Pokémon the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back - Evolution (2019)

Pokémon the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back - Evolution arrives as a near shot-for-shot CGI remake of the 1998 original, which means the cultural artifacts on display belong to a different era entirely. Mewtwo, an artificially created creature, rebels against the scientist and crime boss who built him as a weapon, then stages a tournament to prove his superiority over his genetic source. The moral, delivered through Ash turning to stone and Pikachu's tears, concerns judging a being by its choices instead of its origins. That is a theme with a long pedigree and no contemporary branding attached.

On the matter of representation, the film offers a Japanese voice cast performing established characters with established designs. Brock's complexion is inherited from the source material and carries no argument. Misty is present, capable, and given nothing to say about gender. No LGBTQ+ content appears. No environmental allegory attaches to the storm, which is a psychic tantrum and not a weather system with a message. Mewtwo's rebellion against Giovanni reads as a bid for autonomy, not a critique of capital. Nobody mentions their body. Nobody mentions their brain. History is not revised, only re-rendered.

The film is content to be a nostalgia object, and it is honest about that. It lectures no one. It preaches nothing. The 3D animation drew complaints about plastic skin, and the review aggregators sit at 44 percent, which is the correct temperature for a product that exists to sell the same memory twice. We classify it accordingly. A clean slate, and a slightly airless one.