Very exciting today as I’ve got a guest reviewer. For the first time ever we have a star of the movie here to talk about it. So, here we go:

Pika, pika. Pika pika pika pika? Pika, pika, pika pika pika (pika pika, pika pika pika). Pika pika! Pika, pika pika pika? Pika, pika pika pika pika. Pika pika, pika, pika pika pika. Pika pika? PIKA! Pika pika pika! Pika!

God damn it Pikachu you’re the fucking worst. Guess I’ll have to do it. This film is weird, tonally it’s a complete mess. You’ve seen the trailer, so you’re probably expecting a silly lighthearted movie that makes you happy and warm inside. That’s definitely not the case here, this is tonally incredibly dark at times. The film starts with a kid finding out his dad died in a car crash, then moves on to themes such as abandonment, slavery, and of course a scene where the heroes flat-out torture someone. It’s not as funny as you’d expect it to be, there are long sections with no humour in them at all, but that doesn’t lessen the film in any way. When it veers into comedy it does so naturally and veers into emotional moments well too. It’s not going crazily from one extreme to the other like a drunk driver, it’s slowly changing lanes so subtly that sometimes you don’t realise. Some things that don’t work quite so well; the human characters are a bit flat, and the villain reveal is incredibly obvious from anybody who has seen a film before.

On the upside, the world-building has to be commended. There are a few moments where you think “that’s definitely London, I recognise that building”, but mostly the city feels real, it feels like a place people actually live with a vibrant history. So I’ve talked about the look of the city, now how about the pokemon? Anybody who has seen the Sonic trailer can see that translating something from a video game into real life can go incredibly wrong. While we’re on the subject here’s my thoughts on the sonic trailer: it looks like it was made for kids from the 90’s, but forgot that those kids are now adults. So the core audience seems to be adults people who were in comas for 20 years, and time travellers. So with that in mind how does this look? In a word: phenomenal. In a sound effect: *sharp intake of breath*. They look amazing, they look so good that sometimes you don’t notice them. There are scenes with a lot of them in the background and they are so well made that you don’t realise they’re there. That’s this films greatest achievement, not the performances (which with one or two exceptions are kind of just “there”), not the story (which wastes so much time on pointless things), and not the emotion it makes you feel, the greatest achievement is it feels incredibly real. And that’s the biggest worry for something like this. It really works, the visual style, the pokemon in the world, visually it’s incredible, and cannot be faulted for that. This may not be the best film in the world, but I get the feeling it’s going to influence something phenomenal (but not Sonic The Fucking Hedgehog).