User Reviews

First of all I have to say that this movie amazing, but mainly thanks to the animation. I think is the best animation I have ever seen. Except for some CG parts which seems really unpolished, the animation is a 10. The story is quite ok, but retelling the same old stuff for that long is not that great in my opinion. And Broly, now has a personality, wow, but it is nothing crazy or unexpected. He is better because the old Broly is a screaming beast. But yeah, it is Dragon Ball so the complexity of characters and story are not the main thing. And here comes my main complaint, the power levels are nonexistent and completely destroyed. For me it makes no sense whatsoever. Yeah, Super anime ruined the power levels, but now they are irrelevant 100%. I get it, Broly is gifted, he had a harsh life etc. But so are Goku and Vegeta!! They are stronger than some of the gods, they defeated countless opponents, they trained all their life...but this doesnt matter at all. What is the point of transforming in Super Saiyan GOD if that stupid ass Broly can handle it in his base form. Whats the point of changing hair colours every 5 minutes? Because thats how transformations felt in this movie, honestly. It just seems a big big fan service for 10 year olds. They made Broly that strong just to have a reason to put Gogeta in the movie...it felt so so so forced. Anyway, what can I say, it is clear that this movie was made with passion, love, and a lot of money and hard work, they ruined it with the fan service, the Gogeta thing. In my opinion, Broly at his maximum power should have been easily handled by Blue Goku or Vegeta, to make some sort of sense... I waited so long for this movie to see how everything becomes pointless. Goku and Vegeta should have started in Blue form because it felt like base form anyway. It was a show, an amazing one, but it has to make at least a bit of sense to me to be enertaining.

My ratings are: Animation: 10 Storyboard: 10 Music: 9 Story: 6 Any sort of logic: 2

Hope you find this useful, and maybe share the same opinion in some regards. Have a good day and enjoy the movie!

I cannot stress this enough, this is not a good introduction into the Dragonball series. If you have not watched the series, do not watch this movie. It will simply make no sense and you will get absolutely nothing out of it. Now that out of the way, this is definitely one of the best Dragonball movies, if not the best.

To really see what the movie does well, its important to understand what its predecessors do wrong. They treat the movie like its own story arch, with a big bad and his minions scheming for the dragonballs, tree of life, a can of Coke or whatever, and its up to the heroes to come together and curb stomp them all in short, unimpressive fights. After laying out Toriyama's shopping list disguised as antagonists, the big bad readies to fight them to close out the last ten minutes and gets eliminated by some sort of plot device like Gohan's dormant power, a Hail Mary energy blast, or whistling. There is little catharsis and the villains are tossed in the trash never to be heard from again. Except for Broly. The hulking behemoth gets center stage in this movie, after exploring his character he is thrown headlong into a brutal slobber knocker that carries the movie further than any cockamamie scheme and cannon fodder ever could. The fight itself is masterfully paced, Broly has been fighting for training wheels all his life and finally meeting someone that can match him he just keeps improving until he can match the overpowered heroes. As they escalate, so does he until he becomes an unstoppable monster devoid of reason and mercy. It in itself tells an interesting story that can't be expressed in words. Finally, Broly is the main event threat that he is designed to be.

This leads us back to another massive improvement, in spite of the popularity of the character, Broly's prior appearances aren't good. In fact, the chatracter's backstory has been downright stupid. In his first outing, his personal driving force was his disdain for baby Goku's crying when they were in the nursery. Its a postnatal grudge match, as ridiculous as that sounds. Sure there is the grudge his father has for Vegeta and the Saiyan race but most of it is Goku's crying. This is followed up with his clone Bio-Broly who melts pretty much instantly and can't even speak. To fix the character with one of the worst backstories the movies had ever contrived, they focused on what worked. Broly has never interacted with any of the main cast, he hasn't interacted with anyone but his father since before the series starts. Stranded together, the two have done nothing but refine him into a killing machine to reek revenge upon the Saiyan race that scorned them. He was a monster made, living a childhood devoid of kindness or care, the only creature he can endear himself to is a massive carnivorous beast and even that is taken from him by his tyrannical father. When he is found and brought before Frieza, he is seen as an impressive tool to avenge his defeat at the hands of Goku but proves too powerful for the alien tyrant to control. There is nothing superfluous about him, he is a force of nature that threatens the earth.

With such a direct plot, its the fight that everyone paid to see and it gives everything in spades. The animation is crisp as it transitions into CGI and everything has a good sense of weight. Goku getting slammed alas Loki in the Avengers doesn't look like he is made of feathers, Broly slings him around like a bag of hammers while the heroes body goes ragdoll. There are plenty of zippy movements that lead into a very visually appealing scene where they break time and space with their fighting only to smash their way back. They even manage to work in some funny comedy as Goku and Vegeta rope Frieza into the fight. The only real complaint is how the initial fight with Vegeta ends, Goku simply steps in and Vegeta doesn't complain. It lacks any decisive winner and transitions poorly.

Again, if you are a fan of the series this is a must see, but if not know that it does not explain anything. If anything I said doesn't make sense its only a fraction of the show specific terms that they will not define. There are flashbacks to scenes from the series that well have no context for those who have not seen them and characters who get no introduction at all. This is specifically for the fans

Dragonball movies have always had their issues, they're generally just poorly written and paced fan service doses for people to enjoy fun what if scenarios. This one takes that and pushes it to it's limit but without actually developing an interesting antagonist or any ounce of suspense around it. Like every Dragonball movie you know going in none of the characters are at threat, the planet will be fine and all will revert back to normal at the end of it. So the core of this movie has to come from the action and the character moments. This version of Broly is superior but ultimately just as shallow despite rewriting his character and making him more sympathetic. The writing during these moments is still weak at best, it's clearly catering to children and potential newcomers alike with awkward overly explanatory dialogue and at other times hitting you with stuff so simply or poorly written you can't help but roll your eyes. Thankfully there are many visual treats here, but all as formulaic as ever, you will see our main characters start out at their normal base level, then slowly ramp up with increasing levels of strength and set pieces until something inevitably happens to push the fight over the edge and end it. Unlike most Dragonball movies we get a different ending, our antagonist is actually saved and given a second shot at life, but on his prison of a home planet instead and our characters arch rival is just let go to kill and torture whoever he wants, despite Goku supposedly being a goodhearted person who would never let anyone on Earth suffer, but hey, random Frieza henchmen and anyone he decides to kill as he travels through space? Ay okay in Goku's book. Moment's like this make any character moments that need to shine fall flat, nothing is consistent, everything is convenient, references and callbacks like the Krilin/Namek moment or the fusion dance nonsense is all here in it's boring glory. Nothing feels fresh except for the fight choreography and animation. Which if you really want to just see beautiful animation, it's okay, but you could just go watch Redline. Instead you get a repetitive predictable slog of a beatdown with no twists or anything to worry about. It's a retread of a existing movie that does very little new. Watch if you are a massive fan of Super or for some reason enjoy brainless animation but other than that steer clear. There's not much of worth here sadly and far to many repeated mistakes that for some reason can just not be fixed even after the many years this franchise has exised.

Amazing movie. I was blown away 😍😍. Incredible fight scenes. Graphics were jawdropping.

Well, this movie is pretty logical and I'm glad they are taking this stuff seriously. There were some confusing things but they were pretty much explained. It is clear why Goku's parents did not leave to Earth with him (enemy would sense them). It is clear what was happening during the hour when Gogeta was in bad shape (Whis was distracting Broly).

The only question I have is why Goku didn't use SSB Kaio Ken x20, but probably he didn't want to break his body because thought that will not help.

It's cool that Gogeta used the mastered version of SSB transformation. It is good that Vegeta pretty much received as much attention as Goku. I'm glad that they didn't make Broly extremely strong and he actually easily lost to Gogeta, because power levels are getting out of hand now. But if you give them time it's ok. I just wonder what's gonna happen with Broly? We will have now 3 main characters, wtf? Even Vegeta did not get his shine yet, Goku always gets everything first.

The only reason I give this 8/10 is because I was lacking overwhelming emotions. The strongest emotion I had was when Broly attacked Vegeta and Vegeta smiled. I was like "omg, that's my man Vegeta!". Also there were a few nice emotional moments from the past of Goku.

Animation wise, this movie is excellent. Dragon Ball movies never looked this good before.

I also liked the introduction, revealing more details of the Saiyan life.

And the fight scenes were simple wonderful.

But a couple of things left a sour taste in my mouth:

First, and more importantly, the awful characterization of Goku which started in Dragon Ball Super (Yes, I know Toriyama said Goku is "not a hero" like Superman, but there is a line between being a hero, and befriending guys that regularly commit genocide)

He is an idiot here. A totally unlikeable idiot with no more thoughts other than "I must fight strong guys". So, so annoying.

We have reached the point where Vegeta, a former cruel villain from this series, is more heroic than him. If Super continues this path, soon even Nappa would be more heroic than him.

The second, is Frieza.

I see some fans already claiming Frieza is the "Joker" of the Dragon Ball Franchise. For me, that is awful. Look, I do not hate Batman, but one of the reasons of why I preferred manga over the DC or Marvel comics, it's because there is real progress in the stories, the villains (and some heroes) stay dead, instead of keeping an eternal status quo where nothing can never change: This is made purely for commercial purposes; the real reason Batman cannot kill the Joker is not because the writers want to make a profound statement about how "killing is wrong", but is made because the editors are afraid of losing the Joker hardcore fans as part of their readership.

So, no matter what, Batman can never kill the Joker, and he always keeps escaping from Arkam asylum and nothing ever changes.

I hate the status quo from superhero western comics, because it totally squanders any form of character development in favor of endless pandering.

So yeah, the last thing I would want for Dragon Ball is to follow that route. I can get over Frieza coming back to life once. I can get over the addition of another Frieza looalike character. So resurrecting him a second time (And by Goku, no less!) was way too much.

Worse, at the end of the horrible Dragon Ball Super, he gets away scott-free, and this movie shows him continuing his genocide on the galaxy. And Goku? He simply does not care, and allows Frieza to roam free (Despite the clear warning Vegeta gave to him, about how ridiculously strong Frieza could get just by training a couple of months)

This movie, like the horrible, horrid Dragon Ball Super, is just another victory for Frieza. He got away with everything, and they try to pass this as a "happy ending". Now Goku is just one step away of being best pals with the same guy that killed all his people.

It might sound like nit-picking, but it kinda ruins my enjoyment of this movie, disregard of the positive elements. I cannot stand the new Peter Griffin Goku that only cares about fighting and befriends genocidal tyrants because he is "not a hero".

But hey, at least the animation was nice. And New good Broly is an ok character.

How many retcons are we going to have to see of Frieza wiping out the Sayians? It seems like anytime we try to go back and visit an earlier time period we end up with some sort of timeline inconsistency.

This movie is plagued with established plot elements that just get ignored later on. The biggest ones I can recall are:

Raditz somehow knowing that his parents sent Goku off to Earth. He was away on a mission and they had stated earlier that communication using the scouters is monitored so how exactly did he get that information?

Broly turning super sayain. This one is so laughably bad. Broly's father explains that if broly gets too out of control he loses all sense of himself. After fighting in this state for quite some time Frieza decides to kill his father in order to trigger the emotional response that Goku had on Namek when Krillen died. The problem with that is, Broly is a mindless killing machine at this point, his father's death should have had no effect. Broly had shown more emotional attachment to a severed ear, than his father (who forced Broly to kill the only friend he had) Personally I would have had Vegeta accidentally grab the ear in the middle of a fight, say something about how disgusting it is and have him blast it. That would have at least paid off the emotional character arc set up earlier in the story.

Overall, the fight scenes are good, but the story lacks any substance. I'd wait for the eventual arc they'll do when more super episodes come out.