Movie Review: Pokemon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea

Pokemon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea [2006]

Yeah, a couple of Pokemon movies are within the stack of anime DVD's I got. And this one has always been one that I didn't particularly like for the simple fact that it ripped off Jirachi: Wish Maker and did it poorly. Of course, it's been a long, long time since I last watched this movie, and I decided to boot it up.

Temple of the Sea is the ninth Pokemon movie, and the final movie for the third generation (a.k.a. 'Advanced Generation'), promoting a couple of brand-new fourth-generation Pokemon like Chatot, Buizel, Mantyke and the star legendary, Manaphy. 

And it's plotline is perhaps one of the few that really starts settling into a pretty rut that plagued a huge chunk of the latter movies ever since the Celebi movie, and honestly I can count on one hand the Pokemon movies that deviate from this formula. We're introduced to a new locale, we're introduced to this brand-new legendary Pokemon with a backstory, a bunch of new villains try to catch it, a bunch of new supporting characters try to help it, and then in a final battle the bad guys lose and the good guys win. 

And this movie relatively follows that to a T, except with the addition of a new wrinkle -- Pokemon Rangers, star of their own spin-off games back in the 2000's , one of the more popular spin-off games where instead of Pokeballs, you use the then brand-new Nintendo DS's touch-screen to make circles around the Pokemon to temporarily have them follow you around and go navigate the overworld and stuff, ostensibly the Beyblade-esque thing being able to 'unlock Pokemon's hearts'. It's a weird gimmick and I admit that I never really got into the Pokemon Ranger games.

But really, watching the Manaphy movie I really wished I was watching the sixth movie, Jirachi Wish-Maker, instead. The plotlines are essentially the same, but while Jirachi Wish-Maker had a sense of neat style behind its surroundings, Temple of the Sea is just more and more ocean and oceanic temples that don't look as impressive as it should be. The plotline is the same, but "a random egg hatching" is a lot less monumental than the mysterious crystal formation that transforms into Jirachi every one thousand years. We just swap in May for Max as the character that the star mythical pixie-like Pokemon latches on to, and that's essentially what Temple of the Sea ends up being. 

Add that to the fact that the supporting character, titular Pokemon Ranger Jackie, is just such a boring super-cool anime dude that ends up feeling bland and unnecessary, while main villain Phantom is a pirate that, while hilariously designed, fails to exude any sort of menace at all. Rounding up the cast is Pokemon performer Lizabeth, which gives us one of the show's better visual treats -- the little show using psychic pokemon and levitating bubbles for a sideshow. That's actually pretty neat. Shame Lizabeth is a generic descendant of a tribe associated with Manaphy, with no real personality to speak of.  

Then Ash's crew comes across the Manaphy egg, May bonds to it and gets prophetic dreams, and, of course they meet Jackie and Lizabeth and have to deal with Phantom's crew. Manaphy does have a neat gimmick of being able to use the skill 'Heart Swap', swapping souls of people around, which leads to a fun little hijinks moment with Team Rocket... but otherwise doesn't actually do anything much beyond that, imprinting to May and doing just generic cute-baby things. And honestly, that's how much of this movie feels. Generic. Even Ash and his crew doesn't do much beyond doing generic hero things, which is honestly what ends up making the movie feel so weak. 

There is a subplot where Jackie tells Ash and May that they need to break May and Manaphy apart because Manaphy will have to become the 'Prince of the Sea' and all that, which ends up going from happy-fun-times to forcibly-inserted-sadness that honestly doesn't really end up working all that well. Add that to some insanely lengthy sequences of just playing around and exploring the sea -- none of which are actually interesting, despite the actual opportunities to show some pretty cool marine scenes, and we get to the pretty bland climax. There's a whole thing with the temple collapsing, Ash trying to be an action hero, the escape pod and all that jazz, and a climax that is just infuriatingly generic -- May saying "I believe in you" and Ash hearing it through Manaphy's heart swap (which... didn't work this way earlier in the movie!) and them a deus ex machina bullshit happens, and Manaphy causes yellow energy threads and summons Kyogre and an army of Wailords and saves Ash from drowning to death. Then Ash gets wrapped in the random yellow energy and gets to deck Phantom in the face as he tries to escape with Manaphy. 

What's the deal with Kyogre? Why does it randomly pop up, despite being a legendary itself? Who knows? Some legendaries do show up in other movies that they don't star in as sort of a cameo, but none, I think, end up being as underwhelming or as banal as Kyogre's was in here -- you could replace him with another Wailord and no one would notice. 

Yeah, that actually happens, and it makes absolutely not that much sense beyond ill-defined "hey, generic King of the Sea powers, am I right?" bullcrap behind the whole Manaphy stuff. And we get an extended long period of everyone being enveloped in that power, again, and then Manaphy says farewell to May. 

Honestly, I could go on and on about how fucking plot-holey the movie and its climax is, even on the standards of a Pokemon movie... but I'm not going to. It's gone on as long as it is, and I can just say that my childhood dislike of this movie is definitely justified. Hell, neither Manaphy nor the titular Pokemon Ranger ended up mattering at the end of the movie, just the ambiguous 'prince of the sea' powers. Add that to a pretty underwhelming villain, a pretty underwhelming supporting cast and a pretty underwhelming legendary pokemon... it's not just a bad movie because it cribbed a better, earlier movie... and it's like thirty minutes longer than it should be. The movie's just so damn boring, and it's not even pretty -- the CGI stands out pretty poorly, and it's definitely one of the worst Pokemon movies I've ever seen.