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May 16, 2019 - Image 6

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6

Thursday, May 16, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

The video game movie is a genre
that precedes itself, and not for good
reason. Video games are an inher-
ently interactive medium, and film
is not; you do the math there. Part of
the joy of playing video games is the
ability to control something (in most
cases, a character) and then have that
something romp around the world
of the game — in essence, a digital
playground. Darting from Florence
rooftop to rooftop as a Renaissance
assassin is infinitely more fun than
watching Michael Fassbender’s stunt
double do the same in the “Assassin’s
Creed” movie.
While some video games have
compelling narratives and spec-
tacle the same as a movie — take
the “Uncharted” series for example
— most have a standard good ver-
sus evil plot that exists only to tie
its characters to its world. You play
“Street Fighter” to make Chun-Li
kick the shit out of your friend’s
fighter, not to obsess over cutscenes
stitched together to make an (often
poor) excuse for a story mode.
Even returning to the example of
“Uncharted,” the movie-like quality
of which has attracted a Hollywood
production, the whole point is that
you’re basically playing a movie.
Shoving it onto the silver screen
makes it no different than your gar-

den-variety action blockbuster.
All these trappings of a video game
movie were almost certain to set up
“Pokémon Detective Pikachu” for
failure. Battles between fantastical
little creatures, the core mechanic of
“Pokémon” games, function entirely
on a turn-based system: One player
acts while the other has to wait,
and vice versa. This would be nigh
impossible to port over to the real-
time nature of movies. Yet somehow,
some way, “Detective Pikachu” man-
ages to capture not the mechanics of
any “Pokémon” title, but the emo-
tional experience playing one elicits.
The best decision they made
regarding
“Detective
Pikachu”
was choosing not to adapt any plot
already covered in the wider “Poké-
mon” universe — the anime has
already done that to death. Instead,
they took the fundamental principle
of a low-profile spinoff game of the
same name and ran with it. You have
Pokémon, you have humans. They
coexist. There’s a special Pikachu,
he’s a detective. From just these blasé
story elements, the film finds some-
thing special.
When I first saw the trailer for
“Detective Pikachu,” I was very
much put off by the realism of it all,
the scary scaliness of movie Chariz-
ard clashing with the simply killer
design of “Pokémon Red” that I fell
in love with all those years ago. But
actually seeing the movie and how
it decided to bring these Pokémon
to life (which are admittedly hor-
rifying; I mean, look at any Pokédex
entry for a ‘mon that isn’t cute and
cuddly and you’ll be met with tales
of lost dead forest children turn-

ing into spirits) very much quelled
that initial distaste. The more Poké-
mon that populated the screen, the
more I thought, “Damn, they totally
would be like that in real life.” You
have something like Lickitung, a
Pokémon with a constantly exposed
tongue larger than its body, given
a short scene where it makes use of
that tongue, and then you realize it is
fundamentally disgusting even as an
8-bit sprite.
Even with the few frightening
designs, it was an absolute treat to
see these Pokémon scuttle, scamper
and saunter in and around the cen-
tral location of Ryme City. Greninja
was as ferocious as Bulbasaur was
adorable. There’s even some great
action scenes thrown in that stay
grounded in the source material. I
was transfixed by an underground
battle between Blastoise and Gengar
that saw the latter sending out a bar-
rage of familiar moves like Shadow
Ball, warping ghastly around the
arena as Blastoise spun around on its
shell, using its water cannons to dis-
pel of the creepy Gengar clones.
“Detective Pikachu” does have
its fair number of flaws. For every
genuine emotion shared by the two
lead characters, Tim (Justice Smith,
“Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom”)
and Lucy (Kathryn Newton, “Block-
ers”), there’s a hamfisted line or reac-
tion right around the corner. Ryan
Reynolds (“Deadpool 2”) fully invest-
ed himself in voice acting the titular
role, but oftentimes the script puts
a little too much stock in him, and
his constant one-liners start to lose
steam. However, for all the short-
comings on the human side of the

film, the Pokémon more than make
up for it.
I think the best review of “Poké-
mon Detective Pikachu” I can give is
that I spent 90% of the movie point-
ing at the screen and giddily naming
off all the various Pokémon I saw
to my friends. “Emolga! Octillery!
Rufflet!” I felt like a kid again, and I
loved every second of it. It might be
the most average movie, but “Poké-
mon Detective Pikachu” is the most
fun moviegoing experience I’ve had
in years.
— Cassandra Mansuetti
“Pokémon Detective Pikachu” is a
great technical showpiece that proves
— along with Disney’s “Beauty and
the Beast” and “The Jungle Book” —
another staple of millennial and Gen Z
childhood can be brought to life on the
big screen, even if the film’s plot struc-
ture leaves much to be desired.
In a post-“Sonic the Hedgehog”-
live-action-movie-trailer world, we
can all breathe a sigh of relief in the
comfort that comes with the com-
fort that comes from knowing they
didn’t fall into the same trap of bad
and unfaithful CGI. The Pokémon in
“Pokémon” are great. They’re cute
when they’re supposed to be cute,
they’re tough when they’re supposed
to be tough and all the time they’re
as hilariously linguistically Hodored
as we ever could have asked. There’s
a lot to be happy with in this intro-
duction to a cinematic Pokémon uni-
verse, even if it does lean on modern
storytelling tropes a little too pre-
dictably.
The escalation in the third act of
“Detective Pikachu” is disappointing.
The movie falls into the same trap
that brought down the first “Fan-
tastic Beasts” movie — a transition
away from a small, self-contained
story about a few characters and their
own personal quests, and toward a
big blockbuster flick with world-end-
ing danger and city-saving heroics.
“Detective Pikachu” was an interest-
ing, character-driven movie for about
sixty minutes. Around that mark, it’s
revealed that, for Tim to complete his
personal mission of finding his father,
he will have to defeat a villain that
threatens the entire city (and ostensi-
bly the entire world when they wake
up the next morning).
The ever-expanding plot arc of
“Detective Pikachu” is now another
example of big-studio cinematic uni-
verse-itus wilting away a perfectly
good trio of characters when they
force them to save the world. The
advent of the MCU and its twenty-
something movies of fire and brim-
stone seem to have convinced us all
that every movie’s plot has to put the
fate of the world on the line. “Detec-
tive Pikachu”’s Ryme City is an

engaging and vibrant enough world
without the possibility of its total
destruction. Characters can intro-
duce you to these worlds even if their
task isn’t to save everyone’s day. The
movie lost much of its interest when it
decided that Tim’s character-driven
arc, which had been guiding the plot
up to that point, wasn’t enough any-
more.
These gripes aren’t all that rel-
evant, though, since “Detective Pika-
chu” is a movie aimed at giving kids a
chance to see their favorite Japanese
battle monsters come to life in the
real world. The script wasn’t written
to be a cinematic juggernaut — that
wasn’t ever the filmmaker’s agenda
— but I stand by the sentiment that
a plot structured like that of “Detec-
tive Pikachu” is dangerous since it
only further entrenches this idea that
all films have to implicate the lives of
everyone in the world to have a point.

Introducing a new generation of
moviegoers to the big screen with
flick after flick of down-and-out
underdog facing off versus the all-
powerful essence of evil, hell-bent
on destroying the world for what-
ever goddamn reason (probably
because they love hell and darkness)
maybe isn’t a good way to bring them
into the cinema’s fold. It creates false
expectations of what a satisfying
story must be, and leads to further
erosion of storytelling in the medi-
um. This isn’t a problem of “Detec-
tive Pikachu”’s making, and the film
shouldn’t have to shoulder all of the
blame. It’s a much larger industry
issue. Hopefully, it’s one that will
start to get addressed now that we
are in and out of the “Endgame.”
In the end, “Pokémon Detec-
tive Pikachu” delivers on a lot of
what anyone could want from a
Pokémon movie. It’s a great way to
spend an hour and forty-five for a
family movie night, and it should
succeed because of it. It’s a shame
Danny Devito never got tapped up
for the role of the man behind the
little yellow rat, but what are you
going to do?
— Stephen Satarino

Perspectives on ‘Pikachu’

CASSANDRA MANSUETTI
Summer Editor in Chief

STEPHEN SATARINO
Daily Film Editor

FILM REVIEW

WARNER BROS. PICTURES

Pokémon Detective
Pikachu

Warner Bros.
Pictures

Ann Arbor 20 +
IMAX, Goodrich

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