Pokemon: The Rise of Darkrai Review

Pokemon: The Rise of Darkrai is another in the long line of Pokemon films based on the popular game by Nintendo. I have played every one of the games, watched most of the early seasons of the cartoon, and have collected some of the action figures but I have only watched two films in the series (The First Movie and Jirachi Wish Maker). I found the plots of these movies rather predictable, but found the characters and environments amazing. This is similar to the games themselves - they constantly recycle the same motifs but the new characters keep everything interesting. Anyways, I had a coupon for a free Family movie rental and saw the Rise of Darkrai sitting on the shelf and decided to rent it mainly because the alternatives did not seem too appealing.

I liked seeing that Ash, Brock and Team Rocket (Jesse, James, and Meowth) are still part of the show (even though Brock and James have different sounding voices than what I remembered). I'm not sure why Misty isn't part of Ash's crew anymore, but as long as Pikachu is still there, unevolved, I don't really care :). Anyways, as with the previous movies the plot is rather dull - two superpowered Pokemon (Dialga the space Pokemon, and Palkia the time Pokemon) are fighting in another dimension and this, naturally, has a terrible impact on our dimension and its up to Ash and pals to set things right. The movie itself is also concerned with the titular Darkrai and his role in all of the chaos, but I won't spoil any of the details here.

The graphics throughout are amazing. I really enjoyed seeing a lot of the Pokemon I use in the games "come to life". My favorite character in the film was Lickylicky, the evolved form of Lickitung. I personally never even knew that this Pokemon existed but I could tell from his form that he was somehow related to Lickitung. The first thing I did after watching the movie was capture a Lickitung in my copy of Pokemon Black and evolve him into Lickilicky :). The movie also incorporates some pretty nice special effects such as constantly including three-dimensional scenes and making great use of particle effects as well. The music and sound effects were also fantastic. I also liked how the movie included a lot of Pikachu - I'm glad he is still such a prominent figure after all these years :).

Overall, this was a fairly good film. I didn't care much for the story but everything else was top notch. I will probably seek out the rest of the movies in the series (I believe there are around fourteen films in all). This film is definitely worth a rental if you are fan of Pokemon :).