Kyuu
Catfish
The game: Pika. Pika pika... chuuu! A decent mystery game with linear storytelling, smooth gameplay and interface.
The main draw is Pikachu (obviously) but it can get annoying when he randomly calls out to the player but it turns out he just wanted to show you his fluffy buns. It suffers from the usual Pokemon story sickness wherein the adults are weak-willed and would bend over for a kid even though they can just stab him with a knife. Great for kids, I would imagine, so that they can grow up thinking people will just bend over for them because they're the heroes of their own stories.
The movie: I'm still trying to understand how they managed to make a live-action Pokemon movie this good.
I honestly did not expect much from this and didn't even want to see it, but I thought it would be a card I can play against my husband when he wants to watch Star Wars: Kylo and Rey are Totally Twins; I could go "AH! But I already went and watched Deadpool Yellow with you!"
For the record, Detective Pikachu is NOT Ash's Pikachu. This is not a spoiler. The game made this clear by having the two interact and Detective Pikachu told Ash's Pikachu that he hopes they "will be the best like no one ever was". This was a question when the game was released and the very same question resurfaced when people who were unfamiliar with the game saw the Detective Pikachu movie trailer. Anyway...
The movie follows the basic plot of the game, which as you have seen in the trailer is about Tim Goodman and a talking Pikachu with a detective hat at a place called Ryme City searching for Tim's father. Just about everything else is changed but to avoid dropping spoilers, I'll focus on Tim. When I first saw the trailer, I was not amused. Tim Goodman, in the game, did live apart from his father but there was no bitterness in him. He was a good kid who was genuinely concerned about his father and he came to Ryme City on his own to search for the guy when he disappeared. He had no problems with pokemon and was concerned with their well-being. Tim Goodman, in the movie, was as bitter and awful as ground coffee with no milk, cream, sugar or even water. I have no idea why they decided to write him that way... are bitter protagonists the "in" thing nowadays? Anyway, the movie's character development was pretty good so I didn't hate him. The motivation of the movie's villain was also more believable than his game counterpart's.
I would say the strongest point of the movie was world building. They managed to incorporate the history of Pokemon into the movie itself without making it overwhelming. The trailer was not at all misleading: it wasn't just a few choice scenes that had pokemon stuffed in them, the whole movie was full of natural-looking pokemon interactions.
That said, I can't say that this movie is for kids. It has a depth that I doubt children would be able to grasp that well. The pokemons are more realistic than the usual cartoons: they're dusty, muddy, dirty, etc. like any other animal that walks on streets or rolls around in the dirt. There were kids in the cinema with us and at first, they would shout every time a pokemon appeared but as the movie progressed, they became quiet- either engrossed in the story, or bored. It's safe for kids though, no Deadpool-esque dismemberment or cussing.
But the real hero of both the game and the movie, as it is aptly titled, is Detective Pikachu.
The main draw is Pikachu (obviously) but it can get annoying when he randomly calls out to the player but it turns out he just wanted to show you his fluffy buns. It suffers from the usual Pokemon story sickness wherein the adults are weak-willed and would bend over for a kid even though they can just stab him with a knife. Great for kids, I would imagine, so that they can grow up thinking people will just bend over for them because they're the heroes of their own stories.
The movie: I'm still trying to understand how they managed to make a live-action Pokemon movie this good.
I honestly did not expect much from this and didn't even want to see it, but I thought it would be a card I can play against my husband when he wants to watch Star Wars: Kylo and Rey are Totally Twins; I could go "AH! But I already went and watched Deadpool Yellow with you!"
For the record, Detective Pikachu is NOT Ash's Pikachu. This is not a spoiler. The game made this clear by having the two interact and Detective Pikachu told Ash's Pikachu that he hopes they "will be the best like no one ever was". This was a question when the game was released and the very same question resurfaced when people who were unfamiliar with the game saw the Detective Pikachu movie trailer. Anyway...
The movie follows the basic plot of the game, which as you have seen in the trailer is about Tim Goodman and a talking Pikachu with a detective hat at a place called Ryme City searching for Tim's father. Just about everything else is changed but to avoid dropping spoilers, I'll focus on Tim. When I first saw the trailer, I was not amused. Tim Goodman, in the game, did live apart from his father but there was no bitterness in him. He was a good kid who was genuinely concerned about his father and he came to Ryme City on his own to search for the guy when he disappeared. He had no problems with pokemon and was concerned with their well-being. Tim Goodman, in the movie, was as bitter and awful as ground coffee with no milk, cream, sugar or even water. I have no idea why they decided to write him that way... are bitter protagonists the "in" thing nowadays? Anyway, the movie's character development was pretty good so I didn't hate him. The motivation of the movie's villain was also more believable than his game counterpart's.
I would say the strongest point of the movie was world building. They managed to incorporate the history of Pokemon into the movie itself without making it overwhelming. The trailer was not at all misleading: it wasn't just a few choice scenes that had pokemon stuffed in them, the whole movie was full of natural-looking pokemon interactions.
That said, I can't say that this movie is for kids. It has a depth that I doubt children would be able to grasp that well. The pokemons are more realistic than the usual cartoons: they're dusty, muddy, dirty, etc. like any other animal that walks on streets or rolls around in the dirt. There were kids in the cinema with us and at first, they would shout every time a pokemon appeared but as the movie progressed, they became quiet- either engrossed in the story, or bored. It's safe for kids though, no Deadpool-esque dismemberment or cussing.
But the real hero of both the game and the movie, as it is aptly titled, is Detective Pikachu.
Harry Goodman's Pikachu sacrificed itself in both the game and the movie so that its human partner would be saved by Mewtwo.
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