When you’re making a movie out of something as incredibly stylized as Dragonball, you either have to embrace the silliness or find a way to ground the whole thing in reality. I don’t know how James Wong, director of the live action Dragonball movie, has decided to handle his film, but the early images that we’ve seen seem to be throwing down squarely in the middle of the road. Take this picture, from a Japanese magazine, of hero Goku. He’s famous for his insanely spiked hair; in the picture above, star Justin Chatwin looks like he has an epic case of bedhead. So Goku’s not totally crazy looking, but he’s also not grounded in reality. He’s just sort of straddling a pit of suck.
The page from the magazine shows other actors and the characters they’re playing, but I’m pretty sure the images aren’t those of the actors in character.
And with that I’ve already given more thought to a fucking Dragonball movie today than I have the collected works of Fritz Lang.