Welcome back to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon Movies in Review, a weekly recap of the entire Pokemon cinematic universe. This week we’re revisiting Arceus and the Jewel of Life, the last film in the Diamond & Pearl Trilogy that finally answers the big questions from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Rise of Darkrai and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Giratina and the Sky Warrior. Arceus - the creator of dimensions, Pokemon, and quite possibly all of existence - decides it’s about time to obliterate humanity. I’m in favor of this personally, after all, what have people ever done for Pokemon anywa🧸🍌y?
Arceus and the Jewel of Life is a time-travel movie that sends Ash back to the past in order to save the future. Between devastating battles, reality-shifting time-warps, and multi🅠ple attempts to kill God, this is one of the most thrilling films in the series anꦿd acts as a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.
Jewel of Life hits us with some pretty dense lore right off the bat. In anci🔯ent times - back when people feared Pokemon and simply called them ‘magical creatures’ - Arceus saved the world from an Armageddon-size meteor. In doing so, Arceus lost control of its Life Plates - 16 magic tablets that give the Pokemon its powers. A man named Damos found the plates and returned them to Arceus, earning the Alpha Pokemon’s favor. Arceus takes five of its tablets - Water, Ground, Electric, Grass, and Dragon - and fuses them together to make the Jewel of Life. It gives the jewel to Damos📖 as a gift so that he can nourish and cultivate the desolate wasteland that will one day become Michina Town, but makes him promise to eventually give the jewel back.
Damos and his people build a temple in Arceus' honor and successfully bring life to the town, but when Arceus returns, Damos refuses to give the Jewel of Life back, instead trapping and trying to kill the Pokemon. Arceus destroys the temple and goes into a long slumber, vowing to seek revenge on humanity when it awakens.
Arceus’ return is signaled by violent vortexes across Michina Town in the present day, just as Ash and his friends arrive. Giratina suddenly appears, chasing Dialga following the events of Giratina and the Sky Warrior, but the temple guardian, a young woman named Sheena, is able to psychically communicate with the Pokemon and calms them. When Arceus arrives to enact its revenge, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dialga, Palkia, and Giratina try to stop it, having learned to trust Ash in the previous movies. Dialga sends the heroes into the❀ past 🎉to stop Damos from betraying Arceus in the first place, as its wrath has now become unstoppable.
Arceus’ power can’t be overstated. Not only does it easily fend off Dialga, Palkia, and Giratina, but it effortlessly obliterates Michina Town and the surrounding area. We’ve never seen unfettered power like this in the Pokemon universe, but it's totally befitting of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the Pokemon God itself. The only thing that feels out of place is Arceus’ voice, which, ♈at least in the English dub, sounds a lot more whiny and sniveling than I would have 💎thought an all-powerful deity would sound. It makes a lot of speeches about delivering justice and unleashing its wrath, but the fact that it sounds like the Earl of Lemongrab takes a bit of the edge off.
I’m intrigued by the way this movie dances around Arceus’ status as God of the Pokemon world. Michina Town is inspired by Greece, and the people and architecture in the past timeline are definitely meant to evoke 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ancient Greece - as evidenced by the names Damos and Marcus. The setting naturally makes Arceus seem like a member of a pantheon, as opposed to the monotheistic version of God. Even the lege💖nd of Damos and the Jewel of Life is decidedly Grecian. At the same time, Arceus goes absolutely Old Testament on Michina Town. The Japanese version of the movie even includes the line “Ju🍃dgment Day is come! Humanity, prepare for trial!” which is a pretty on-the-nose reference to Revelations. The English dub changed this to “The time has come! Prepare for justice!” to avoid the Biblical reference, but Judgment is still Arceus’ signature move, even in the English games. The original version of the movie also includes the word ‘god’ several times, but even those were removed in the English edition.
Arceus will always be God in the Pokemon universe to me, no matter how much they try to pull their punches in the movies and games. It doesn’t even necessarily make sense to frame the Pokemon gods as a pantheon, considering Arceus not only created Dialga, Palkia, and Giratina, but also created the dimensions of time, sp꧙ace, and distꦡortion they rule over.
It’s also a lot more fun to think of Arceus as the God rather than a god while Ash and Pikachu are absolutely cooking its ass. Before getting sent back in time, the heroes reason that without the Jewel of Life - aka the power of Water, Ground, Electric, Grass, and Dragon - Arceus has inadvertently made itself completely vulnerable to electric damage. Here comes a level 99 Pikachu with a Thunderbolt. Oops. In the ancient timeline, Arceus is very nearly killed by the combined force of several hundred electric attacks before Sheena 🧸uses her Chekhov’s psychic powers to make them stop.
Ultimately the heroes discover that Damos never meant to betray Arceus, but was hypnotized by his lieutenant Marcus’s Bronzong. Marcus believed returning the Jewel would cause the land to revert into a desert, so he brainwashed Damos and forced him to turn on Arceus. Luckily, Ash figured out the plot just in time to return the Jewel and rescue Arceus. Before returning to Heaven or whatever dimension it's from, Arceus makes a final speech, addressing the crowd of people and Pokemon as “All of my beloved” and calling them its “beautiful future children who taught me how to believe.” Which if you ask me, is definitely some shit God would say.
A few stray thoughts, as always:
- Heatran is done extremely dirty in this movie. Legendaries typically get top-billing in Pokemon films, but here Heatran just gets to be a minion for the villain.
- Rise of Darkrai made Palkia the hero in the end, while Giratina and the Sky Warrior is obviously about Giratina, so it was nice that Dialga finally got to play the hero by helping Ash go back in time to stop Arceus.
- There are no PokeBalls in ancient times, but Marcus has some kind of saddles he uses to control Pokemon. As soon as they fall off, all his Pokemon turn on him. I’d like to know more about this technology.
- It’s pronounced Ar-key-us in English and Ar-say-us in Japanese, but it's been confirmed that it was meant to be Ar-see-us at first until they realized it sounds like ‘arse’.
- Arceus doesn’t call them Pokemon either, instead referring to Dialga and Palkia as “magical creatures” just like the people did in ancient times. Weird.
- The way the three movies are linked together is great because Marcus is responsible for everything that happened in Rise of Darkrai and Giratina and the Sky Warrior too. I wish there was more continuity between Pokemon movies.
I promised to name the Diamond & Pearl series at the end, and I think the only appropriate name for it is Pokemon: The Godkiller Trilogy൩. There’s one more, unrelated Diamond & Pearl movie left, so com💦e back next week for a deep dive into 2011’s Zoroark: Master of Illusions.