Dragon Ball Super: Broly (2018)

Dragon Ball Super: Broly arrives with the confidence of a franchise that has nothing left to prove and no interest in proving it. Akira Toriyama rewrites the biography of a character he never much cared for, dragging the legendary Super Saiyan out of the non-canonical attic and into respectable continuity. The result is forty minutes of exposition about Saiyan class hierarchies followed by an hour of two men screaming while their hair changes color. This is not a complaint. It is a description of the genre's most reliable pleasure, executed with real craft.

Those hoping to audit the film for contemporary social consciousness will find the ledger empty. The Saiyan genocide and the exile of a low-caste infant read as mythology, not as commentary on anything happening on this planet. Frieza remains a tyrant in the classical mode, a despot of appetite, not a stand-in for shareholders. Cheelai is competent and gets things done, but the screenplay never stops to congratulate itself for this. Broly's rage is treated as a power level, not a diagnosis. Nobody in the film has a body worth being positive about, since everyone is either a god or a pile of dust.

The picture is content to be what it is: a martial arts fantasy with immaculate animation and a fight that breaks through dimensions because standing in one dimension was insufficient. It lectures no one. It moralizes about nothing. It simply asks that we watch a man named Gogeta hit another man very hard for an extended period, and it regards this as a complete artistic statement. In an era of cinema that cannot resist explaining itself, there is something almost restful about a film with no message at all. The Saiyans have been destroyed, resurrected, and destroyed again. Nobody has learned anything, and the film has no intention of teaching us either. We are left to enjoy the screaming, which we do, quietly and without shame.

For the record, the classification stands: this is spectacle, not sermon. The screenwriters of the world may take notes on what it looks like when a movie simply refuses to have a thesis. It is a rare vintage, and it goes down clean.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}