Pacific Rim

[kimmy]

Recently watched "Pacific Rim". I have been thinking of writing a "3 short paragraphs" style post about it, just to annoy August.

I somewhat enjoyed it; my rating is: GIANT ROBOTS FIGHTING SPACE MONSTERS

-k

Thanks for the warning. I think the original Godzilla was as much as I need for that genre. I saw the Transformers movie and was appalled that people were entertained by that. It was like teen beat models standing in front of animated robots - to the sound of grinding metal.

I had originally been thinking of doing an August-style review of Pacific Rim because it's a great opportunity to riff on some of August's favorite themes, particularly excessive CGI and 14-year old boys in Hong Kong. I'd actually say 14 year old boys in Tokyo, because even though much of the movie is set in Hong Kong, the story is actually based in a long-standing theme of Japanese "manga" comics and "anime". That theme is GIANT ROBOTS FIGHTING SPACE MONSTERS (!!!). But rather than poking fun at August yet again, I'm going to respond to what Michael raises here, and explain why I think Pacific Rim was actually pretty decent.

As I've mentioned a few times, I write fiction. And for a long time I was also involved with a creative writing group, providing advice and assistance to other would-be writers. I participated in some on-line work-shops and stuff like that. I think that the best advice I received was: make a promise to your reader, and give them what you promised. The promise is a setting and a mood and a theme. This story is going to deliver suspense and mystery in Victorian London, or something like that. If your reader has finished the first 10 pages or so and still doesn't know what kind of story you're going to tell them, you will lose them. And if you don't deliver what you promised, then obviously you've failed your reader.

So my criteria for what makes a good movie are much the same. What does this movie promise? And did it deliver what it promised?

If you go watch Something About Mary or Kingpin and criticize them because they didn't deliver complex thematic issues or sophisticated character development, you missed the boat. That's not what they promised the viewer. What they promised was gross-out comedy, and they deliver in spades. They're tremendously successful in delivering what they promise.

If you go to watch Transformers, and you're not expecting Rimbaud and you know it's going to be giant robots and CGI and all kinds of silliness like that, and you still come away disappointed, then that's a reasonable criticism. Transformers promised giant robots, and they gave you giant robots, but was that all they promised? Well, no. They promised more. Excitement and action was also promised.. A lot of viewers, like Michael, didn't find much excitement in the various Transformers movies. The characters are all either robots or humans with the emotional range of robots... hard to care what happens to them. The CGI battles were just a blur of chaos. It was hard to know what was going on, and hard to care. And I didn't even know what all the fighting was about. Some kind of glowing cube or some crap like that? Why do I care? Not very exciting.

So, a quick plot summary for Pacific Rim. They explain during the opening credits that in the mid 2010s, a horrific monster, hundreds of feet tall, emerged from the Pacific ocean and attacked the west coast of the United States. And after days of sustained military counterattack, the creature was finally slain. Later, another creature came. And then another. When Pacific nations realized that the monsters, called "kaiju" (a Japanese word meaning GIANT SPACE MONSTER) would keep coming, they banded together and build new technology to fight them. This technology was (you guessed it) GIANT ROBOTS called "jaegers". The jaegers are not actually robots, they're giant humanoid mechanical war-machines controlled by teams of two human pilots who are cybernetically linked to the jaeger as well as to each other. The jaegers were effective at fighting and killing the kaiju, and the pilots became rock-star celebrities. But things changed. Each kaiju was bigger and more powerful than the one before. They mutated and adapted new and more dangerous abilities to combat the jaegers. Soon the jaegers were being damaged and destroyed faster than they could be replaced. The main protagonist is a jaeger pilot whose jaeger was destroyed and his co-pilot (his brother) was slain in a battle against a particularly vicious kaiju.

When our story begins, the jaeger program is being shut down and our hero is working in construction, still not recovered from the scars of losing his brother. He is contacted by the commander of the jaeger program to come out of retirement for one last mission. The commander has a plan to stop the kaiju attacks once and for all, and he has gathered the handful of remaining jaegers to do it. Our hero reluctantly agrees. He must bond with a new co-pilot, win the respect of the other jaeger teams, and kick kaiju ass.

In the case of Pacific Rim, the promise made to the viewer is GIANT ROBOTS FIGHTING TO SAVE THE EARTH FROM GIANT SPACE MONSTERS (!!!!) and for the most part I felt like I got just that. Excitement is part of the promise, and I felt like the movie delivered. The battle scenes made sense, you could figure out what was going on and there was a coherent story to what was going on in the action sequences. This is a Guillermo del Toro movie, and he brings more skill to this than it would have if it was a Michael Bay or Roland Emerich movie. Just as he made Pan's Labyrinth more than just a fairytale, and just as he made Hellboy more than just a big red dude kicking the crap out of badguys, del Toro makes this a more human story than it would have been in lesser hands.

The other thing Michael mentioned that I had to think about was the comparison to Transformers and Godzilla.

The Transformers is basically two tribes of robots fighting with each other, and the earth is their boxing ring. The robots don't really represent anything, other than a line of Hasbro ™ action figures. What about Gozilla? Godzilla has some not too subtle symbolism... Godzilla is the story of the unintended results of environmental recklessness rising up to bite us in the ass. Godzilla is more or less an avatar for mother nature.

What about Pacific Rim? And why has giant human-shaped war-machines with human pilots been such a long-running theme in science fiction? Well, the giant human-shaped war machines are symbolic of... us. We are just pathetic little meat popsicles. But with our technology we can be giants. We can stand toe to toe with 400-foot tall space monsters. I think these movies and comics and video games keep employing this theme because they symbolize our ability as a species to face any challenge.

The Hugh Jackman film "Real Steel" employs the same symbolism. The washed-up boxer and his estranged son repair a busted old robot and campaign it to the championships of the robot fighting league. The robot they're repairing is an avatar for Jackman himself, and the championship they're fighting for is really their father-son relationship. And Real Steel too was better than you'd expect a movie about GIANT FIGHTING ROBOTS to be.

-k

[TimG]

called "kaiju" (a Japanese word meaning GIANT SPACE MONSTER)

Minor quibble: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiju

Kaiju (怪獣 kaijū?) is a Japanese word that literally translates to "strange creature". However, the word kaiju has been translated and defined in English as "monster".

[Remiel]

That is a great review, kimmy. I have been waiting for this movie to come out on TMN or Netflix so my parents can see it. I, of course, say in in theatres.

[bleeding heart]

A really good review, I agree.

Kimmy's right about the importance of creatively delivering on a promise. Her examples are spot on, too: Something About Mary is a good film, because it does exactly what it's supposed to do, and it does it well. Of course that doesn't mean that others have to enjoy it, as I did; it only means that it should be appreciated for what it is meant to be, rather than because it isn't The Godfather.

(When Stephen King was somewhat rudely informed that his work did not reach the profound heights of the respected American literary canon, he said that he agreed...and could scarcely think of a more irrelevant comparison.)

I also agree about Transformers...it fails by its own standards, not by unreasonably lofty ones. I LIKE crazy, violent action movies, sometimes even ones that are quite conventional. And my dislike (to put it mildly) of Transformers is based on THAT criteria.

[Remiel]

I liked the Transformers movies. Maybe they do not deliver on all their promises to all the people, but they did to me. I really only had one: photo-realistic transforming robots. I think there may be a limited representative element as well: they are the representation of the promises of CGI itself, at least for me.

[overthere]

That is a great review, kimmy. I have been waiting for this movie to come out on TMN or Netflix so my parents can see it. I, of course, say in in theatres.

They are likely to hate it on a small screen.

PR is a visual and auditory assault, which is essential in this genre.

Oh, and it was not bad overall.