Dragonball Z Resurrection of F Review

The time has come for me to review Dragonball Z Resurrection of F. It’s no secret that I am a huge Dragonball Z fan, it is one of the first series I watched and one of the biggest influences into me deciding I wanted to be an animator.

I am going to review Resurrection of F as a Dragonball Z fan so SPOILER ALERT, there will be SPOILERS below. Check out the trailer below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z_nWwKBiRw&w=560&h=315]

Quick rundown of the story, a henchman from Frieza’s army organizes a small army to find the dragon balls on Earth and bring Frieza back to life. Piccolo and Gohan realize someone has summoned Shenron but are unsure of what is going on. Frieza and the troops who resurrected him head into space to train to get revenge. At this point we find out a startling revelation, Frieza has never trained a day in his life. They also spend time gathering troops to come back and try to destroy the Earth and get their revenge on Goku and company.

Frieza was never really my favorite villain, I was more a Cell guy. Although the battle between Frieza and Goku was too good to pass up for seeing in theaters. The animation for the film was great. Some of the impact frames that you only see for a split second are amazing. Large bloodshot eyes, fantastic effects, just such great accents and details were spent on those impact frames that made the fights more intense.

Overall I really enjoyed Resurrection of F… Except for 2 points, here we go.

I am going to sound like a Vegeta fanboy, but hear me out. Towards the end of the film Goku let’s his guard down and gets taken down, opening the door for Vegeta to kill Frieza.  Vegeta steps in and takes Frieza down with a series of attacks. Before Vegeta can finish Frieza, Frieza destroys the Earth. Whis, then reverses time backwards to right before the moment when Frieza destroys the Earth. This allows Goku to destroy Frieza before he can blow up the Earth.

My problem with this, is it felt like a bad cop out. If Frieza was just going to destroy the Earth, why not do it at the start of the film or after he brought his army to the planet or when he couldn’t beat Goku? I wasn’t super harsh on this part of the movie. The reason was because they mentioned Whis’ time reversal power earlier in the film, so as an audience we were set up for this result.

Quick side note, I really expected more from Jaco. His character brought nothing to the movie other than a couple chuckles that Saiyaman could have achieved.

The main thing that had me disappointed was the timeframe in which Frieza returned to Earth. So after Frieza was revived, they left Earth so Frieza could train to beat Goku. We find out in the film that Frieza was only away for 6 months to train before returning. 6 months.

Now you can say that Frieza didn’t know any better or that his ego was in the way. The reason I don’t buy tho argument is that Frieza witnessed Goku’s battle with Buu from hell. We also find out that Frieza held Buu and Beerus in the same tier as fighters. So clearly 6 months was not going to be enough to destroy Goku, which brings me back to my main point, why not just destroy Earth right away.

Overall I really did enjoy the movie, I felt the animation was great, and the fight scenes were exactly what I wanted to see. The fight at the end of the Battle of Gods left me wanting more. My critique of the film was I feel that they used Frieza’s ego as too much of a crutch from a storytelling perspective. Will for sure be buying the film when it is released.