Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods (2013)

The eighteenth animated feature bearing the Dragon Ball name arrives seventeen years after the last theatrical outing and carries the distinction of being the first entry supervised from the screenwriting stage by Akira Toriyama himself. That supervision yields ninety minutes of pudding theft, cat-shaped deities, and escalating punches. Beerus, a God of Destruction with the patience of a hungry housecat and the wardrobe of an Egyptian pharaoh, wakes from a long nap, learns that Frieza was killed, and goes looking for a fight. He finds one. Then he finds several more. The film holds no thesis beyond the proposition that fighting is enjoyable and that food is also enjoyable.

Bulma slaps a god across the face during her own birthday party. Videl is revealed to be pregnant. The Pilaf gang, now shrunk to toddler size, bungles a robbery. These are events, not arguments. Nobody in the film pauses to reflect on what any of it signifies, which is precisely the point of the exercise. The narrative concerns itself with the mechanics of reaching a legendary transformation and the etiquette of divine combat. Goku apologizes to an opponent he cannot beat. Beerus destroys a small rock to honor a technicality. A refreshing absence of sermonizing runs through the whole affair, an absence that a certain strain of contemporary criticism would call a failure and that this department simply records as a fact.

On the ledger of modern social consciousness, the film is a blank. The voice cast consists of franchise veterans reprising roles they have held for decades, with no commentary attached. No character's identity is interrogated. The environmental stakes are nonexistent, since the threat is a deity with a sweet tooth and not a collapsing ecosystem. Wealth goes unexamined. Bodies are drawn to a fixed house style that predates the current conversation by thirty years. The film's ethical universe is simple: train, eat, fight, apologize when you lose, and spare the planet if the whim strikes. It lectures no one about anything. A score of zero is not a verdict on quality. It is a measurement, and the measurement is zero.