When Detective Pikachu was announced I was intrigued- what was up with this live action Pokémon movie that had sprung up suddenly and made Pikachu fluffy? Furthermore it had a PG rating and an actor in his 20s playing the lead role, clearly with an eye towards Millenials like myself who had grown up with Pokémon, alongside the movie's main target audience of children. Ryan Reynolds as the voice of Pikachu would be much better known by adults and since his voice now kind of has an automatic association with Deadpool it just sounds funnier coming out of that cute fluffy body. My boyfriend and I went to see it under the expectation that the audience would be about 50/50 children to adults, and we were right.
What was I expecting? To have fun, enjoy the live action world of people living alongside Pokémon, and laugh at some jokes. Which is definitely what I got- a much more irreverent version of Pokémon than it would ever be appropriate for the games or cartoon to be, which was fun to see as an adult fan. I even got into the spirit of things and wore as much Pokémon stuff as I had lying around. This turned out to be a Poke ball necklace, my rainbow badge pin I got from when my gaming shop 10 years ago did the Pokémon TCG, my shirt with the berries design (favourite shirt!) and also I took Dragonite along for the hell of it.
The plot of this movie was extremely silly and very all over the place, so let's talk about that. Our main character Tim, played by Justice Smith, is introduced as someone who for some reason doesn't have a Pokémon partner, and is in insurance, so it at least makes sense that he's wearing a suit. We know these things about him from a conversation he has with a friend. Now you might think the friend is going to be a character in the movie but he's not- once Tim leaves for the city in the first 5 minutes we never see this guy again. Before our friend exits the movie we do have Tim attempting to catch a Cubone with his friend's encouragement, and I guess this is Pokémon catching rules from the recent Let's Go Pikachu game because he just chucks the Poke ball at it without even attempting to weaken it first. Pokémon catching rules in this universe matter not at all however, because we are shortly to exit this particular setting, never to return. Our main character gets a call in which he is told some tragic news and boom, we're on a train with him to the big city, a city in which we are told people and Pokémon live alongside each other instead of people catching Pokémon and using them for battles. Pokémon in this town are like animals that happen to have extra powers and in general are just a fact of day to day life. Which is everything I wanted from this movie so I'm happy. (But why not have the whole movie like that? Theory later!)
The tragic news was that Tim's father, who lives and works in the big city as a detective, was in a car crash and is presumed dead. Tim visits his father's apartment and finds our titular main character, a Pikachu who had been Tim's father's Pokémon partner and who we know is a detective because of his tiny deerstalker. This is definitive proof that Sherlock Holmes must exist in this universe as a pop cultural icon, and couldn't possibly just be for the handy visual cue (and merchandising potential), perish the thought. The hat has Tim's father's name in it so we know that the Pikachu belonged to him (and presumably the tiny hat- did Tim's dad wear it?). Tim is surprised to find that he can understand Pikachu's speech, while everyone else just hears the standard Pokemon talk when Pikachu is speaking. The movie also sets up something referred to only as 'R gas' in this scene, which is done in a fairly organic way- while looking through his father's things Tim finds a small vial labelled 'R' which he accidentally opens, releasing a purple gas which we see affecting several Aipom outside, who upon breathing it in are compelled to attack Tim and Pikachu. The real plot derailing with the R-gas won't start until later so for now it's easy to anticipate cool ways this could provide conflict in a world where Pokémon don't normally fight each other and don't attack humans. Also during the escape from the Aipom Pikachu doesn't do any kind of electric attack, which is explained later but is super weird at the time.
Now it is time to get to solving our mystery, because Pikachu convinces Tim that his father is alive. Pikachu has amnesia but he knows he was Tim's dad's Pokémon, and that he was in the car during the crash that supposedly killed Tim's dad, but Pikachu points out that he survived, so couldn't Tim's dad have survived too? We are shortly to get evidence of the truth of this, thanks to a British guy played by Bill Nighy, who in this world was the one who had the idea of Pokemon living in harmony with people. He also has a son, who is cartoonishly evil and Bill Nighy is cartoonishly noble and it made me suspect we were going to get Big Hero 6-ed, and sure enough in the climax it turned out the the father was actually the evil one and the son was trying to stop him all along! I guess having the scene of Tim arriving in the city being reminiscent of the introduction of the city in Zootopia wasn't enough influence from recent 3D animated Disney movies, who have been very keen on bait and switch villains for a while. Anyway Bill Nighy shows Tim proof that his father really is alive, so we're off following the next lead!
This movie has a bit of a frustrating problem during the next part where we are moving from location to location in an attempt to solve the mystery, which is that it follows a pattern of a lot of stuff happening in the location and then Tim or Pikachu or his new accomplice aspiring reporter Lucy just suddenly going 'oh [next clue] must be in [next location]!' To be clear, the stuff I'm talking about that happens in these locations isn't investigating and clue hunting, it is unrelated stuff. It often seems like the characters are reading the script and just getting themselves where they need to be for the next set piece, so maybe some setup for the clues was written out or dialled down in the script or something, to make room for more zany antics. That's why I complimented the setup for the R-gas, it was one of the few times setup felt natural and detailed enough for us to absorb the information, even though it came out of nowhere just a little bit.
Through this kind of storytelling we end up in a cool underground club with a DJ and his Loudreds jamming it up...wait no actually it's an underground Pokemon fighting ring, they just have a DJ, to play people in I guess? Here's where we meet the best character in the movie, the amazing Sebastian, played by Omar Chaparro. Sebastian is a man who hates wearing a shirt as much as he adores Charizards, which is so much that he has a massive tattoo of one on his chest. As soon as I saw him I was mesmerised by how bad the tattoo effect was, it looked like it had been drawn on with liquid eyeliner or something. That's how cosplayers do it! Could they really not have done a better makeup effect? (I told my friend about it and she said they probably blew all the budget on Ryan Reynolds.) But I don't care because Chaparro is having a blast being as ridiculous and over the top as possible and stealing the entire scene.
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| Seriously, look at this guy |
Sebastian wants to challenge our heroes to a rematch, Pikachu verses his Charizard, which in this movie are terrifying, scaly, gnarly dinosaurs. Maybe I'd catch this on a rewatch so it might be my memory's fault but did they ever explain why Tim's father was going to an underground Pokémon fighting ring? Fighting Pokémon against each other appears to be something you have to do in secret in this universe, or at least the utopian city part of it, and Tim's father is a good stand up guy and also a cop, but apparently he had fought Pikachu against Charizard before at least once. This possibly character depth/anti-hero-ness is to my recollection never explored. Anyway so now it's tiny Pikachu against giant Charizard, which is already tense enough, but then Sebastian takes out a vial of R-gas and gives Charizard a big ole' snootful and boom, Charizard is crazed and bloodthirsty, and oh no Pikachu's amnesia means he can't remember his electric moves anyway! And worst of all, they are apparently fighting these Pokémon that can use flamethrower and electric shock moves with the spectators only behind a goddamn chainlink fence wall!! Not even reinforced glass, or at the very least a Mr Mime using Barrier! The whole scene is so delightfully ridiculous, especially seeing all the extras in the crowd with their cool baddass goth clothes and then there were all these cute cuddly Pokémon everywhere, it looked so funny. (Also the extras could have given this epic Pokemon fight a bit more heat, just sayin'! They looked a tad bored, but not in a cool gothic way, more of a 'the extras weren't given enough direction' way.)
Sebastian is one of the few side characters who I feel was given enough screen time to really shine- there's plenty of others who are introduced, you get interested in them, and then they don't show up again even though it seems like it would work well if they did. I already mentioned Tim's friend from the start of the movie, they have pretty great chemistry and you feel like 'hmm these guys are fun, let's see more of them!' Then at the end of the movie I realised 'oh wait, the friend never comes back huh!' I think part of me thought he was going to show up to help out in the third act. Poor guy, he was just exposition fodder all along. And then there's Tim's dad's boss, Detective Hideo Yoshida, who we have a couple of rather emotional scenes with towards the start of the movie. Unlike some of the emotional scenes in this film the scenes with Yoshida, played by Ken Watanabe, talking to Tim about his father's death were given enough time and space to really feel that emotional weight. Yoshida also has this extremely enigmatic, very grouchy Snubbull who sits on the desk scowling and growling at Tim the entire time. There's something about a fuzzy pink Pokemon doing that which is just inherently funny. I was excited to see more of him but sadly there are no more scenes that give Detective Yoshida any significant role after he shows Tim what he thinks is proof that his father is dead. He hits some great emotional beats and then he's gone. In fact I feel like a good chunk of the emotional core this movie clearly wanted to have starts getting rushed from the halfway point onwards.
Oh yeah and Mewtwo is in this movie, I didn't mention it yet because *extremely deep sigh* this is where the plot really starts falling apart. There's an evil lab that is doing experiments on Pokémon, including making some Torterra enormous and a Ditto that can turn into humans. I thought Ditto could already canonically do that, because there's that weird thing in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Moon where some police are actually Dittos, but never mind. Mewtwo is being held in the lab, in a containment chamber not all that different from the one in Pokémon: The First Movie. Mewtwo being in the movie at all but not really introduced in detail is a major barrier, I think, to people who are new to Pokémon understanding this movie. Because this isn't a retelling of Mewtwo's origin story from the original games and first Pokemon movie, of being created in a lab as a clone of the mythical Pokémon Mew. This is the same Mewtwo, who had been captured 20 years after the events of the movie by a different evil lab. Mewtwo as a character has all this context that fans know but is given the barest explanation in Detective Pikachu- it hates humans because it was used as a weapon by them, and has killed humans in the past during its escape from the lab where it was created. It can also talk to humans when most Pokémon can't due to its extreme psychic power. To fans it seems perfectly plausible that Mewtwo would cause the car crash that was meant to have killed Tim's dad, and why it would tell Pikachu that humans are evil, and why it can talk so that humans can understand . But would any of that come across to someone without this context, when what they've been shown so far is a world of Pokémon who are friendly with humans and need to be affected by a mind altering gas to be dangerous to them, and where Pikachu being able to talk to Tim is super unusual? By the way, the experiments the new lab are doing involve extracting the R-gas from Mewtwo's concentrated hatred of humans. That's where it comes from. This isn't bad in itself, but we're getting there.
I was so torn on Mewtwo being in this movie because while I felt it was kind of shoved in lazily to take advantage of the context it already had for fans, and given very little explanation in the actual movie, I really love Mewtwo as a character and I loved it in this movie too. For one it looks great, and is in my opinion the 2nd best looking Pokémon in the movie (the first is the absolutely adorable Bulbasaur). Most of the Pokémon have been made very fluffy or textured in other ways, but Mewtwo in 3D is still smooth, and you can see how bony it is, it looks unnatural and weird but intentionally so, reflecting its artificial, lab-made nature. I like the way they gradually reveal that Mewtwo might not be a villain, with Mewtwo healing Pikachu from its injuries in the middle of the movie. One of my favourite moments was in that scene, after Pikachu is healed, when Mewtwo is attempting to show Tim and Pikachu that it didn't kill Tim's dad and it shows them a hologram of it speaking to Pikachu after the car crash. In the hologram Mewtwo tells Pikachu something like 'humans are evil...' but the hologram gets interrupted as Mewtwo is contained and captured by the lab staff, and taken away before it can finish. Then towards the end of the move you see the full hologram, showing that what Mewtwo was actually saying to Pikachu was the humans are evil, but there is good in them too, like in Tim's father. I really liked how that part of the story unfolded.
The trouble is Mewtwo already has its own story, in that first Pokemon movie, and Detective Pikachu has Mewtwo go through essentially the same arc again while having to also exposit the original story of Mewtwo's creation, which is probably done too quickly for someone who doesn't already know Mewtwo's story to understand. Once again I'm wondering why this movie was not just set in a parallel Pokémon universe where Mewtwo was created by Bill Nighy's lab for nefarious reasons so that they could retell Mewtwo's origin story on screen, kind of like when Russell T. Davies took Doctor Who into a parallel universe so he could tell his own origin story for the Cybermen. And if we were in a parallel universe where Pokemon live outside Poke balls and live, work and play alongside humans, there'd be no need to set up Pokémon catching before heading to the utopian city (still getting to why I think they did it this way btw!). Having Mewtwo in this story as the source of the R-gas is a direct adaptation from the game Detective Pikachu, which the plot of this movie is loosely based on, but I can't help but feel like leaving it out and having the R-gas come from somewhere else might have been a good adaptive change.
But now! We are at the climax of the movie, which is the best part because here's where the plot really goes nuts. It was so ridiculous, I was just...delighted. So it's time for Tim to find out Nighy's character is evil, and Nighy spills his secret plan in a standard evil guy exposition monologue. Nighy has an illness that is steadily taking its toll on his body, so he invented a device to put his mind inside Mewtwo's body. So far, so supervillain. (See, wouldn't this work great if he had also created Mewtwo himself as the perfect Pokémon body instead of just capturing it?) The whole 'guy who uses a wheelchair zaps himself inside the ultimate body because his is all broken' is a cliché that can move towards the offensive (funnily enough didn't that RTD Doctor Who Cyberman origin story I just mentioned also pull this one with its disabled villain?), but in this case I think it's meant to be that he's trying to save himself from dying of the illness, rather than just being disabled. (I've only seen this movie once so correct me if I'm wrong). Nighy has this super high-tech futuristic wheelchair, and so did that Doctor Who episode's villain come to that, so it does beg the question: in a world where we're shown that such incredible tech is possible, why does the plot still have disability as this terrible hurdle to overcome? And even if it was an illness that Nighy was going to die from imminently, I don't really think the plot needed him to have an illness in order to work. We see from large artwork of Dialga and Palkia in his office/evil villain lair that he's obsessed with legendary Pokémon (so much so that he might perhaps create his own? *nudge nudge*) and we know he's interested specifically in the evolutionary power of Pokemon because he tells Tim as much while evolving his Eevee into a Flareon, just before revealing his evil plan. (I thought Flareon might be significant in some way but it never comes back after this, I think it was just to introduce evolution into the movie because it had not appeared yet. Once again nowhere near enough explanation for people who are new to Pokemon but never mind at this point!) So all the pieces are here for a villain who doesn't have a lazy 'disabled scientist uses science to make himself into a super-being' trope going on.
Anyway, so now via call centre headset looking thing Nighy is controlling Mewtwo's body, and I thought it was going to be 'oh no, this guy who has gone mad with power has to be stopped before he destroys the world!' or something. Bit cliche, but fine. I am still with you, plot. But NO! That's not even the plan! The plan is that he is going to, for some reason *takes deep breath*- release a load of R gas that he has been storing inside big Pokemon parade balloons which will change the Pokémon's state of mind enough for him to swap all the people into their own Pokémon and he wants to do this because...I guess their evolutionary energy can be used to heal people?? We know he wants to heal himself, but why on earth does he want to do it on everyone, regardless of their current health? If this was ever explained it's done in such a rushed way that I certainly didn't pick up on it. And the R gas wasn't even used to turn Pokemon on their human partners, its ultimate evil usage had nothing to do with aggression at all, so why even set it up that the gas makes Pokemon aggressive???
See, I feel like up until that plan was revealed I would have been right alongside the people calling the plot a bit formulaic and predictable, but after this I just couldn't say that any more, it's too bizarre and silly to be comfortable and formulaic. Nighy carries out the plan straight away after telling Tim, and from here on all events happen at 100 miles an hour with no pauses to let anything register, and sometimes reversing them after they have happened almost straight away. Nighy releases the R-gas onto the people gathered for the annual Pokémon parade, we see the people's consciousness go into their Pokémon, Lucy is inside her Psyduck now, but they do nothing with this before almost immediately putting everything back to normal. So...why?? And Tim just says 'the R gas is in the parade balloons!' as if it's something the viewer could have figured out too, and maybe that would have been the case if we had previously been shown, I don't know, someone filling up the parade balloons in a suspiciously secretive way, but they were just already inflated when we arrived on the scene so...Tim read the script I guess? (This is just one of many moments like this that felt like they were missing an important bit of setup, another one was when Tim and Lucy have to escape a secret Pokemon lab in a hurry and one of them yells 'the Torterra garden!' and they run into it and dive out the back through a slatted door. And it's like- we were never shown a door there, how did you know this? Are we supposed to be thinking of course, how obvious when you have to escape in a hurry you always use the back door of a Torterra garden?!!) Honestly the balloon realisation wouldn't have been a problem if the pacing would just slow down a bit, wouldn't it have been effective if Tim said something like 'but where are you keeping such a large amount of gas?' and then we're shown a lingering shot of the scene below...with the huge balloons in it...hovering around looking adorable because they are the cartoon versions of Pokémon instead of the realistic ones... and then Tim is like 'Of course! The parade balloons!'
I think while I was just thinking about that I realised that this may be the problem with the movie. It wants to be a comedy story where Ryan Reynolds tells irreverent jokes while in the body of a cute cuddly Pikachu and have an odd couple dynamic and 'learning to trust each other' story between the main characters, and it also wants to be a mystery story. It's doing the first one a hell of a lot better than the second. I realised while leaving the movie that Detective Pikachu really doesn't do all that much detecting, or at least it feels that way, even though quite a lot of the movie is actually given over to investigating. It's because every piece of the puzzle they discover feels like a very rushed afterthought. If Who Framed Roger Rabbit had been written and paced like this, Eddie and Roger would have ran into the movie theatre, immediately seen the Cloverleaf industries logo on the screen, Eddie would yell 'that's the connection!' and then whoosh they're off to the next scene to find the next piece of the puzzle. Doing things like that wears an audience out, so instead Eddie and Roger use the calm moment where they've escaped from the bad guys for now to talk, hit some emotional beats where Roger learns more about Eddie, and then they discover the clue. Oh and speaking of emotional beats, it's now time for...
....Our emotional climax where you find out, dun dun dunnnn, that Tim's father was Pikachu the whooole time!! I loved this reveal so much, it was just so amazingly cheesy. I found myself laughing out loud in the theatre when this happened, by this point I was so dumbfounded by the constant number of bizarre plot elements hitting the screen that it was just delightful by this point. I can't think of any other way they could have ended this movie. Though it does raise questions about the planned sequel, because now Tim's dad is Ryan Reynolds played by Ryan Reynolds again and Pikachu is just his Pikachu, won't the tone of the movie be very different? I'll be seeing any sequels to this no matter what, because I'm hooked, but a human father and son team just isn't the same as a guy and his Pikachu team (and the Pikachu is also Ryan Reynolds).
And now, finally, let's answer that question: why was this movie set in a special city in the normal Pokémon world, and not a parallel Pokémon world where the rules of Pokémon and human interactions are different? Well, my theory is that it's to do with one of our last emotional beats of the film. Early on they establish that Tim's mother is dead, and it's implied that her death several years ago was the catalyst for Tim's father leaving home to work in the big city and become emotionally distant from Tim. And it's also established early on that Tim not having a partner Pokémon is strange and unusual. At the end of the movie, we find out that the day that Tim was supposed to get his first Pokemon was also the day his mother passed away. In a flashback near the end of the movie we see young Tim saying 'but it's the most important day of my life!' as a relative calls him away to tell him the terrible news...and it's honestly a very heartfelt emotional moment. The mythology of the Pokémon universe, outside of the games, started with Ash Ketchum on the most important day of his life, the day he got his Pokémon, and every Pokemon fan understands what Tim means when he refers to that exciting day, and therefore understand why he never wanted to become involved with Pokémon again after that day was swallowed up with the grief of the death of his mum. This emotional moment, right at the end of the movie, is clearly important to it, and it wouldn't work at all if the Pokémon setup from the games and TV series wasn't happening out there somewhere in this world.
So instead we have a city where everyone partners with one Pokémon, so a big theme of the movie is Tim getting used to having a Pokémon partner for the first time. ...Except, Pikachu was his dad all along, so actually the theme is Tim learning to bond with his dad, and getting closer to him. At the end we see that instead of going back to his little town, Tim is going to stay in the city and work with his dad, seeing as they made such a great team and got to know each other better while Tim's dad was Pikachu. There's a line of dialogue in the middle of the movie where Tim starts listing Pikachu's moves when previously he hadn't known any, but we're never shown Tim making the effort to learn more about Pikachu's abilities because he's come to care about him. He just suddenly knows the moves, another character says something like 'you've been studying!' but that's all there is to it and it doesn't go anywhere. By the end of this movie we still don't really know what kind of partner to a Pokémon Tim would be due to him only getting to know a Pokémon that had his dad's consciousness inside.
This movie has some really great moments alongside so many ridiculous elements and confusing choices, but somehow I think that made me enjoy it more than if it just had the formulaic plot some critics have called its main problem. It's fun to see a daft movie and it's enjoyable to discuss the weird things that happened and what they could have done better. And seeing a Pokémon movie that was able to not take itself seriously and put in irreverent jokes was so fun for me and every Millennial raised on Pokémon who loved it. Thank you for reading my ramble, and I will close with some scattered observations:
The fact that the gas was called 'R gas' was either a fun Easter egg for Pokémon fans, or a confusing choice that falsely implied Team Rocket would be in the movie, I can't decide. I really loved the movie's poster with all the subtle references to the Pokémon world, and it was so fun to try and spot them all. They definitely reuse Pokémon in this movie to avoid having too many different kinds due to the effects budget, but despite this when my boyfriend and I tried to list all the Pokémon that were in the movie it took us quite a while and I still don't think we got them all, so it can't have been that bad. And finally, my boyfriend has since seeing this movie used the phrase 'I feel it in my jellies' or variations therefore a non-zero amount of times. Thanks for that Detective Pikachu!
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