Full spoilers
Including the ending, the cut prologue and everything in between.
Pokémon: The First Movie wakes a creature in a tank, lets it ask why it exists and has the men who built it toast their success while it listens. What follows answers that question more sincerely than most cinema for adults dares.
A creature wakes up in a glass tank, asks the darkness who it is and why it exists, and the men who made it toast their success while it listens. That is the opening of a film history filed under toy commercial, and it is why I am handing a Pokémon movie a hundred with a straight face.
You know what happens on New Island, you were eight, you were there, so I am not going to walk you through it. What I want to do instead is take the film seriously as an argument, because under the licensing it makes five of them, about being made, about violence, about copies, about grief and about what a self is, and it commits to all five harder than most cinema aimed at adults ever dares.
Nobody signs a consent form for being born
Start with the argument the film opens on, because it is the oldest one there is. Every living thing arrives without being asked and gets its purpose handed to it by whoever happened to be standing there. The existentialists argued that existence comes first and essence is never included, that the whole weight of being alive is authoring your own purpose, and Sartre needed hundreds of pages to make the case. This film needs one creature in a tank hearing itself described as a success, an experiment, a result, never once as a someone. Nobody consented to being born and nobody gets a purpose in the welcome packet. The only difference between Mewtwo and you is that his packet said weapon.
What lifts it past a Frankenstein rerun is who the villains are. Not men, systems. Science makes him and values him as a result, commerce buys him and values him as output, and the film’s two father figures, a grieving scientist and a gangster in a suit, are just the local faces of institutions that measure worth before asking names. Ethics has carried one rule above most others for two centuries, never treat a person purely as a means to your end, and the film stages the violation twice without ever saying the rule out loud, trusting children to feel the difference between being loved and being useful. Anyone who has ever been valued for their function and only their function knows the exact temperature of that armor. The tragedy is not that a monster got made. It is that a mind asked to be a someone twice, in a lab and in a boardroom, and both times the answer was a job description.
A theory of violence smarter than the war films
Here is where the film stops being a fable and turns political. Its claim about violence, delivered to children between card ads, is more coherent than what most prestige war cinema manages. Supremacy is inherited grammar: call someone a lesser copy long enough and he will not dismantle your ladder, he will climb it and throw you off the top. Nietzsche called that trap ressentiment, the revolt of the injured that never questions the master’s scale of worth, only who gets to stand on it, and Mewtwo lives it to the letter, his island speeches Giovanni’s pitch with the pronouns swapped. The film knows it even when he does not. The opposite of your abuser is not the reverse of him. It is someone who put the ladder down.
Violence itself the film treats as a mirror phenomenon. The battle it stages is original against clone, every creature fighting the one being on earth most like it, shot straight and scored like a funeral, because that is its position on every war ever fought: the more alike two rivals are, the harder they need to prove a difference. René Girard built a career on that idea and on its darker sequel, that warring communities only find peace over the body of an innocent they mourn together, and the film walks his whole sequence, a ten-year-old dead in the crossfire, both armies weeping in unison, peace. Its pacifism is honest about the price, too. Pikachu refusing to fight its clone, slap after slap, saves nobody in the moment. Refusal just tells the truth in a room where nobody else will, and the film lets that be enough, which takes more nerve than a rescue.
Timing did the rest. The dub reached American theaters seven months after Columbine, into a country tearing itself apart over children and violence, carrying the claim that the enemy is a mirror. Adults answered by reviewing the merchandise.
The most political thing in it is a copy demanding standing
Underneath the fight sits the question our own decade cannot stop asking, what makes an original worth more than a copy, and the film’s answer is nothing. The clone Pikachu’s fear is not a copy of fear, it is fear, happening for the first time to someone who just arrived. Once the suffering is real, the sufferer is real, and provenance stops being worth. The clones are newborns told by their only parent that existence must be earned in combat against their originals, and the film refuses to score a single frame of it as good versus evil. Twenty-five years later the whole culture argues about copies and what they owe the originals they were pulled from, and a children’s film staked its position before the century turned.
There is a joke buried in here so good I do not care whether anyone intended it. Mewtwo is intellectual property. He is a derivative of the franchise’s rarest creature, a copy spun up to be sold, and the most marketable monster in the catalog spends his whole film raging against existing as someone else’s product. The movie critics dismissed as a commercial is a commercial whose main character wants out of the commercial. Somewhere in there the franchise looked in the mirror, and it hands what it saw to the comic relief: two Meowths sitting out the apocalypse, looking at the same moon, deciding the differences were never worth the fight. The thesis goes to the punchline cat. It lands harder from him.
Grief is the only argument everyone accepts
The film plants its deepest claim in the part Western theaters cut. Before Mewtwo has a body, his mind finds the clone of the scientist’s dead daughter in the next tank, his first friend, and when her body fails she goes out telling him that being alive was worth it. A dying child answers the film’s darkest question, whether a life that short and that borrowed is worth having, and the answer is yes, without argument. His first complete experience of existence is losing someone who was glad to exist, and the scientists sedate the grief out of him, bad for the data. Everything he does afterward is that wound wearing armor.
Compassion is a worn word, so look at its bones, it means suffering together, and the climax literalizes the etymology. The tears that undo the petrification are not magic pulled from nowhere, they are the payoff of the tank, the one experience the film has shown existing on every side of every line it draws, human and creature, original and copy, creator and created. Mourning is the first thing both armies do in unison, and it is the thing that ends the war. Not victory, not the better argument. The war stops because everyone in the room finally pays the same cost at the same time, and that is the truest thing any film has told children about how wars end.
He erases every witness except you
Standing over the boy his war nearly killed, Mewtwo arrives at the sentence the whole film was built to carry. How you came to exist does not matter, what you do with the fact that you exist decides who you are. Existence first, essence authored, spoken by the one character who earned every word of it. I spent years arriving at some version of that belief and treating it as the closest thing I have to a creed, and a cartoon built to sell trading cards handed it to me when I was a kid, decades before I could hear it.
People call the memory wipe a franchise reset button, and read cheaply it is. Read closely it is the character’s saddest choice, the being who wanted more than anything to be known deciding the world is not ready, erasing himself from the only minds that ever met him, mercy for everyone and none for himself.
There is a strain of philosophy that says you are your memories, nothing more. Take it seriously and the wipe turns the whole film into a message in a bottle, because the night on New Island now exists in exactly two minds. His, and yours. You watched it. The film erases its witnesses and deputizes the audience as the last ones holding the lesson, so the moral was never addressed to Ash at all but to the kids in the seats. I was one of them. It took.
The case against a hundred, and why it loses
Now the honest part, because I know what this film is on paper. The dub sanded Mewtwo’s philosophy down and pushed him toward malice the Japanese script never gave him, the prologue was cut whole, sixteen percent of critics found a kind word, and the reviews dined on the same joke, that a fighting franchise made a movie about how fighting is wrong. All of it true. None of it moves me an inch.
The hypocrisy charge dies on contact with the text, which draws the line adults refused to see, sport between willing partners is not war, and the island battle is framed, shot and scored as war between mirrors, condemned as one. The sanding is real, but the arguments never lived in the dialogue. They live in the images, the tank, the harness, the slap, the tears, the moon, and images survive translation. Critics in 1999 reviewed the marketing. Children reviewed the movie. The children were right.
I withhold hundreds on principle, and I am the demographic this film imprinted on, so I checked the nostalgia at the door and walked the text again looking for the place it settles for less. It is not there. Five arguments, each planted before it pays off, the comic relief carrying the thesis, the mascot carrying the pacifism, the kid carrying the cost, and the monster walking away with the only unhappy ending in the building, remembered by no one, holding everything. Creation, violence, personhood, grief and the making of meaning, all five faced, all five landed, ninety minutes.
It earns it. All of it.
Pokémon: The First Movie: 100/100
The first Pokémon movie is sincere, mythic and devastating about a life nobody asked for, with cinema’s saddest monster at the center, a kids’ film that commits to everything and earns it all.
