Review of Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection ‘F’
Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection ‘F’ is everything Dragon Ball Z fans love about the series.
This movie has more action, more humor, and a more well-developed story than Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods.
If you liked Battle of Gods, you’ll love ‘F’, and if you were looking for more fights, then ‘F’ has got you covered. The intensity of the hand-to-hand combat and the fluidity of the animation is something fans haven’t seen since the original DBZ.
Akira Toriyama manages to ‘up’ himself and the cast once again; always taking things to the next level. And there are some fun cultural elements that he adds into the mix, along with science fiction and in-jokes for hardcore fans.
I could do a full movie review for Resurrection ‘F’, but I don’t feel like restating what everybody on the Internet has already discussed. Suffice to say the story is superb, the actors do a great job, and if you’re a Dragon Ball fan, then Resurrection ‘F’ is a must see.
Do yourself a favor and see it in the theater with other DBZ fans. It’s a limited release from August 4 – 12, so now’s the time to buy your ticket.
The reason this movie exists and is in theaters today is because we went out and saw Battle of Gods as part of the greater Dragon Ball community. Our financial support showed the Japanese creators, the dubbers, and distributors that we wanted another film. We did it then and I hope we can do it again now. Who knows what may come next!
If you’ve seen the movie, then how did you feel about it?
Nice review Derek, I’ve just shared!! I’m looking forward to going to the cinema on the 6th November and enjoying in Spain!! I’m glad to see that everyone in the world is having fun with our Z-Warriors on the big screen again!! :)
It’s a great time to be a Dragon Ball Z fan!
Finished watching the film about two hours ago now.
Let me start off by saying I’m of course a big DBZ fan having grown up with it, and from the screenshots and sneak peaks of this movie, it looked to be an incredible film, giving fans exactly what they wanted. And despite what it may seem like, I DID enjoy it, and I am glad I watched it.
But the plot holes and inconsistencies leave it so flawed, it’s hard to ignore them.
*SPOILER WARNING HERE: DO NOT READ BELOW*
First, 18 not fighting even though she’s stronger, just to let Krillin be a man, was clever and funny at the same time, so that’s understandable. Yamcha made sense due to not being strong enough and his recent internet memes about his deaths and 0 kills counts throughout the series. Goten and Trunks being “told” not to come, and simply never showing up in the movie at all? What? Strange and unlikely for the DBZ universe. (Especially given they can sense energy and could easily tell when Goku was shot through the heart and dying, or Gohan’s heart stopped, or whatever. They just never tried to even help? Oh come on. They’re half-saiyans. They love to fight.)
Particularly considering some interesting scenes could have come out of Frieza expecting adult (“Future Trunks”) Trunks, but receiving a noticeably different version. Plus, Frieza was of course focusing on his revenge for the ultimate, intense Frieza Saga battle with a SS, but he was also killed again by yet another SS later as Mecha Frieza. While Goku is his main prey, the whole Trunks thing had a lot of potential there…imagine Trunks getting his butt kicked while Vegeta was still away. Imagine both Goku and Vegeta arriving while Gohan’s heart was stopped, and Trunks was similarly beaten. The potential for epic scenes and storytelling here is massive!
Second, you can NOT get more obvious than, when, in the first ten minutes of the movie, you completely randomly have a character explain they have the ability to turn back time, and have the main chars “ooo” and “ahh” at the fact…you know IMMEDIATELY that that brand new feature is going to be used in this movie at some point. Heck, a child older than ten would know! The way the writing rushed into that was so insanely bad it can’t even be funny. The worst part of it?: The fact that, now, during any moment of tension in the film, the viewer never really feels the emotions because they know that there is the easy cop-out of turning back time a few seconds and getting a do-over! Did the writers seriously not see this as a problem here? Read any review of the film and everyone is including this terrible loophole as a strong negative. At least with the dragonballs, in terms of do-overs, there were a lot of rules in place, it took a lot of time to gather them, depending on the dragon there were a certain amount of wishes, a certain amount of times someone could be wished back to life, etc. Whis can just tap his cane twice and reverse time at any point, no rules at all. Yikes.
Not only do you know this during the entirety of the film now, but for some reason the main fight against Frieza never feels quite intimidating…Goku begins with the huge upperhand, they both transform to maximum, Goku claims to “getting my butt kicked” (when in reality he only was beaten up a few times, nothing crazy), but he remains pretty decently okay throughout the match, AND a completely untouched and newly-SSGSS Vegeta is standing by just waiting to get his turn against the villain. The viewer NEVER feels the tension because there IS none! Even without the time reversal, it is repeated three times in the film that if Vegeta & Goku would only team up together, they would “easily” defeat frieza. Yet ANOTHER reason there is no tension. What the heck happened? There was tension for the Z-Fighters before this main fight, but that was about it; when Krillin said Gohan’s “heart is stopped”, that was probably the most tension-filled moment in the entire film right there, and even then we still already knew about time reversal AND a potential tag-team of Goku & Vegeta (which we’ve even seen before with fusions and whatnot in the past; now all of that character development has magically been lost though? I can understand hesitancy due to Vegeta’s character, but flat-out refusals two or three times and never doing it?).
The mix of CG and 2D were weird at times, and I’ve seen a lot of mentions of it, but I think it was okay (except for the huge Frieza army part with like three 2d characters in the front and a hundred CG copies of each other in the air in the background…that looked terrible). For the most part, the fight scenes were beautifully-done and looked amazing. There were a lot of good things in this movie too. Seeing a return to letting side characters have a helping hand was really cool, and I know a ton of us enjoyed that! Buff Roshi was never a love of mine, but I know he was for a lot of fans. Frieza was as badass as ever. I still think he and Cell were the two best villains of the series, and the Frieza Saga might’ve been the best saga of them all due to the intensity of the fighting on an alien planet and the legend becoming real; a SS. I think it was cool to have Krillin not even hesitate to go stand up against Frieza when he hands Maron to 18, especially when he experienced two of the most intense deaths by Frieza in the past (internal combustion, and the horn piercing before that, although perhaps the piercing didn’t quite kill him and Dende simply healed in time, I guess). So, Krillin grew as a character a bit with that, even if it was just a mere second of screentime.
And finally, what we’ve all been waiting for…Vegeta getting revenge on Frieza for ALL he had done to him, his family, his planet, and his race…revenge for arguably the most GRAPHIC, bone-crushing beating of the series when final-form-Frieza beats the pulp out of Vegeta on Namek while helpless side chars look in awe and fear…he was a mere punching bag…then Goku finally emerges from the tank, Vegeta can barely recite his explanation to him of who Frieza is and what he has done, tears streaming down his cheeks as he recalls everything from his past while coughing up blood, and then Frieza shoots him through the heart. This movie was just about to allow EVERYONE the opportunity for Vegeta to exact his revenge on Frieza, one of the most evil and badass villains in the history of DBZ; and almost as if a cruel joke to viewers, the writers get RIGHT UP TO the point where Vegeta has beaten him around a bit and is completely unscathed, about to deliver the final blow…when Goku inadvertently is REQUIRED to save the day again…
You. Have. GOT. To. Be. @^!@*&*(^+++!!!. Kidding.
The guy who, this time, got shot through the heart and was dying exactly like Vegeta was last time during this battle…saves the day once again. This fact of the movie alone almost makes me want to throw my computer out of a building. And if you look to the internet, I am not alone in this response. This is UNBELIEVABLY ridiculous. It’s…asinine…it’s…words fail!
*SPOILERS END HERE*
Again, not a bad installment per se, it just had a lot of flaws.
The best part of the movie? The pre-fight of Frieza’s army vs. the Z-Fighters.
The worst part of the movie? The main fight’s nonexistent tension and the ridiculousness of the plot’s ending.
Please, anyone, feel free to disagree or agree. I’ve finished my rambling. I am a somewhat happy, but disappointed fan.
I won’t argue against those points because they’re valid and well-reasoned arguments.
However, in regard to the ending, I have to mention that Toriyama will always do the opposite of what you expect to happen. I mention it repeatedly throughout my Dragon Ball Culture book series, alongside numerous pieces of evidence. Toriyama’s been doing it since page 1 of the Dragon Ball story, and he continues to do it to this day. Fans said the same thing you’re saying now about the appearance of Goku’s Super Saiyan God form back in Battle of Gods, when his hair turned red and he became smaller, not larger.
In short, whatever fans want, Toriyama will give them the opposite. He’ll purposefully go out of his way to break fan’s expectations. That’s how his mind works.
Interesting note about Toriyama. I wasn’t aware of that. But I do have to wonder about the infamous “Gohan was supposed to take over as the main character” spiel after after the cell Saga when his latent power was fully released under the Kais for Buu. Many fans are always upset that Toriyama keeps Goku as the hero for every single villain, and this film, you must admit, teased us that Vegeta was finally going to not only get his revenge on Frieza, but also be the hero (and win– with Majin Buu it didn’t work). However, Goku always is squeezed out to be the hero again, even if it takes an extremely contrived plot adjustment to do so, like this movie’s ending here :-
Anyway, regardless of the points I made that I didn’t like, the movie was actually fun to watch and I did enjoy it; after all, it’s DBZ, and with some amazing-looking animation. :-) I am glad Toriyama and the others put it together. It’s just a shame the potential they had with it really went to such waste.
It’s the same situation here. ‘Oh, you want Gohan to be the strongest in the universe and become the hero? Okay, I’ll make him skinny and weak.’
For Vegeta, Toriyama teased to everyone over a year ago that he wanted Vegeta to be the hero. Remember all that news about it? Well look what happened. He saw that millions of fans across the world were expecting Vegeta to be the hero in the next movie, and then bam, he made the opposite happen.
He’s a contrarian who will go out of his way to betray people’s expectations, even if it does ‘ruin’ the story. Toriyama WANTED Vegeta to be the hero, but he had to do the opposite in order to make sure the fans didn’t get what they expected.
This kind of stuff is part of Dragon Ball’s charm, and is a big reason for why it’s so popular and discussed all over the world. But it seems like nobody but me realizes this is what’s going on, and that it’s intentional. That’s why I write about it.
I guess words like “charm” and “popular” don’t usually come to my mind in this context; it’d be like “unpopular” and “frustrating”, haha. But being as popular as it is, I guess Toriyama has found the secret to keeping an age-old franchise alive: Never actually give the fans what they want, so they’re always upset and wanting more. More = $$$ for the franchise, and then it never dies. Interesting marketing.
Thanks for all that you do!
Exactly! That’s Toriyama’s genius. Also the genius of his editor, Kazuhiko Torishima.
The problem is that glory-hogging Goku saving the day is precisely what anyone would expect, at this point. It would have been amazing if he had broken expectations and allowed Vegeta to finish off Freeza like Jon suggested.
The problem in this case is that the plot played directly into the unfortunate fact that everyone already knows about Dragon Ball: Goku has to deliver the finishing blow. No one else can completely win the fight or be the hero. Hell, even when Gohan killed Cell, Goku still had to be part of it.
It’s boring and tired, and I really wish the trend would break, so that our expectations can ACTUALLY be broken.
Unfortunately I am not near a theater to watch it, so with that being said when will we see it coming to Dvd/Bluray?
It’s still in theaters, so a release hasn’t been announced yet.
Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection ‘F’ is now available for pre-order on FUNimation.com:
http://www.funimation.com/p/sale?utm_source=Home_Page&utm_medium=Spotlight&utm_campaign=DBZResF_Preorder
it seems evident western fans will never fully comprehend toriyama’s genius as they fo not study eastern philosophy or spirituality nor do they spirjtually cultivate just accept the facts derek dào of dragon ball all day keep doing your awesome virtous labor you’ll meet toriyama soon
Frizza turns gold. Cooler turns silver. Both silver and gold are known as Angelic frequencies. (Gold is usually repersentive of Lucifer) Toryama is a genius.