I don’t make it out to the cinema very often these days, but I try to make an exception for films where Jason Statham blows something up, or where the film is a loose adaptation of a Nintendo game. DETECTIVE PIKACHU (2019, dir. R. Letterman) is a cracking example of the latter category, an adventure-mystery stuffed full of cute Pokemon which carries a stark warning against the dangers of mega-corporations meddling in science they do not fully understand.
After watching this film I made it my goal to subtly introduce the phrase ‘Detective Pikachu’ to the rest of my team, as an extended metaphor for investigating strange failures where the error message may as well be written in Linear A: “What’s that, Jenkins? ObsoleteNodeError? Timmy’s fallen down the well??”
In the film, only the protagonist Tim (who sadly does not fall down a well at any point) is able to understand Pikachu, but Pikachu can still talk to other pokemon. Together they use their unique communication abilities to gather clues - from both humans and pokemon - to solve the mystery of Tim’s father’s (faked?!) death. Basically I am saying that Detective Pikachu is the movie equivalent of pdb.
The metaphor seems to have caught on with my team, at least in terms of deerstalker/magnifying glass reaction emojis on Slack when someone announces they have cracked a particularly gnarly case. I think I am the only person putting logger.debug('PIKA PIKA') statements in their code though.