Feels like a draft of a better remake.
3
By Steven "Yoshi" Reich
I don't think this movie is awful, but there seem to be a lot of missed opportunities, puzzling choices, and underdeveloped aspects that give this movie an unfished feeling. The CGI generally seemed okay, though I do think the Pokemon and environments fared better than the human characters. As for the script, even as someone who's aware of many of the differences between the '98 Japanese version and the '99 dub (be prepared for a lot comparisons to the latter), I find many of the changes and additions puzzling. The Meowth X Clone Meowth scene felt weaker (not just less direct-I found it didn't provide enough weight for the time the scene was allotted), and the harbormaster was made extra redundant by removing her foreshadowing. As for the additions, I found few, if any of them interesting, and in the case of Brock, rather tone-deaf.
Speaking of audio, Shinji Miyazaki hasn't done a lot to impress me lately, and this movie hasn't changed that trajectory. The score isn't ear-splitting or grating, but I find it severely underwhelming overall. A rework of the score from the '99 dub would almost definitely have been more to my liking. The absence of "Brother My Brother" drained a lot of emotion from the clone fighting scene for me, and while "Keep Evolving" is a good song, it doesn't have the raw emotion of "We're A Miracle". If a remake of "The Power Of One" is in the pipeline, Pokemon will need to take a different route.
In terms of voice acting, while I've generally acclimated to the TPCi cast, I don't feel like this is their best work. I honestly wonder if some of them were disappointed not to be doing something closer to (again) the '99 dub.
Overall, I'd say that bizarrely, Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution seems like an earlier version of the film released in the west in 1999. In the modern polarized climate (even prior to 2020), the theme of "don't reduce people to their differences"'s relevance should have been apparent, but it seems like it somehow got diminished instead of expanded upon. The movie isn't terrible because of it, but I don't think it lived up to its potential either.
