It does? Every other Pokémon film has been a pretty isolated event. The only ones I know of that's directly tied to another are the ones about Mewtwo, and only one of them has ever been theatrically released. The others are TV Specials, which are rarely considered films within a series.
Darkrai warned Gaudy in his dreams of what was to come, and it probably would have warned others somehow if it were to occur elsewhere. They would have figured SOMETHING out to stop the two fighting.
Ah, yes. I forgot that Gaudy (Is that how you really spell his name?) had nightmares about Dialga and Palkia. I guess if he didn't live in Alamos Town before, he would have moved there in the past to construct the Space-Time Tower.
This is fairly unrelated, but it does bring up another thing about many anime and anime movies that annoy me: People who lived in the past are often made to be such great engineers, magicians, healers, architects, or whatever that people in the present have to rely on whatever these guys in the past have done or, if the ancient forces are harnessed by the evil, the heroes must find some balancing force form that same time period to counter it. In this case, it's both Oración and the Space-Time Tower in that they were invented long ago and are the only things that can calm Dialga and Palkia down. On the other hand, stuff created in the present often fail, as with countless war machines. It's odd that this would be made cliché by a country that prides itself so much on technological progress, with a reactionary mindset like this in their entertainment.
I would have liked it better had Tonio been the architect of the Space-Time Tower, that Alice was the composer of Oración, and the flashback sequences eliminated altogether. It would have given them a more important role, and I would have cared about them more. However, the two of them are so reliant on their predecessors, both in how they behave and their role in the story, that it's hard to connect with them too well. A lot of screenwriters and film directors consider flashbacks to be writing flaws, and I would agree with them: They disrupt the flow of the film and often its continuity with it, and they introduce characters who could have been easily written out. I can see that Tonio's role, outside of Gaudy, is a space-time consultant and has value to the story. (It's still pretty minor, as he just spits out scientific-looking data and gobbledy-goop that means nothing to any cosmologist or quantum physicist.) Alice, however, does not. She seems to be some sort of caretaker to a garden and romantic interest to Tonio and Alberto--that is, her role is passive. She takes in plot points and, outside of Alicia, never contributes anything.
Again, Darkrai warned Gaudy via his nightmares of what was to come. One day in the garden, Gaurdy heard Alicia playing Oracion, noticed it healed and calmed Pokemon, and decided "he must leave behind the Oracion to protect the future." So, he put it on a disc, in the middle of a big turning table, to be placed in the middle of a big turning table in the future when the event was to occur. His "instructions" were quite obvious. As for explaining the healing properties, I am sure the writers don't know themselves. It's just made up. How does Jigglypuff put people to sleep? How does Pokemon Flute wake people up? How does Melody's song heal Lugia?
That's a pretty remarkable coincidence, then, that the person who had the knowledge to project music across the city and restore dimensions also came across a person who could calm down Pokémon. I wonder why Gaudy and Alicia didn't write clearer instructions on what to do when Dialga and Palkia come, however, considering that Darkrai's nightmares were clear enough to the two of them that they could identify the event as Dialga and Palkia in a feud and that Oración would calm them down. I know the movie wouldn't be nearly as exciting if they just followed instructions all the time, but my mind is grounded firmly in plausibility, and little things like these bother me.
If it's true that the writers couldn't explain how Alicia came up with the song, then Oración IS a deus ex machina--a plot point or event that exists to immediately solve a conflict that has otherwise backed the writers into a corner.
It's not convenient - it's how the writers set it up.
If the writers did not have this town or Alicia/Alice, they would have thought of another situation.
From a narrative perspective, yes. The writers could have picked any town, any name, and any appearance to place the conflict in. From a logical perspective, it doesn't make much sense that all these people come together in one place, though the Darkrai-provided premonitions could explain it. It's too bad Darkrai always hides in the shadows instead of coming out in the open and warning people. (Also, I'd like to add in the presence of Ash and company. Tonio, Alice, and Alberto would have a lot more trouble putting the disk into the tower were they not present. Narratively speaking, however, their inclusion is to have characters the audience can relate to and to connect this story to the
Pokémon TV series. It's completely understandable, and I wouldn't mark the movie down for that.)
From being a huge Star Trek fan, most of the movie did seem like it sort of would make sense if it were real life. I mean, tearing open space is possible (at least in theory), going from one dimension to the other is possible (in theory). Controlling time and space isn't though, obviously. What I think doesn't make any sense is how any human (Gaudy) would be able to design the Space-Time tower to produce golden wings that fix everything. I am pretty sure Oracion doesn't cover disintegration.
I had the impression that Palkia restored the town upon hearing Ash request it to do so, that it restored the town as an apology for getting innocent people and places involved, or as a thank you of sorts for healing Palkia and allowing it and Dialga to come to terms. What Palkia does is plausible. If dmension-traveling is possible, then there must be a creature somewhere in the multiverse that has evolved (in the Darwinian sense) to have such capabilities, given that there are infinite universes out there. (This is an extenison of the infinite monkey theorem, each universe being a monkey on a typewriter and the dimension traveler as the works of Shakespeare.)
However, the way it's explained in the movie does not. Tonio never really speaks anything ecept what he sees on the computer, and all his computer displays are 3-D graphs and spreadsheets built to look scientific and nothing more. Gibberish like this is all too common in science fiction due to the writers' lack of knowledge of the field they're writing about, though from what I've seen of
Star Trek (the original series, at least), Gene Roddenberry and his crew seem to be a lot more careful and do a lot more reearch than the norm among sci-fi writers. The commonality of scientific-sounding gibberish is evidenced in the large numbers of sci-fi B-movies made in the middle of the 20th century: Science has progressed significantly since then, and seeing them from the 21st century renders them laughably inaccurate (also evidenced, through MST3K in the 80s and 90s).
It seems as if the only way Pokemon will gain greater acceptance is if the plot does not focus on Pokemon. The third movie received the highest ratings out of all of the ones released in theaters because it centered around a little girl, her emotions in losing both of her parents, and Pokemon were just part of the story. This is also how earlier Pokemon episodes were too - they focused more on the humans than the Pokemon. Nowadays, it's the opposite, and it makes everything much more boring. It's like every episode is centered around a new Pokemon, a trainer of the day, etc.
Wow, I think this is the first time EVER on these forums I have enjoyed writing such a lengthy response. Keep up your intelligent posts!!
And that's because Pokémon is simply accepted that it exists by mainstream America, Europe, and Australia. In order to make a movie that can get through to people, it has to rely on what is common knowledge so that as many viewers can understand it as possible.
National Treasure was popular, at least in North America, because all Americans know who the Founding Fathers were and the names of the documents they wrote, and nearly all must have heard some conspiracy somewhere about hidden maps and treasures, if not necessarily about Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. Pokémon, however, as far as common knowledge goes, is a TV show and a video game about a boy who travels with an electric rodent. (Nevermind that the Yellow version was the only video game with that characteristic.)
I couldn't seem to put my finger on what it was about the early episodes of
Pokémon that made it feel different to any other group of episodes, and now that I think about it, you're absolutely right. The episodes centered around the characters of Ash, Misty, Brock, and Team Rocket, and how they developed as characters over time. The Pokémon were there mainly to set up situations for the characters to continue growing. It must be the reason why I can't enjoy those
Beyblade-type shows: Because, as toy commercials, they center around the toys, the characters simply being vessels to use the toys in a dramatic-looking way.
It really can't be helped at this point, however, that the human characters aren't growing, except I guess the newer characters, like Dawn and Paul. Pokémon has exceeded 500 episodes, and it's incredibly difficult to keep characters developing for that many episodes, even very very slowly (a la
InuYasha).
Pokémon was not intended to last as long as it has when the first episodes came out, and by this point, Ash, Brock, and Team Rocket seem to have grown completely as characters, and they have no more room to move except through their Pokémon. That's probably why the monsters themselves are the focus now, as they are the new main characters with new relationships to the veterans.
The Simpsons has been facing the same problem for many years now; with even the secondary characters fully developed, the writers have turned to tertiary characters as of late, such as Lenny and Carl.
They don't develop in the movies, however, because it would break series continuity for people who choose not to see them, just as comic strips with stories that go on for weeks often have their color Sunday strips unrelated to the story at hand or stop the story progress for them because some newspapers don't carry the Funnies on Sunday.
Oh, and thanks. I don't think I've ever analyzed a Pokémon movie this intensely before. I didn't even think they were capable of such detailed interpretation.
