Movie Review: Dragon Ball Z - The Return of Cooler

Dragon Ball Z: The Return of Cooler [1992]

So I've been working through old Dragon Ball Z movies relatively slowly, and this one (in Japan, it's called the far more unwieldy "Clash! Ten Thousand Million Powerful Warriors") is the sixth DBZ movie, as well as being a sequel to the fifth one, Cooler's Revenge.

So the plotline of this movie is a sequel to Cooler's Revenge, where at the end of that movie, Freeza's brother Cooler, surprise surprise, gets killed, as we see briefly in a flashback shown in this movie. Cooler ends up being the first movie villain to get a second appearance, and only one of two alongside Broly, who gets three movies to himself as Wikipedia tells me.

And the concept of Cooler is neat enough -- connecting him and establishing him as Freeza's brother is a neat way to instantly have a yardstick to measure him while at the same time making us care about him, something that Fusion Reborn's Janemba didn't have. Plus, it allows Freeza's voice actor to voice more Dragon Ball Z characters after Freeza's untimely demise without bringing him back. I know of Cooler from playing Dragon Ball fighting games -- which I did even before I picked up the Cell and Buu sagas of DBZ, and Cooler and Broly, without fail, is in every Dragon Ball fighting game I've seen. 

And for the most part, I thought Return of Cooler was a pretty neat movie, it just kind of self-destructed in the final stretch. And I thought I'll recap it with a neat little rapid-fire summary of the 45-minute movie. You see, New Namek (which is a location that I don't think we ever see in the manga or Super) gets taken over by a giant metallic spider-planet that pulls a Unicron called the Big Spaghetti Gete Star, which clamps down upon New Namek and unleashes an army of one-eyed robots that capture and enslave all the Namekians. Oh no, the Namekians! We care about them!

So Dende and Popo ask Goku and his buddies to go off to space to help out, and the cast for this movie includes Gohan, Krillin, Piccolo... plus the cheerleader squad of Roshi, Yajirobe and Oolong. Yajirobe's mostly just there for comic relief, including a bit in the final act where he is put at the mercy of a robot hacksaw, while the first three get to fight. Roshi doesn't, because throughout DBZ he is completely useless, something that kind of took me out of sorts after watching Super relatively recently. Krillin also honestly ends up being the comic relief that gets batted around by even the simple one-eyed drones, with an actual sequence showing Gohan and Piccolo overwhelming their assailants, and then Krillin psyching himself... only to fail. I mean, he eventually gets one, but poor Krillin really makes it easy to make jokes about him being a chronic loser, yeah? And apparently it's even a running joke where he gets beaten up the worst in these movies. 

Cooler then shows up in a brand-new shiny metal body (essentially a metal version of the final-form Freeza) and calls himself Meta-Cooler. Or Metal Cooler. Whatever your preferred romanization is. He recaps the previous movie, which is nice since I've never watched that -- and claims he was burned in the fires of the Sun... but has survived and placed in a metal body... which... um... how did he do that? He went from the sun, and even if the alien race's biology is different enough to be integrated into a computer, how did he float all the way to the Big Gete Star and then to Namek? From our Sun?

In either case, we get a fight scene against Cooler's robots. Goku fights Cooler himself and while the animation is pretty suspect (even by the standards of the era -- I pulled up the anime around that time, which would be the later Freeza Saga and the Cell Saga, and they look a fair bit better than these) it's enjoyable enough. Shame that the background music is wholly underwhelming, we cut away to senseless generic comedy with Krillin and the cheerleader squad a bit too often... and I'll point out some col scenes: Goku and Cooler engage in an Instant Transmission battle (why didn't Goku Instant Transmission to New Namek?), and Piccolo's arm-stretching impalement of the robots is cool, and the robots shooting their own arms at Piccolo followed with cannons are cool.... 

But they are kind of wasted. Gohan and Krillin are quickly overwhelmed, captured and reduced into one pulp of comedic relief with Roshi's gang, and Piccolo just flies around until he guides the comic relief gang out. And Piccolo being this weak isn't really justified since Dende is already Kami, implying that this takes place after the Cell Saga, but then Goku is alive and Gohan is super-weak and Vegeta is super-hostile and okay I'm not trying to fit this movie in continuity, because it simply doesn't.

Also also, wouldn't it be cool if Piccolo showed any emotion at the enslavement of his race and potential destruction of their new home planet? Hm. 

But Cooler turns out to be able to regenerate his body by shooting out wires and reconnecting with his broken forms, and even Goku's Super Saiyan is only enough to slow him down. Vegeta comes in out of nowhere (he literally pops out of the sky -- the final scene shows Vegeta leaving in a saiyan pod, but the presence of that raises more questions than anything else), and the two go Super Saiyan together and then fight Metal Cooler together. And Cooler even punches Vegeta in the dick at one point, which is a bit hilarious... and then the two blow up Cooler! And then, an army of Metal Coolers show up, and beats Goku and Vegeta... offscreen.

Goku and Vegeta wake up within the Big Gete Star itself, and this is where the movie kind of self-destructs. Why bother with the lesser robots and not send the army of Metal Coolers immediately? It's not like they're doing anything important, right? What is the end-game here, and why are they draining New Namek with a giant drill, and how does evisceration of Namekians and Yajirobe via hacksaw power a giant robot planet? How does Cooler survive and get turned into a brain chip? And as Goku and Vegeta lay unconscious in Super Saiyan form (???) and Cooler drains their energy... apparently that energy is enough to literally blow up Cooler's entire Big Gete Star system, causing the whole thing to self-destruct? Yeah, this whole sequence ruins all the build-up that admittedly was pretty cool with a revelation that raises more questions than answers them, the Big Gete Star ends up really not amounting to much, and Vegeta and Goku get back up after being overwhelmed for... no real reason. Cooler transforms into a giant version of himself made entirely out of wires, but Goku and Vegeta just beat him with a beam. And then they win, and everything is fine, roll credits. 

And, yeah, what a weirdly bland ending. Honestly, the setup and the first two acts of this movie isn't even half bad. Enslaving the Namekians is a very neat little plotline, and the concept of a robotic, self-regenerating Cooler combines aspects of Cell and the Androids, plus this might theoretically be the Metal Freeza arc that we never got. But it's all ruined by a sub-par animation, side characters that do nothing (to be fair, that's a criticism for Dragon Ball Z as a whole) and plot holes bigger than the Big Gete Star itself. It's at least somewhat entertaining, but for all the buildup and badassery that Cooler supposedly has by being Freeza's brother, this second outing, at least, has him be an absolutely generic doomsday villain with jack shit personality, a plot that barely makes sense and a plot with more holes than swiss cheese.