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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