Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

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Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by WittyUsername » Thu Apr 02, 2020 11:28 pm

This might be seen as an odd topic for this website, but it is still Dragon Ball related, so I thought I’d ask it anyway.

Obviously, both of these movies are absolute travesties, and it’s a miracle that neither of them managed to kill the respective franchises they’re based on, but would you consider DBE to at least be less of a travesty than M. Night Shyamalan’s TLA?

Personally, I would say that as bad as DBE is, it’s not as incompetent as TLA.

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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by Polyphase Avatron » Thu Apr 02, 2020 11:46 pm

Never watched either except for clips.

Unless you're willing to pay me to sit through them so I can give you my opinion, I intend to keep it that way.
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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by MasenkoHA » Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:10 am

I’ve only seen Evolution as I have never watched the Avatar cartoon, am not inclined to watch it and have little reason to watch a movie adaptation that looks horrible on its own merits.

I will say, even though Dragon Ball Evolution is a terrible terrible film and a horrid adaptation there were ideas that I liked. I liked Bulma wanting to use the dragon balls for fame and fortune rather than for a boyfriend, I liked Roshi’s dirty old men being in check to where its just a girly magazine he owns instead of outright sex offender, I even liked the idea of combining the first arc with the Piccolo Daimao arc.

Obviously, I didn’t like the complete opposite direction of Goku’s character (doesn’t want to practice martial arts, socially self-conscience, and experience sexual attraction like you have to go out of your way to fuck up adapting a character that badly) or the whitewashing or the utter failure of Shenron (how do you fuck up an epic Dragon God that badly I think that 5 seconds bothered me more than any other part of the movie) or making Piccolo ...Freeza essentially or just the way it fails as a movie with cheap effects, cliche writing, horrendous acting (from actors who are actually good in other things no less) and bad directing

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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by Grimlock » Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:24 am

Please don't take this as an offense, but do we really need to keep talking solely about the quality when it comes to these movies? They are kind of bad, yeah, but I find it hard to believe that's the only thing we can talk about them, I'm pretty sure we can find more or even new things to discuss. Their quality have been talked to death now, and a decade has passed, shouldn't we just move on?
WittyUsername wrote: Thu Apr 02, 2020 11:28 pmand it’s a miracle that neither of them managed to kill the respective franchises they’re based on
Huh, why would a single piece of work "kill" an entire franchise? Especially big ones?
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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by Planetnamek » Fri Apr 03, 2020 2:15 am

Way fucking better, DE at least tries to do its own thing separate from the anime. Last Airbender makes the mistake of trying to adapt an entire season of a show for a 90 minute movie which can't be done without feeling rushed and half-assed. Also DE at least had well-done fight scenes, LA is just a clusterfuck of bad FX and it's boring as hell.

I'm with Vegetto EX on DE, taken as a dumb kids film it's perfectly fine for what it is, there's certainly way worse shit aimed at kids(those Land Before Time sequels come to mind)

Why anyone would ever think DE would kill a billion dollar franchise like DB baffles me.

James Wong is a way better director then Shyamalan ever was IMO(i'm one of those people that thought Sixth Sense was an overrated piece of shit that wasn't remotely scary at all, also HATED Signs for the dumb as hell plot twist)
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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by Vijay » Fri Apr 03, 2020 2:21 am

It's like askin which one was better: GT or Super

Both DBE & LA suck in terms of plot, fight, vfx. Fans of either show may be clouded by their nostalgia, hence forgive sum of their shortcomings, but if ya remove nostalgia google's, both films are not good films. Simple as that.

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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by Thunderbird » Fri Apr 03, 2020 2:58 am

TLA at least didn't look like a fan made movie.

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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by SHINOBI-03 » Fri Apr 03, 2020 5:04 am

The Last Airbender bored me to hell. Evolution did not.
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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by JulieYBM » Fri Apr 03, 2020 7:59 am

Gosh, I had purged these movies from my mind until this thread existed.
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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by WittyUsername » Fri Apr 03, 2020 8:52 am

Grimlock wrote: Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:24 am
Huh, why would a single piece of work "kill" an entire franchise? Especially big ones?
It was a deliberate exaggeration.

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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by SuperSaiyaManZ94 » Fri Apr 03, 2020 10:02 am

The Lasr Airbender despite how absolutely god awful it was at least resembled the animated series to some degree while utterly failing in execution of the condensed plot from the show, while Evolution looked more like some generic mid 2000's action movie with the Dragon Ball name slapped onto it and some little references here and there. Quite frankly, they are both pretty crap movies but i feel Evolution was by far the worser bastardization of an adaptation over TLA.

Mind you i watched chunks of them here and there but never all the way, because it came to me pretty quickly just how bad they are as adaptations.
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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by GhostEmperorX » Fri Apr 03, 2020 11:00 am

I legit forgot that DBE even existed. Same with TLA. This comparison has been done for ages, what did you seriously think would be discussed here other than the same stuff that‘s been talked about for more than a decade now?

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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by WittyUsername » Fri Apr 03, 2020 11:25 am

GhostEmperorX wrote: Fri Apr 03, 2020 11:00 am I legit forgot that DBE even existed. Same with TLA. This comparison has been done for ages, what did you seriously think would be discussed here other than the same stuff that‘s been talked about for more than a decade now?
It’s self-explanatory. I wanted to see which movie people on this website think is worse.

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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by Matches Malone » Fri Apr 03, 2020 11:40 am

I haven't seen either of them, but based on their budgets (DB being less than 10 million while TLA being 150 million), we can at least agree that TLA was a better movie from a production point of view. At least the studio tried to make something good, Fox just sent DB out to die. Not only did they kill DB in live action, they killed anime as a while in live action.

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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by 10gigtriforce » Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:20 pm

Evolution hands down. Its. Deviations were at least a little interesting and the cast seems like they at least tried. Plus it had a decent PSP game.


Avatars worst deviations were cause m night didnt want to admit other Asian pronunciations existed and also his and the writers' incompetence. Also they tried to act like it was better than it was in their marketing. Evolution didnt do as much deceptive marketing

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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by It_Is_Ayna_You_Flips » Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:56 pm

I'd say Evolution is better but only technically. As in, the special effects and cinematography of Evolution worked much better than what we got in TLA. TLA had so many bewildering special effects moments that took you out of the film so even if you'd managed to get past the trainwreck story and subpar acting you'd still slam headfirst into Aang (or whatever his equivalent was called) petting the air over his left shoulder while the CGI had Momo over his right shoulder. Then there was the god awful bending scenes...

Evolution on the other hand managed to keep it's action scenes looking serviceable. They looked like low budget Chinese kungfu movie scenes which, while not impressive, still works for Dragon Ball. Had the movie doubled down on camp it might have even made the scenes good. Which I guess is another point in Evolution's favor. You can see a decent movie underneath all that.

There is no decent movie under TLA. Just lousy fanfiction.

EDIT:
Planetnamek wrote: Fri Apr 03, 2020 2:15 am Way fucking better, DE at least tries to do its own thing separate from the anime. Last Airbender makes the mistake of trying to adapt an entire season of a show for a 90 minute movie which can't be done without feeling rushed and half-assed.
Respectfully disagree! The movie adaptations of manga like BLAME! and Akira point to it being very doable, if you're good at your job and willing to take a hatchet to most of the story. TLA's biggest issue was that Shyamalan was too big of a fanboy to do what needed to be done.
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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by Planetnamek » Fri Apr 03, 2020 1:11 pm

It_Is_Ayna_You_Flips wrote: Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:56 pm I'd say Evolution is better but only technically. As in, the special effects and cinematography of Evolution worked much better than what we got in TLA. TLA had so many bewildering special effects moments that took you out of the film so even if you'd managed to get past the trainwreck story and subpar acting you'd still slam headfirst into Aang (or whatever his equivalent was called) petting the air over his left shoulder while the CGI had Momo over his right shoulder. Then there was the god awful bending scenes...

Evolution on the other hand managed to keep it's action scenes looking serviceable. They looked like low budget Chinese kungfu movie scenes which, while not impressive, still works for Dragon Ball. Had the movie doubled down on camp it might have even made the scenes good. Which I guess is another point in Evolution's favor. You can see a decent movie underneath all that.

There is no decent movie under TLA. Just lousy fanfiction.

EDIT:
Planetnamek wrote: Fri Apr 03, 2020 2:15 am Way fucking better, DE at least tries to do its own thing separate from the anime. Last Airbender makes the mistake of trying to adapt an entire season of a show for a 90 minute movie which can't be done without feeling rushed and half-assed.
Respectfully disagree! The movie adaptations of manga like BLAME! and Akira point to it being very doable, if you're good at your job and willing to take a hatchet to most of the story. TLA's biggest issue was that Shyamalan was too big of a fanboy to do what needed to be done.
I suppose so, with Avatar though I genuinely don't see how you can fit all of season one into a 90 minute movie without it feeling short-changed.
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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by Lord Beerus » Sat Apr 04, 2020 12:14 am

Both are equally terrible live action adaptions. The only difference is that The Last Airbender spent $120 million more than Dragon Ball Evolution to be just as shit as that film.

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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by Baggie_Saiyan » Sat Apr 04, 2020 7:29 am

Evolution is fine I recently watched it and was surprised at how much I was into it and how much more I enjoyed it than the likes of BoG.

Past few years I stopped giving a shit what the general consensus on things were and that I felt I needed to hate or like things because that was the majority opinion. Found out I greatly dislike the Z anime, absolutely hate BoG and kinda enjoy DBE.

DBE isn't perfect nor even good but a DB adaptation is never ever gonna be perfect so we may aswell be subjected to a shit one that we can have fun with. And I certainly did!

Not into Avatar so can't compare to that.

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Re: Would you say Dragonball Evolution is better or worse than The Last Airbender?

Post by Matches Malone » Sat Apr 04, 2020 9:26 am

Baggie_Saiyan wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 7:29 amI greatly dislike the Z anime, absolutely hate BoG and kinda enjoy DBE.
If there was a down vote function here this would easily become the most hated comment on the site. :lol:

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