Yesterday was a double movie day as I first watched Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse at home and then went to a showing of Pokemon Detective Pikachu. If I had to describe both movies at once, I'd say they were both good but not amazing. As always, spoilers ahead! Let's do this in order. Spider-Verse was definitely an interesting movie to watch. It was definitely overhyped though. I dunno if it's my lack of comic book knowledge or what but to me it was just a normal movie and not the amazing experience that everyone seemed to make it out to be. It was nice how they turned the repetitive origin story into a joke. I'm glad comic book movies have moved beyond the need to start each new series out retelling the same origin story. This is especially important for a character that has been in so many different movie series in just a couple decades. Overall, I don't think I really have much else to say about the movie because the storyline wasn't particularly impactful or memorable to me. As far as animated superhero movies go, the Incredibles still get my vote as the best. So now let's move on to Detective Pikachu. This movie was pretty much exactly what I expected going into it. I was even relatively certain I knew what happened to his dad based solely on the knowledge that somebody else had correctly guessed it. My favorite part of the movie was probably how it unexpectedly (to me) fits into the anime storyline. When I saw mewtwo I figured they were doing a retelling of his creation but instead this was a 20 year old mewtwo (and the first pokemon movie came out less than 21 years ago and the games not much longer so you could work that ~20 years into either one). They also made a lot of random references in the movie. Such as the two random home alone references at the start of the movie. Or the reference to the island of the giant pokemon when they show the giant Torterra. Which I must add, that Torterra scene was so obviously going to happen once you got to that part of the movie but in the trailer it looked like Inception level nonsense going on with the ground. For the most part, the references didn't feel out of place in the movie and there was only one instance where Pikachu said something that made me wonder why he would be saying that (it was a joke about climate change, it was hilarious but felt forced in the scene). The concept of Rhyme City was a little strange overall. It's just one of those weird things about how Pokemon are shown as both being like animals but also being as very intelligent. Having a city where they are treated more like people makes sense but also feels weird. Then you have the cities creator, the (big twist) villain of the story who kind of feels like he has a logical beginning to his story but then things just get a little crazy. My question is how and why he went from trying to cure his disease to creating a gimmicky city about living with pokemon and then from that decide to forcibly combine his cities citizens with their pokemon. He didn't even use mewtwos power to combine himself with mewtwo permanently, which logically would have been his first action upon taking control. Although I'm guessing that's more to make the story resolve easily than anything else but still it casts his motivations in a weird light that he was more eager to rush out and transform everyone else than fix his own problems. I guess the other question is how he even knew mewtwo had that power because nobody else in the world seemed to know about it. Pokemon isn't really known for having the best motivations for its villains so it's no deal breaker for the movie but it would have been nice if it made a little more sense. Overall the movie was good enough that I'll probably catch it on 4k blu-ray when it becomes available so I can see all those realistic pokemon designs again.