Destiny Deoxys Review

Although I use the English name of the movie and its characters to make the review more accessible to English-speaking fans, I was actually watching a fansub of the Japanese version of the movie. There may be some differences if you have only seen the dub.

Thoughts and Synopsis

It's another Legendaries Randomly Fighting™ movie - the first one since the second movie. I'm still not a fan of that concept, but this movie does bring some fun things to the table.

It all begins in the Arctic. A scientist named Professor Lund and his assistant Yuko are stationed there for research, along with Lund's son Tory, who is out playing in the snow among a colony of Spheal, Sealeo and Walrein. Suddenly, however, a meteorite strikes nearby. The Pokémon are spooked and stampede, terrifying Tory until he faints from the shock. As Professor Lund and Yuko retrieve him, they witness the extraterrestrial Pokémon Deoxys rising from the impact crater, retrieving a rock with a mysterious green gem stuck in it from the ground and cradling it in its arms.

All of a sudden, however, Rayquaza descends from the sky to attack the Deoxys: apparently it just intruded on Rayquaza's territory, and Rayquaza is not happy. They fight for a little while, the Deoxys fluidly changing forms as it goes, and the scuffle takes them near the research center where they destroy vehicles and equipment and send the scientists fleeing. Eventually, however, Rayquaza manages to Hyper Beam Deoxys at close range, effectively dissolving its entire body and sending the blue gem in the middle of its chest flying into the ocean as Rayquaza leaves, satisfied that it has destroyed the intruder. Professor Lund and Yuko fly home to LaRousse City with Tory and bring the green gem - which we can pretty easily deduce is a second Deoxys - along for research.

FOUR YEARS LATER, Professor Lund and Yuko are getting close to a breakthrough in their research on the green gem. By pointing a laser beam with a specific frequency at it, they hope to be able to regenerate the Deoxys the gem belonged to. However, before they can complete the process, the beam dies down: there's not enough power to keep the beam going at that intensity for that long. The green gem throbs with light even after the experiment, though, and deep in the Arctic, the Deoxys that was destroyed four years ago emerges from underneath the ice, fully regenerated, and projects a purple aurora into the sky.

Ash and company, meanwhile, happen (of course) to be traveling to LaRousse City, mostly for the Battle Tower located in it. As they enter, they are greeted by a "Block Bot", a welcoming robot consisting of several independently moving, levitating blocks that can speak and carry out functions like creating passports for everyone who enters the city. The whole city is similarly high-tech, featuring for instance huge conveyor belts to help pedestrians get around the city, and just about everything is automated. On the way to the Battle Tower, they meet and befriend three trainers, Rafe, Sid, and computer geek Rebecca.

Once at the Battle Tower, Ash tries to ask a boy for directions: it's Professor Lund's son Tory, now a little older, who seems oddly afraid of Pikachu. Ash, oblivious, chases Tory around with Pikachu sitting ominously on his head until they're both ushered into a battle arena and automatically registered for a tag battle with Sid and Rafe. As the battle starts, Tory finally manages to explain to Ash that he doesn't actually have any Pokémon. Ash, not wanting to miss out on his chance to battle, decides to loan him his Torkoal, but this fails miserably, as Tory doesn't know much about Pokémon battling and is terrified of the fighters. Eventually, Ash attempts to handle it himself, but in his agitation, he fails to properly coordinate both his Pokémon and loses quickly.

As Ash and Tory exit the elevator after the battle, Professor Lund and Yuko arrive to congratulate Tory on having tried to take part in a Pokémon battle, but he says he only entered by mistake and runs out of the building, upset. The professor and Yuko explain things to the very confused Ash and company: Tory was nearly trampled in that stampede back when the meteorite struck four years ago, and the experience traumatized him so much that, even though he likes Pokémon in theory, he's terrified of being close to them. Ash, naturally, immediately believes he can fix it with friendship: surely he and Pikachu can just make friends with Tory and everything will be okay, right?

Meanwhile, as Tory walks outside to sulk, he is approached by a Plusle seeking help for its Minun partner who has gotten stuck in one of the city's automatic trash cans. In spite of his fear, Tory decides to help, eventually managing to pry the trash can open and free Minun. As the Pokémon attempt to thank him, however, he flinches back and runs away again, retreating to the botanical gardens, located near his father's lab, to collect his thoughts.

In the enclosed garden, he calls out to someone: he has a secret friend there, a strange, sparkly green mist that plays with him and communicates with him by changing its shape. He excitedly tells it that he just helped out a Pokémon and entered a Pokémon battle. As Ash arrives to ask him who he's talking to, however, the green mist disappears and Tory refuses to tell him.

Ash tries to reassure Tory and offer to let him battle with him again, but Tory is hostile and just wants to be left alone, and when Ash tries to help him up after he's spooked by a flock of Wingull, he shoves Ash away. Ash starts to lose his temper, but May, Max and Brock come over to calm him down, and Brock invites Tory to eat with them. He puts out Pokémon food too, attracting small wild Pokémon, and Ash, ever the hopeful type, tries to get Tory to go pet them, but naturally getting rid of a phobia is not that easy, and Tory runs off again, though he apologizes for how he acted earlier.

That evening, Ash and company see an aurora projected into the sky by the blue-gem Deoxys, who arrived in the city that day. Rebecca, the computer geek trainer from before, points out that this doesn't make any sense since they're nowhere near the north or south pole, but no one pays much attention to her. Tory brings Pokémon cookies for everyone, and the Pokémon play together, with Ash and Tory eventually spinning a jump rope for them together, while Rebecca sits on a nearby bench, analyzing the suspicious aurora patterns with her computer. Eventually the aurora vanishes, but the blue-gem Deoxys is still roaming near the city, shooting strange waves at things.

Tory talks to Ash about the progress they've made and explains that he's always been a loner because he couldn't be around anyone who had Pokémon. He makes a brave attempt to touch Pikachu, but then Ash's Corphish jumps startlingly between them demanding attention, and Tory panics again. The next day, though, he decides to introduce everyone to his friend the sparkly green mist, and Rebecca analyzes it with her laptop, intrigued.

At this point, Rayquaza arrives in the city, having finally noticed that the blue-gem Deoxys is back and wanting to settle this once and for all, and the Deoxys flies out to meet it. On the way, Deoxys fires strange beams down at the conveyor belts, which promptly go berserk. Professor Lund, who watches this from the city's extensive network of security cameras, worries that the looming battle between Deoxys and Rayquaza will have civilian casualties, so he orders an evacuation of the city, to be carried out by the Block Bots. However, he is mistakenly carried out of town with everyone else by the largely automated evacuation, leaving him unable to help the main characters directly from here on.

Deoxys creates an army of clones of itself that begin to pick up humans and Pokémon alike, taking them off to God knows where, and meanwhile the real one shifts into its Defense Forme and creates a huge dome-shaped barrier around the city to prevent Rayquaza from getting in. This stops the wind from getting in, too, and thus all of the city's power-generating windmills come to a halt, causing a citywide blackout. By this time most of the city's inhabitants have escaped, but several are left, including our heroes. It is now impossible to enter or exit the city, everything is down including the Pokéball system (luckily, several of the main characters sent out at least one Pokémon earlier to introduce them to the sparkly green mist), and there is no way of communicating with the outside world.

Ash and company (which now includes Tory, Sid, Rebecca, Rafe, and Rafe's two little sisters in addition to May, Max and Brock) have to force their way out of the botanical gardens, which cannot be opened normally with the power down. The Deoxys copies kidnap Sid and his Blastoise when they try and then swarm around the exit they were going to use, so Rebecca suggests they try to take another exit, and Tory leads the way. On the way, they bump into Yuko, who'd been looking for them and tells them about the blackout and the barrier around the city, and they take shelter in the lab. Outside, while more Deoxys clones carry off all the wild Pokémon in the area, Plusle, Minun and a Munchlax that's been providing some comic relief here and there in the movie crawl into a sewage pipe and eventually find their way into the lab as well.

As night falls, most of the Deoxys clones seem to be gone, and Ash, Brock, Rebecca, Tory and Rafe deem it safe to exit to try to find some food and water. Plusle and Minun follow them, wanting to be with Tory who helped them before, even though he's still reluctant to let them close. They find one of the city's many automated hotdog dispensers, which doesn't work thanks to the power failure, but Pikachu comes to the rescue with a Thundershock that reactivates it. Just then, however, a couple of Deoxys clones come along, and one of them captures Minun, prompting Tory to unthinkingly reach out to grab it - unfortunately, however, he doesn't reach it in time, and Deoxys takes off with it. Ash, Tory, Brock and Plusle have to run for a place to hide, where they conveniently find boxes full of water bottles. Plusle is sad about losing Minun, and again, Tory very nearly reaches out to comfort it, but he still can't do it. He asks Plusle for forgiveness, feeling that Minun's capture was his fault.

Meanwhile, Rebecca and Rafe are trying to work out scientifically exactly what the Deoxys clones are doing by observing their behaviour. It turns out they're taking all the people and Pokémon to a particular building and leaving them there. Astonished, they watch one of the Deoxys clones carrying the hotdog dispenser from earlier (which is all the while wiggling its legs and repeating "Please cease your violence!"), but then suddenly dropping it when the limited power Pikachu's Thundershock gave it runs out.

Everyone gets back to the lab, and the next morning, as Rebecca and Yuko are trying to figure out the meaning of Rebecca's data together, the Deoxys clones realize that they're inside and start trying to break into the building, though they lose interest and go away once the gang have retreated through a door to where the Deoxys can't see them anymore. It just so happens that the place they just entered is the stairwell leading to the Deoxys regeneration lab where they were trying to revive the green-gem Deoxys near the beginning of the movie. As Yuko explains that the meteorite with the green gem stuck in it is actually a second Deoxys, the sparkly green mist that Tory had befriended jumps out of the green gem, confirming that it's actually a projection of the Deoxys. Rebecca analyzes the light patterns of the mist and realizes that they're similar to the patterns of the aurora - the Deoxys actually use light patterns to communicate, and this is their language. The green mist's pattern, she somehow figures out using the computer, said "friend", while the aurora's pattern meant "Where are you?"

They realize that the two Deoxys are friends and the entire ordeal has simply been the blue-gem Deoxys' attempts to locate the green-gem one - it projected huge auroras into the sky in the hope the green-gem Deoxys would read them and find it. And because Deoxys "sees" electromagnetic fields (we've been treated to some distorted Deoxys-vision at several points in the movie), the electric patterns given off by all the living creatures and the various electronic devices in the city were making it hard for it to see anything, thus prompting it to try to simply remove them so it could explore the city undisturbed. This is why the Deoxys clone dropped the hotdog dispenser as soon as it shut off - once it was no longer giving off an electromagnetic field, it no longer disturbed its vision and no longer needed to be removed. Thus, the gang realize that they just need to revive the green-gem Deoxys so that the blue-gem Deoxys can cease its search, and then the two alien Pokémon can leave in peace.

There is only one problem: the emergency power the lab is running on right now is not nearly enough to resurrect the green-gem Deoxys. Instead, the trainers head out to try to make their Pokémon manually turn the windmills' blades. They meet the blue-gem Deoxys on the way and unsuccessfully attempt to tell it they only want to help while it creates more clones that Rebecca's Metagross and Rafe's Blaziken fend away. Eventually Rafe volunteers to be left behind to hold them off while the others continue.

At that time, however, Rayquaza finally figures out how to break through Deoxys's defensive barrier around the city: it fires a Hyper Beam and then dives through the shield at the weakened spot, pushing through to the inside. Deoxys' myriads of clones swarm around Rayquaza and it blasts them apart with ease, but there are so many of them that it keeps Rayquaza busy for a while, all the way until the real blue-gem Deoxys finally comes out to face it.

Meanwhile, Ash and Tory get Pikachu and Plusle to use their electricity to power the door to the building where everyone is being held, opening it to let everyone out, while the battle between Deoxys and Rayquaza rages on around the city. Sid and Rafe go with a bunch of other people and Pokémon (including Team Rocket, who have been around doing nothing of importance) to repower the windmills with May, Brock and Rebecca, while Ash, Tory and Yuko return to the lab with Plusle, Minun and Pikachu. As the power returns thanks to the efforts of everyone at the windmills, they turn the regeneration machine on, but like at the beginning of the movie, there isn't quite enough power to complete the resurrection procedure. Since they brought three convenient Electric-types with them, however, they can grant the machine the remaining power it needs, and the green-gem Deoxys is finally revived.

The Deoxys, grateful, picks up Ash, Tory and Pikachu telekinetically, bursts through the roof and and playfully flies them around for a bit. The fun is put to a stop, however, when in the ongoing battle between Rayquaza and the blue-gem Deoxys, Rayquaza manages to smash Deoxys into the ground, causing the barrier around the city to break. The wind comes back, the power comes back, and the windmills start turning again - which has to suck for the people who were working to keep them going only to now find out that they could have just waited for five minutes.

The blue-gem Deoxys rises from its impact crater and goes on an all-out offensive in its Attack Forme, eventually managing to smash Rayquaza into that same crater. Just as it prepares another attack, the green-gem Deoxys arrives with Ash and Tory, leaves them on a rooftop, switches to its Defense Forme and deflects the attack away from Rayquaza, causing it to hit a nearby bridge instead and bury both itself and Rayquaza in rubble. The blue-gem Deoxys scans the area with the strange beam that screwed with the electronics before, and we can finally see what it was actually trying to do: the beam turns green when it passes over the rocks the green-gem Deoxys is buried under, synchronizing with it. The two Deoxys communicate for a moment through the beam before the green-gem Deoxys breaks out, the two of them shoot auroras into the sky, and they transform back into their Normal Formes as they recognize one another.

Their alien friendship dance is interrupted, however, when Rayquaza bursts out from the ground and shoots a Hyper Beam at them. Both Deoxys quickly fly Ash and Tory out of harm's way and fight Rayquaza together, taking the fight towards the Battle Tower.

Now that the power is on, however, the Block Bots are operational again, and the head bot quickly detects this fight as dangerous and activates an emergency protocol to seal off the danger with the Block Bots' bodies. As the bots approach the Battle Tower, they're hit with Deoxys' electromagnetic disturbance and begin to malfunction, the head bot's blue face turning red as its voice distorts. The Block Bots start to flood the city, flowing towards the Battle Tower en masse and nearly enveloping Rayquaza. Before it's submerged, however, both Deoxys transform into their Defense Formes, form protective barriers and place themselves on either side of Rayquaza, shielding it from the bots. Rayquaza stares at them in surprise.

Just as Ash and Tory are wondering what to do (and are reunited with Plusle and Minun, who came to find them), Professor Lund appears on a giant screen near them and informs them that the only way to stop the head robot is to force it to verify a passport - in the split second while it is doing so, it will be vulnerable to remote control, and they can use that moment to stop the overreaction of the security system. He tells Tory he's the only one who can save the city just before the Block Bots destroy the screen.

Ash declares that Tory isn't the only one, since he's there too and also has a passport. A hotdog dispenser comes floating along on the sea of Block Bots, and Ash and Tory hitch a ride on it along with Pikachu, Plusle and Minun. Their improvised boat begins to capsize, revealing the comic relief Munchlax was hiding under it, feasting on hotdogs. It falls and suddenly glows white, evolving into a Snorlax then and there.

Ash walks across Snorlax's body, which is conveniently positioned just so that he can get over to a tower near the head Block Bot. Pikachu jumps across the moving Block Bots and reaches the head bot, and Ash follows it, managing just barely to latch onto the robot. He takes out his passport and... drops it as the head robot moves suddenly. Nice job, Ash.

Luckily, however, just then Tory floats past and throws his passport up to Ash instead. Ash successfully makes the head robot verify it, Officer Jenny is ready to override the controls as instructed by Professor Lund, and the head bot's face turns blue and happy again before all the Block Bots shut down, piled in towers around the city. Tory, Plusle and Minun are left sitting on top of a very unstable such tower, high up near the walls of the Battle Tower; Plusle and Minun fall, and this time Tory does find the courage to jump down after them and grab hold of them to save them. The three of them fall helplessly down, until the green-gem Deoxys emerges from underneath the Block Bots below and catches them in its arms.

Rayquaza reemerges alongside the blue-gem Deoxys: they're no longer fighting. The blue-gem Deoxys levitates Ash and Pikachu up, and Ash, Pikachu, Tory, Plusle and Minun all get to take a little flight with the two Deoxys and Rayquaza before being reunited with everybody else. Tory's happy as can be with Plusle and Minun, having finally overcome his fear of Pokémon. The two Deoxys make pretty auroras and then head off towards space together.

Meanwhile, Team Rocket are still working an exercise cycle, apparently unaware that the windmills have been fine for the last half hour or so.

The Good

There's actually quite a bit of stuff that's subtly well done in this movie. First of all, I'd like to name its portrayal of the Deoxys, which I was very pleasantly surprised by - they actually went to the trouble of making them compellingly, realistically alien instead of just going with your typical boring, unimaginative humanoid aliens, and that singlehandedly elevates the plot from a purely inane Legendaries Randomly Fighting™ deal to something a bit more interesting. We perceive the world through sight, detecting different wavelengths of light, and communicate through sound, and a lot of fictional aliens simply take this for granted - but the Deoxys sense the world through the shapes of electromagnetic fields and communicate through elaborate light displays. What looked like a sinister alien invasion was really just an alien looking for its friend and being unable to comprehend our world or what anything in it means: all it sees is a confusing jumble of electromagnetic fields everywhere, strange creatures moving but not communicating in any way that it can recognize, and all it can think of is to simply move all this strange stuff that's blocking its vision out of the way - but meanwhile, to the humans, its actions are destructive, threatening and terrifying, no more comprehensible than the humans were to the Deoxys. It's a surprisingly solid effort at imagining an encounter with truly alien beings, and I like that a lot.

Tory is also definitely one of the better and more memorable secondary human characters in the movie series. He's adorable, has an actual character arc with issues to work through, and his subplot is pretty well handled: getting over a phobia is hard, and he isn't simply magically cured when he's made friends with Ash, contrary to Ash's naïve hopes. Instead, throughout the movie his growing concern for Plusle and Minun is built up alongside his genuine longing to get over his fear, and in that desperate situation at the end where Plusle and Minun fall, with no time to think about it, he finally manages to just take the final plunge (figuratively and literally) and reach out to them. It feels pretty believable, and it's always nice to see Ash actually being fallible in his assumptions. While less developed, the other secondary characters aren't bad either; I especially liked Rebecca for being an unashamed female computer nerd and how her genuine perceptiveness and interest in science and analysis is actually crucial to solving the mystery and saving the day.

Thirdly, I think this is one of the funnier Pokémon movies. Like in the fifth movie, Team Rocket never interact with the main characters, but their scenes are actually pretty entertaining. And I love the hotdog dispenser flailing while feebly complaining about violence, to the point that I was delighted just to see a hotdog dispenser pop up again later in the movie. Then there's Ash's trouble with the conveyor belts, Sid's awkward crush on May, May's terrible passport photo, Munchlax's efforts to use the trash can... All in all its attempts at humour are pretty successful, and I enjoyed them.

The setting of LaRousse City is made pretty fun with the somewhat bizarre and unnecessary levels of high technology, particularly since this becomes relevant to the plot in several neat ways, and the movie does a pretty good job with atmosphere, particularly making the night that they spend in the city without power as the Deoxys clones roam the outside eerie.

Finally, I enjoyed how the Block Bot plot is solved. It makes a lot of sense that verifying a passport requires the bot to open a network connection and that that might make it vulnerable to being reset remotely. It actually feels kind of clever, and the fact the passport verification function is brought back like that is nice.

The Bad

Unfortunately, while Deoxys' role in the plot is pretty interesting and well done, Rayquaza's really isn't. It's just generically mad about Deoxys intruding on its territory, and for some reason carries an inexplicable years-long grudge because of it that makes it willing to chase the blue-gem Deoxys into LaRousse just to pick a fight with it again four years later. It would make sense Rayquaza carried a grudge if it had lost the first fight and wanted to get back at Deoxys for that, but that's not what happened: Rayquaza was the one who disintegrated Deoxys and left it helpless at the bottom of the sea for four years. One would think that's plenty enough punishment for intruding on Rayquaza's territory once, but apparently Rayquaza disagrees, strongly enough to go way out of its way to continue to harass Deoxys years later, when it's nowhere near Rayquaza's territory. It's hard to tell exactly what Rayquaza's "territory" actually is here - the movie gives the impression it's the Arctic, but it would make more sense for Rayquaza's territory to be the upper atmosphere, which the Deoxys merely passed through on the way to Earth - but either way Deoxys did absolutely nothing that would warrant this, and the movie doesn't offer any actual reason for Rayquaza to act this way. The real reason, of course, is that this is a Legendaries Randomly Fighting™ movie, so by whatever means necessary, the legendaries must be made to fight.

The resolution of their fight, meanwhile, is practically a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment. This inexplicable, deep-seated grudge of Rayquaza's somehow vanishes in a mere instant when the two Deoxys protect it from the tide of Block Bots - even though earlier, when the green-gem Deoxys protected it from the blue-gem Deoxys' attack, that didn't appear to move Rayquaza at all. The only thing to indicate Rayquaza's change of heart is a single five-second shot of Rayquaza's eye moving towards the Deoxys as they protect it. The first time I watched this movie, I actually completely missed the fact the Deoxys were trying to shield Rayquaza as well as themselves, so that shot didn't mean anything to me - as far as I could tell the entire conflict between them had just inexplicably evaporated. This could have been done in a much better, clearer, more logical way.

And while the Deoxys' alienness was portrayed nicely, the movie doesn't ultimately manage to make us care about them, the way the fifth movie made us care about Latios and Latias, or even the way the fourth movie made us care about Celebi. The Deoxys don't visibly emote at all, which makes sense - they'd be less believable as aliens if they magically happened to make humanlike expressions - but also makes it harder to empathize with them. It would be possible for the movie to make up for this by better developing Tory's relationship with the green-gem Deoxys, its personality in general, or otherwise showing more clearly how much the two Deoxys care about one another, but it doesn't really, so the Deoxys' reunion, while heartwarming in principle, fails to pull the emotional strings that it should.

Although I kind of enjoy the Block Bot plot for bringing back the Block Bots and the clever way to solve it, it feels distinctly slapped on at the end to extend the runtime of the movie (this was the first Pokémon movie to not be accompanied theatrically by a Pikachu short, so at roughly 100 minutes, it was considerably longer than any of the previous films, which clocked in at around 70-80 minutes). It also felt really disappointing that after the movie had largely centered around Tory, and Professor Lund expressly asked him to make the head bot verify a passport, Ash immediately just hijacks Tory's moment so that he can be the hero instead. This is one of the more painful instances of Ash being shoehorned in as the real hero when he really shouldn't be, and I can't help but suspect that the movie was originally meant to have Tory stop the bots, before someone decided Ash needed a more important role.

Then there are a number of minor oddities, contrivances or plot holes. Why did the blue-gem Deoxys apparently just self-regenerate on its own four years after its body was destroyed? The green-gem Deoxys is treated like the only way to bring it back is getting the machine in the lab working, and if it were simply something that takes four years naturally, then the green-gem one should logically have regenerated earlier, since it was already in gem form at the beginning of the movie. It's possible to conceive of reasons for this, of course - the green-gem Deoxys could be a child, for example, who doesn't have the ability to self-regenerate yet, or the ability to self-regenerate could vary heavily between individuals, or the blue-gem Deoxys could have been an absolutely exceptional case by managing to self-regenerate at all - but there is no actual hint towards this in the movie; nothing indicates the two Deoxys are anything but perfectly equivalent, and we never learn anything about what the blue-gem Deoxys' ability to self-regenerate actually means. The Deoxys' light-based communication is a really neat concept, but it's undermined by having Rebecca's computer just magically able to translate words from this alien language that has never before been observed by humans - this makes no sense whatsoever, and it would have been pretty easy and a lot more interesting to just have the green-gem Deoxys actually help them to translate, since we've seen it's learned to understand human speech in its time at the lab. And the sheer number of Block Bots that we see at the end just doesn't make any sense - where were all these bots that could apparently flood the city and stack up into massive towers? The Block Bots could form a bridge during the evacuation, but this is on another level entirely, and I'm not sure the writers were quite thinking through just how many bots that would take. By definition, if there are enough bots to flood the city, you can't actually fit them in the city without flooding it; you'd have to have something like multiple massive skyscrapers of stacked Block Bots sitting around at all times, and why would they even build that many in the first place, even if they could?

Finally, this movie uses a lot of CGI, and a lot of it is incredibly conspicuous and just looks bad, particularly when it's used for living Pokémon. It's a bit baffling how it can look so much worse than most of the CGI in the previous movie, but it really does, and it detracts significantly from some scenes - the scene with the Deoxys clones surrounding Rayquaza, for instance, is all CGI, and Rayquaza's movements just look comically stiff throughout that bit, making it feel fake and stilted rather than cool.

Conclusion

There's a fair bit to like about this movie. It's a surprisingly decent alien plot, the characters are likable and Tory especially has a good arc, and it's pretty amusing. But one way or another, although there are parts I appreciate, the whole just doesn't really click with me. It's too Legendaries Randomly Fighting™, too lazy with Rayquaza, too long with the tacked-on Block Bot plot, too much conspicuous CG, with not enough investment or emotional connection. In the end, for me personally, I would rank this one pretty low. But there are definitely things to like here, and I'm honestly not sure I can completely explain why I don't like it more than I do.

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Page last modified October 8 2017 at 05:02 UTC

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