The history of adapting video
games to film is a history of disappointment. This is often the result of
trying to make a buck off of something popular and treating the source material
as an afterthought (or in some cases, holding it in contempt), often glancing
over their own inherit weirdness and aiming more for realism. (Look no further
than the violent backlash to Sonic’s redesign in the Sonic the Hedgehog trailer for proof of how that can backfire.) Pokémon Detective Pikachu had a lot to
live up to, not just as a video game adaptation, but as the first live-action
rendition of one of the biggest multi-media franchises of all time, branching
from games to pretty much anything you can slap Pikachu’s face on. The trailers
showed that they were able to at least get the designs right, but could they
capture the spirit?
Our story follows Tim Goodman (Justice
Smith), a former aspiring Pokémon trainer who resigned himself to a normal
life. One day he travels to Ryme City, a place where humans and Pokémon live
together as equals, after getting a call that his father, a world class detective,
has died in a car crash. When he goes to clean up his apartment, he finds a
talking Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds) that, for some reason, only he can understand. Pikachu,
being something of a sleuth himself, suspects that there’s more to Tim’s father’s
death, a sentiment shared by a nosy reporter (Kathryn Newton) who’s also
investigating his disappearance. Together they must comb the city for clues,
interrogating human and Pokémon alike, and unlock a secret that could tear the
fabric of Ryme City apart.
As excited as I was at the aspect
of a live-action Pokémon movie, I was
a little confused why they chose to adapt Detective
Pikachu, a relatively new and obscure spin-off game, instead of one of the
main titles. Then I remembered that the whole crux of the series is capturing
magical creatures and making them fight each other, something that works fine
for a video game but would be a pretty hard sell for a mainstream movie. Hell,
it was even a point in Pokémon: The First
Movie. Setting it in a Zootopia-esque
metropolis where people and Pokémon coexist seems like the best way to make it
palatable without PETA jumping down anyone’s throats, and it’s doubly appropriate
since most of the film’s energy is spent on worldbuilding. One thing the movie
pulls off that most of us were afraid it couldn’t was making a live-action Pokémon
world seem both livable and feasible. Director Rob Letterman does this by
taking the same approach as the Resident
Evil movies: telling a different story set in the same universe while
keeping some of the more video gamey elements in the background.
Plot-wise, the script is a kid
friendly fusion of Blade Runner, Who Framed
Roger Rabbit?, and the aforementioned Zootopia.
In fact, Zootopia is probably the
strongest point of comparison since an inordinate amount of background noise is
focused on showing how Pokémon would function in the real world beyond fighting
(with the exception of a major scene that takes place in an underground battle
tournament), but also because one of the key maguffins (a mysterious chemical
that makes otherwise tame Pokémon go berserk) is lifted wholesale from it. Your
investment in the mystery will probably rely on your ability to buy into the
movie’s worldbuilding and how many neo noir stories you’ve heard before, but
since this is still a kid’s movie, the big reveal is less Gone Girl and more Scooby Doo.
That said, while the reveal of the big bad isn’t so hard to figure out, his big
plan is a little less predictable, mostly because of how weird it is, even
within the context of its own weird world.
The movie’s greatest accomplishment,
however, is in how it nailed the Pokémon designs. Live adaptations of cartoons
and video games struggle to find that happy medium of bringing characters that
were never meant to be represented as such into the real world without mangling
it into an abomination that wasn’t so much brought to life as it was focus tested
into existence. (Again, just look what they did to Sonic.) They hired an artist
who made a series of realistic Pokémon drawings as a creature designer, and he
was able to maintain their original sizes and proportions while grafting them
with realistic fur, skin and scales without looking super uncanny. They look
great in motion and the designs range from badass (Charizard) to adorable
(Bulbasaur) to downright unsettling (Ditto). The only exception is with a Pokémon
who becomes the catalyst for the bad guy’s plot who sometimes looks like he
wasn’t completely rendered. And Mr. Mime, but let’s be real, he looks freaky
even in his cartoon form.
The real MVP, of course, is
Pikachu. Giving him an actual voice beyond repeating his own name ad nauseum as
most Pokémon tend to do helped exponentially in developing his character, that
being of a coffee guzzling smart aleck whose defensive sarcasm hides a deep
sadness. Ryan Reynold’s laconic inflections are still recognizably his, but
this character is different from his live action turns or the similarly faceless
human cartoon Deadpool. He also has wonderful comedic chemistry with Justice
Smith, who often struggles to communicate with his yellow companion in public
without looking crazy. Funnily enough, one criticism the Pokémon franchise gets
a lot is that its human characters are all blank slates for the kids to project
themselves onto. Tim isn’t the deepest character ever by any means, but he’s
still fleshed out with his own personality, desires and issues, whose more
reflective of the earlier generation who grew up with Pokémon from the get-go, almost as if they knew half their audience would consist of adults who watched it as
kids.
Calling Pokémon Detective Pikachu one of the best video game film
adaptations ever may sound like damning with faint praise, but this is one of
the few cases where that title is actually earned. Although its success
undoubtedly hinges on the nostalgia of a property that’s touched nearly everyone
under the age of 30 in some way, it still holds up on its own merits and is
thoroughly entertaining in its own right. Between this and Alita: Battle Angel,
this could be the dawn of video games and anime getting the proper live-action
treatment they deserve. That may sound foolishly optimistic, but a guy can
dream.
7/10
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