is still no excuse. Anyway, once they arrive on the planet, they meet Broly, the son of Paragus and a very peculiar saiyan survivor characterized by a suspicious calmed and gentle personality (an uncommon trait for the saiyan race), but who in reality was hiding a monster inside that was going to cause a lot of troubles for the Z team.

It just boggles me how Broly can be one of most beloved and popular villains among the DB fans. He is totally uninteresting, even for DBZ movies standards, or more precisely, was made uninteresting in the way. He could have been an intriguing villain. As someone who was overthrown and sentenced to death by his own people -given the threat he represented to the King for being born with an enormous power he had never asked for-, condemned to wander through the galaxies living in inhospitable conditions and who was later mind-controlled by his own father who wanted to make use of his colossal strength for his selfish purposes, he had a lot of valid reasons to be angry inside, to seek for revenge, and the potential to become more than just your average forgettable DBZ movie villain who wanted to conquer the world or something…was always there. But unfortunately, the movie failed to take advantage of this potential at all by presenting him at first as this enigmatic robotic dude who doesn’t say anything, doesn’t do anything besides making these wacky angry facial expressions whenever he stares at Goku (in such a way that it feels almost as if he was programmed to do so) and by then turning him into a dull over-muscled beast with just 2 brain cells: one that he uses to destroy and kill everything in his path, and the other one to yell: “Kakarott!”. And this was everything the movie did with his character, the famous Legendary Super Saiyan!

We never get to know how he really feels or what he thinks about everything he has had to live, what his true motivations are, because he never speaks a single relevant line about himself; when he’s not the beast, his mind and behavior are under control (with a machine that the movie never even bothered to tell us how his father invented or how does it work, not even a single simple and quick explanation: it just does!) and when he becomes the beast, he doesn’t (and maybe, he just can’t) say anything about himself either, he just limits to yell: “Kakarott!”, leaving everything to speculation and allowing for some people to believe that, given the few-friends face he put to Goku and the obsession he develops towards him, the reason of all his anger was as stupid as he couldn’t bear Goku crying all the time next to him when they were babies, when the case could have perfectly been that, for some reason, he was to him just the embodiment of all the suffering he had to go through. Things are, since the information provided was so little and confusing, we could never know, losing all the opportunities to make the audience feel anything for him. At the end of the day he’s a completely shallow character, nothing else but a killing machine that likes destroying everything in his way pretty much like how Kid Buu was, except this time not even half charismatic and “lovable” like he was.

The other aspects of the movie weren’t better. First, no matter how uninteresting your villain is, you can always arrange some exciting action scenes, which also wasn’t the case here. The confrontation (that takes half the movie) was incredibly tedious and flat, failing to create any tension or genuine excitement, so much that you just wanted the Z team to finish the job quickly to get back to Earth and resume their conflict with the much more interesting Cell.

Speaking about Cell, Goku’s complete carefree attitude like if he didn’t have to solve this situation as soon as possible because Dr. Gero’s creation was waiting for him, not giving weight to the threat, was not believable. Goku was never that dumb! (At least not in the Z era). Vegeta acting out-of-character, easily surrendering after noticing Broly’s superiority, and as the prideful warrior he always was, also didn’t make sense; that was never part of his personality. Gohan, who was supposedly as powerful as his father (or even more) by this time, didn’t do much besides being passively part of the final solution and helping the alien race from the harsh labor conditions under which they had to work for Paragus, the same as Krilin and Trunks. And Roshi and Oolong, who had absolutely nothing to do here, were also included in the quest just for the sake of adding unnecessary comedy, which was terrible, unfunny and totally forced, doing no favor.

Finally, the ending of the movie feels like…”well, let’s end this, whatever way, and let’s get out of here quickly”. After a tedious, over-stretched fight, we had a rushed conclusion with the climax literally happening in the last minute before credits start rolling and goodbye.

Art and animation are pretty good, and in fact, better than the actual main series. But every single DBZ movie also does, so this is nothing particularly special here. Though I have to say I liked the greenish design of Broly’s hair and aura, which highlighted his status as an advanced and superior super saiyan. The music included some of the main series tunes (at least in the Japanese version, don’t know the dubbed one) but somehow I feel it was just ok, it couldn’t emphasize the intrigue and the action enough as opposed to what the main series always did so well.

To sum up, “Broly: The Legendary Super Saiyan”, was just a total letdown. It promised to be one of the best but at the end became one of the most lackluster of all the old DBZ movies. To be fair, most of them are, but as one of the most relevant given its direct connection with the franchise’s most important storyline (the saiyan race), in this case the result should have been better. It missed the opportunity to leverage the legend of the Legendary Super Saiyan (forgive the redundancy) Vegeta was always talking about during the Frieza arc and was painfully boring, as opposed to the other two Broly based movies (“Broly: Second Coming” and “Bio-Broly”) which at least were funnier to watch since they featured the naughty kids Goten and Trunks going in an adventure and were considerably more enjoyable. I’ll honestly never understand what the DB fans found so good and entertaining in this movie and in Broly, who to me was never anything else than an over-muscled, 2 brain-celled beast obsessed with Goku for God knows why reasons, and I’m really hoping the upcoming movie, this time canon, could do something more interesting with the character and his backstory. 4.5/10.

Alright well, this anime is about an angry young lad who wants to kill another young lad. He moans about it for the first half and then they fight about it for second half. About half the fighting is yelling and moaning for no reason. ALSO! the dude gets gigantic for no reason.

Yep that is the plot!
The sound is j..j...just bad because literally its just moaning, THATS ALL!!!! THATS ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh my god the characters are just dudes who ffffffight. Geehhhhhhhhh why???

Really do not waste your time on this, it made me want to slit my wrist. If you wanna watch a DBZ film go watch ... the first 3 and maybe the fourth.



Gero Gero...Gero...GeroGeroro



Do you ever wonder where the DBZ characters grow there access hair from when the switch form?
I need answers.....