Zain! Did you enjoy Detective Pikachu? My s/o and I were gonna see it next tuesday :D
Mate, I’m SO sorry for how late this reply is. You’ve definitely seen the movie by now, haha, but I figured I should express my opinions on this movie anyway so!
The short answer is YES, I did enjoy the movie. Had a lot of laughs, liked seeing some of my fave pokemon. But the story is a mess, and even though I had fully expected that, sadly it was still disappointing.
Here’s why!
The world would’ve needed another live action pokemon movie before this one. Why? Because it doesn’t actually SHOW you the pokemon. Considering how big of a phenomenon pokemon actually are, the first big movie with realistic CGI pokemon should have had moment when we as the audience get to go WOW LOOK AT THAT! THAT’S A BEAUTIFUL POKEMON! AND IT’S ACTING JUST LIKE IN THE ANIME/THE GAMES! But I don’t think there was any of that.
Farily early in the movie there’s ONE shot of a Snorlax sitting in the middle of a busy street, and my whole audience cheered and went “Snorlax! Fuck yeah!” bc people were genuinely excited to see him. And then we never saw him again.
It was the same with 98% of all other pokemons in the movie. We see them moving about in the background, but we don’t get a close-up. Remember that Charmander working the grill in the first trailer? That got me so excited, because I thought FOR SURE we were gonna get a proper shot of him, seeing him use his powers in a way that made sense. But? No. No closeup. In fact, I totally missed it completely in the movie because I couldn’t skip back like I did in the trailer. And the movie is FULL of moments like that, where you see pokemon doing something in the background and you go like WAIT. LEMME SEE.
And yes, you can argue that the whole point of this movie is to be set in a universe where no one thinks pokemon is all that special anymore, that them blending into the background as part of this world is “the point”. But I want to argue, that so many of us went to this movie JUST to see pokemon, not for the silly story. And that’s why I left disappointed, because this movie didn’t even provide me with THAT.
There was no awe. There were no pokemons behaving the way we’re used to. There were no pokemon trainers, with one exception, which gave us the ONLY real trainer/pokemon relationship in the entire movie. Just the one. There was one pokeball in the entire movie. My point is: we didn’t get to see pokemon or trainers being what we know them to be, in this movie. This movie wasn’t about pokemon as we know them. It’s just a world where pokemons exist, and we barely get to see them.
Phew. Okay. Didn’t mean to go on a rant XD It’s hard to talk about the story without spoiling everything, but just know that I’m upset about where the hell it went in the end XD That was ridiculous.
But Mewtwo looked good as fuck. His look almost made it worth the money.
