I think I’m kinda bored.
Which is unfair. Everything about getting to the showdown between Freeza and Goku is actually quite good. Bringing back Pilaf and the gang is a bit gratuitous I suppose, but considering how dour the film as a whole is I won’t begrudge them having a second comedy element besides Whis. Using F during Freeza’s resurrection? *chef kiss* (and let’s be real, I guarantee you that when they had the “holy shit Battle of Gods made all the money, how do we follow that up” meeting, someone just said Maximum the Hormone and the entire movie wrote itself afterward.) The fight with the Freeza Force is a bit long, but also does a great job of giving each fighter a moment and making their fighting styles visually distinct and instantly recognizable.
The opening has to get its own section of course. So Freeza has to be just history’s greatest monster right? His personal Hell is huge, and dozens of angels and other spirits are dedicated to eternally serenade him. He hangs from the great tree, encased in his pupa, there to await forever more until he can truly transform for the better. And this is all beautiful and poetic, but it really stands out because generally speaking Dragon Ball Hell has always been fairly bureaucratic; King Yemma sits at a great desk, in full business attire, rubber stamping the fates of souls. Wait in lines, work menial jobs for all eternity. But Freeza? Oh no, he gets the special hell, the ironic kind.
But about half the movie is the big fight, right? And it’s… a perfectly solid DBZ style brawl. Freeza not picking up right away that Vegeta was just waiting for a chance to kill him was weird, but it also set up the only real twist in the proceedings so that’s an alright trade-off. New forms are always fun I suppose, and both of them feel appropriately powerful in a way that DBZ could be hit or miss at. Basically though it’s sorta hard to care? I think there’re two main contributing factors.
1) The entire foundation of this fight is on shaky ground. Conceptually, by making the thing a big title fight for all the marbles between Goku and Freeza… you’re trying to be better than the original end of the Namek saga. And you can’t. Moving it to Earth so the stakes are technically higher, giving them new forms, making the occasional nod to Freeza learning from the previous bout, that’s all great and adds a little to the fight as spectacle. But you can’t replicate the original transformation to Super Saiyan, or the real meaning of that original victory: Goku is officially the strongest man in the universe. You can still present him new challenges, smarter and stronger foes, shonen power creep, and it’s fun and exciting and all that, but the cultural impact will always be less, and making that comparison so directly weakens this story by default.
(Suddenly I can’t help but wonder if this implies Vegeta’s entire character arc, his quixotic quest to recapture and overcome the original battle between him and Goku, is a metaphor for the show itself. Eh, beyond the scope of a Resurrection F post.)
2) Between the first time I watched this, near release, and now, all of Dragon Ball Super has come out. While I skipped all the episodes directly adapting this movie (I am assured this is the right decision), Freeza’s comeback in the Universe Survival arc exists now. And for all its problems, Freeza was consistently the best part of it. His transformation to Golden form there was given far more weight and spectacle than in this film, his cruelty was more terrifying, his humor more clear and funny, his power far more overwhelming until the very end. So now that I have so much more Freeza to compare him to, the little nuggets we get in Resurrection F feel so much less satisfying.
In the end Resurrection F is spectacle over substance, but nothing here is better than what’s been done either before or since in the series. That’s a bit unfair to the film in its original context of course, and what’s here is… fine, but it doesn’t stand out or hold up, at least not the way Battle of Gods does.
Rating- 6/10
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