gotta teach them all

thoughts on pokemon legends arceus and "men"

After watching the new trailer for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, I decided it was finally time to go back and finish playing Pokemon Legends Arceus, the first of 2022’s new Pokemon games. I had previously been distracted by the release of Elden Ring, but before that, Legends Arceus was on track to be one of my favourite games of the year; it’s a surprisingly smart and well-made reinvention of the Pokemon formula that shows one of the most factory-made game series finally start to catch up to the 21st Century and rethink its gameplay in ways that trim away a lot of the fat.

Of course, this isn’t nearly a perfect game. For one thing, the game just looks absolutely terrible. The art-style isn’t nearly stylised enough to look nice running on the Switch with this little polish, leading to moments where I couldn’t even make out the landscape around me. For another, the story continues to be one of the worst things about playing any new Pokemon game, constantly interrupting the flow of gameplay for an injection of lukewarm tedium in the form of dialogue that goes on far too long for its own good.

Another strange little detail I noticed creeps in during the game’s story. Perhaps unintentionally on the behalf of GameFreak, Legends Arceus plays the role of historical colonisation denier, by framing Japan’s erasure of the native Ainu population as some kind of generally agreed upon good thing.

It’s no surprise to most people that the region of Hisui/Sinnoh, where Legends Arceus is based, is modelled on the real life island of Hokkaido in Japan, which was populated by the Ainu people until 1869, at which point Japan annexed Hokkaido and forcefully assimilated the Ainu into Japan, meaning the erasure of much of their land and culture. This kind of colonisation is surprisingly reflected within the new Pokemon game; a group of “surveyors” with a traditional Japanese style of living sets up a town within the land of Hisui, where local clans are arguing. The surveyors calm the quarrels of the natives, introduce new technology and generally improve the living situation. We can imagine what happens next.

Legends Arceus is, of course, a game for children. I don’t expect a sweeping critique of Japan’s actions during the Meiji Period, and nor would I think that was entirely suitable. However, the way in which the colonising force is portrayed in the game feels equally unnecessary. If we are to reframe traditional narratives about the history of colonisation, it does make sense to alter this across all forms of media, not just school textbooks and academic articles.

Pokemon is a fictional franchise about collecting little monsters in balls, and writers should not be forced to give their work “good politics”, whatever that implies. But that doesn’t mean that instances of historical revisionism shouldn’t be criticised whenever they appear. Pokemon Legends Arceus doesn’t owe anything to the Ainu people, but perhaps it should have avoided staying so close to real-life history if it wasn’t prepared to face some of the realities of it. Or, knowing GameFreak, perhaps they should have just left a story out of it completely.

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A work might want to aim to have positive politics, but this might not always work in its favour. Take, for example, Alex Garland’s new film, Men, which takes a solid message (yes, all men), and completely butchers it.

There are good things to be said about Men. Firstly, it has some beautiful cinematography by Garland’s regular picture creator Rob Hardy. It also has some great ideas that could have been used for a genuinely surreal folk horror type film. An early scene involving a tunnel and echoes is stunning, and the final act has some body horror that is so out there it almost makes the film worth it. Added to that, the general idea of a town of men all played by Rory Kinnear is pretty good, and seeing Kinnear morph his acting to play a variety of semi-humorous caricatures of British patriarchs (the posh landlord, the local vicar, the policeman) is a lot of fun.

The problem comes when Garland tries to communicate his main “messages”. It’s not just that “all men are pricks” has been done, it’s also that it’s been done better, more subtly and often by women who might know what they’re talking about more than Alex Garland. It’s maybe no surprise then that the most subtle bit of Men is how Garland communicates that the patriarchy is a poisonous lineage that also damages the men who perpetrate it (each different Kinnear mentions some kind of toxic relationship to their father, and the final scene bears this out in a hideous literalism).

But when it comes down to the effect that men have on women, Men is left struggling. The central female character, Harper, played ably by Jessie Buckley, has almost nothing to do in this film except be abused by the various men, not just the Kinnears but also her late husband. We see very little of her outside of this abuse, and in the end Garland seems to have nothing left to say except that misogyny is a kind of primal, ancient force that will always come after women, no matter what, and that there’s pretty much nothing anyone can do about it except watch. Great, thanks Alex.

It’s not that Garland is wrong, per se, it’s more that he has nothing new to say about it, and it clashes hugely with the rest of his film. Men could have been a film of interesting surrealism, or even a comment on British countryside insularism, but instead it forces ham-fisted analogies on itself, leaving the whole thing feeling unsatisfying. Garland might just not be the person to tell this kind of story, and his attempts hinder the kind of thing that he is good at - creating surreal stories that do have hidden depth to them. Faced with a topic he isn’t able to handle, and the depth disappears, the surrealism having to play second-fiddle to Garland clumsily trying to tell a feminist message.

Far be it from me to say that men cannot make feminist films, but they have to be able to handle the material. Garland’s film might have been good in a number of other ways, but he can’t talk about abuse or misogyny in an authentic way, and it shows. Simply having the right ideas isn’t enough - you need to know what to do with them, or you’ll end up with a film where the title drop feels like a punchline, rather than the gut punch it’s supposed to emulate.