Pokémon Detective Pikachu

The film's opening scene presents us with the telos of the world of Pokémon:  Tim Goodman (in case one wasn't sure of his role in the movie) is cajoled by a close friend, who we never see again, into attempting to catch a Pokémon.

Like the game that inspired it, the movie sets the stage by focusing on that quintessential Pokémon experience - subduing and entrapping a wild creature in order to force it to fight repeatedly for the honour and glory of the one who entrapped it.

However, unlike the game, which is refreshingly open about the power relations that exist between Pokémon and humans by simply forcing you, the child player, into capturing a Pokémon in the name of scientific discovery, the movie does away with this and opts for a saccharine "explanation" that the Pokémon must choose their trainer....effectively consenting to their enslavement.

Although this opening might lead one to believe that Pokémon Detective Pikachu will continue to mystify and obscure these power relations, (although one could admittedly read the Pokémon's willingness to enter the Pokéball as a metaphor for our own lack of willingness to overthrow capitalism) the central conflict of the movie itself not only exposes this unequal relationship for all to see, but actually doubles down on the slavery-as-friendship motif and turns the only true revolutionary figure in the film (Howard Clifford, played by Bill Nighy) into (Spoiler Alert!) its main villain.

Howard Clifford is the founder of Ryme City, where Pokémon live freely side-by-side with humans, and where Pokémon battles are illegal.  Ryme City is presented as a virtual paradise - a densely populated, technologically sophisticated mega-city that simultaneously flourishes with stunning biodiversity.  Outside of Ryme City, the old ways prevail, where wild Pokémon are caught and stored in balls until their trainer decides to let them out, so that they can fight another enslaved Pokémon until one or the other passes out from its injuries and people live in quaint but deeply boring villages and countrysides.

In contrast to the usual fetishization of the rural or natural, Ryme City is framed as an utopian space while the natural is positioned as dangerous.  Indeed, the violent car crash that frames the movie's narrative takes place over a rural bridge, and the dystopic lab where Pokémon are subjected to genetic experiments is in the remote countryside.  Over and over again, the movie shows us that untamed nature is violent and dangerous - indeed, Detective Pikachu himself suffers a nearly fatal injury in the midst of a forest upheaval which in and of itself is the result of a number of giant genetically-altered Pokémon.

Now you might be asking yourself - what is the central conflict of the film?  Well it turns out that Howard Clifford is a transhumanist, and not content with creating the paradise that it Ryme City, he intends to reshape humanity itself by fusing Pokémon with their companions, effectively turning every Pokémon into a synthesis of man and animal.

Our heroes, Tim Goodman and his friend, the plucky reporter Lucy (of course she's a reporter, what other profession better signifies impotent opposition than a member of the press?) uncover this plot and, unsurprisingly, manage to foil it, and separating Pokémon again from their trainers.

But what are the implications of this?  In the context of the film Ryme City was built on a lie, and its founder, Howard Clifford, has been exposed as a transhumanist fraud and thrown in jail.  How might the city react?  Well, presumably it will do so in a reactionary way, by returning to the good old ways, and re-enslaving Pokémon in order to use their pain as entertainment for the masses.

But wasn't Howard onto something?  Shouldn't his radical, Pokémon liberating ways actually be celebrated, and not condemned?  The movie's response to what made him bad was that he did not ask people's consent to reverse the power relationship, to enslave humanity by turning Pokémon into Pokéballs for humanity.  One could argue that, in the face of a global climate catastrophe, a humanity that lives on within the biodiversity of the natural world, rather than in opposition to it, is in many ways a vastly more elegant and hopeful path than the one presented in the film as the "happy ending", which is to basically affirm late capitalism, but this time with someone at the helm (Howard's son) who will be a "gooder" capitalist than his father.

And in a supreme ironic gesture, it is revealed that Detective Pikachu himself has been this very synthesis all along - the reason Detective Pikachu speaks is because MewTwo ( the most powerful Pokémon, who is incidentally the product of human tampering) fused Tim's father Harry into his Pikachu.  At the core of the dramatic action of the film is the very thing that the film itself explicitly repudiates at the level of the political.

All in all, it gives new meaning to "Gotta Catch 'Em All - Pokémon".