2,500 Tonnes of Awesome
So yes, as the explosion of kaiju posters and genderswap fanart on my Tumblr suggests, Steve was kind enough to cover me last night while I finally went to see Pacific Rim. Which, I'm very happy to hear, is actually on the verge of breaking even after its second weekend. The bulk of that comes from global box office cume rather than domestic, which surprises me not at all, I've gotta say. But it isn't even close to a "flop", so I'm hoping that Hollywood might learn a few...ah ha HA, almost broke myself up a bit, there. Heh.
At any rate, people far more perceptive than I sometimes am have already reviewed this film in fine detail, so I'm going to confine myself to a few observations about what I liked, aside from "fucking everything!" Laying aside various questions about basic physics, which you sort of have to, I too was impressed by the literal weight of both Jaegers and kaiju, plus the filmmakers' commitment to not (in general) showing blatant human carnage--one can assume that when Yancey Becket got pulled out of Gipsy Danger's shattered skull, he was probably eaten alive, but you thankfully don't have to witness it; when something similar later happens at far closer quarters, it's to a person you already feel ambivalent about, so you don't have that extra lashing of "holy shit, how emotionally awful." We don't have to see what happened to Mako's parents/family, because guess what? The ruined streets speak volumes. Nice.
The fights themselves are both you-are-there exciting and completely understandable, choreographed to a degree I don't remember having seen for a really long time. They're staged in such a way as to set them apart in your mind (the daylight fight, the night fight, the underwater fight), and the kaiju increase in number and threat-level as you go along. My favourite is definitely the middle sequence, with Otachi and Leatherback, in which you realize they've been modified to include weaponry that's offensive as well as defensive and specifically tailored to fighting Jaegers. Dr Newt's realization about the hive-mind capabilities of the kaiju pays out here--they are made not only for pest-control and terraforming purposes, but also for surveillance/intelligence-gathering, and we reap the lack of benefits.
This then feeds into further revelations about the Rift and what lies beyond it. At their simplest, the kaiju appear to be heavily mutated, cloned and ultra-massive versions of the same things that made them, these tiny, cold-brained, multi-eyed little paradimensional locust-geniuses: like the ants from Phase IV, but with much better tech. That doesn't actually bode well for the future, considering we left them most of a Jaeger to work with.
All the character dynamics ring particularly true, and often form a welcome departure from the Hollywood man-of-destiny norm. I've been amused by what often seems to be the willful misinterpretation of Raleigh Becket's personality, probably because he happens to be a (very) white, fit young man who enters narrating, occupying what appears to be the central slot. At any earlier phase in his life, he seems to have been hovering on the edge of being an unbearably self-satisfied rockstar/jock like Chuck Hansen, but having to live through getting his brother's ass handed to him acted as a wake-up call--now he's a survivor with very few skills and a permanently open mental wound, a slot where a co-pilot should go, the eternal, lonely silence of his own mind. Yet very little of this translates into what we've come to expect as "classic Hollywood manpain": Charlie Hunnam plays Raleigh as so eager to re-connect that his immediate pull towards Mako Mori reads like a giddy platonic crush. He WANTS to be a team--not just to have her on his team, but to be her back-up. He respects and admires her, much like he respects and admires Stacker Pentecost, but necessarily in a far more intimate way. How this somehow gets translated in people's head as posturing and caveman protectiveness I don't know, but man, it reads like jumping at shadows that aren't there.
That said, sure I ship it! And I also ship doctors Newt and Hermann, with their built-in old married couple vibe, so strong Hermann never even questions whether or not Newt's garbage-cobbled neural interface will find them Drift-compatible. There's already been a lot of ship-shaming BS about how concentrating on (or even acknowledging) the bromantic white-boy scientists is somehow misogynistic and racist, as though they eclipse Mako's WOC awesome just by existing. To me, however, it's simply simultaneously an extension of the bonding under pressure every Jaeger Project team exhibits (do you really think the Kaidanovskys were already involved when they signed up?) and yet more proof that the film's underlying thesis boils down to stand together, or fall alone. This is human race we're talking about here, man. That cowboy shit needs to go out the window, or your brain will squeeze itself to death and there's several billion dollars' worth of engineering wasted.
Also: Idris Elba. Idris goddamn Elba. That is all.
All right, I need to break off. But yeah, that's the best thing I've seen in a theatre all year.
This entry was originally posted at http://handful-ofdust.dreamwidth.org/499995.html. Please comment either here or there using OpenID.
At any rate, people far more perceptive than I sometimes am have already reviewed this film in fine detail, so I'm going to confine myself to a few observations about what I liked, aside from "fucking everything!" Laying aside various questions about basic physics, which you sort of have to, I too was impressed by the literal weight of both Jaegers and kaiju, plus the filmmakers' commitment to not (in general) showing blatant human carnage--one can assume that when Yancey Becket got pulled out of Gipsy Danger's shattered skull, he was probably eaten alive, but you thankfully don't have to witness it; when something similar later happens at far closer quarters, it's to a person you already feel ambivalent about, so you don't have that extra lashing of "holy shit, how emotionally awful." We don't have to see what happened to Mako's parents/family, because guess what? The ruined streets speak volumes. Nice.
The fights themselves are both you-are-there exciting and completely understandable, choreographed to a degree I don't remember having seen for a really long time. They're staged in such a way as to set them apart in your mind (the daylight fight, the night fight, the underwater fight), and the kaiju increase in number and threat-level as you go along. My favourite is definitely the middle sequence, with Otachi and Leatherback, in which you realize they've been modified to include weaponry that's offensive as well as defensive and specifically tailored to fighting Jaegers. Dr Newt's realization about the hive-mind capabilities of the kaiju pays out here--they are made not only for pest-control and terraforming purposes, but also for surveillance/intelligence-gathering, and we reap the lack of benefits.
This then feeds into further revelations about the Rift and what lies beyond it. At their simplest, the kaiju appear to be heavily mutated, cloned and ultra-massive versions of the same things that made them, these tiny, cold-brained, multi-eyed little paradimensional locust-geniuses: like the ants from Phase IV, but with much better tech. That doesn't actually bode well for the future, considering we left them most of a Jaeger to work with.
All the character dynamics ring particularly true, and often form a welcome departure from the Hollywood man-of-destiny norm. I've been amused by what often seems to be the willful misinterpretation of Raleigh Becket's personality, probably because he happens to be a (very) white, fit young man who enters narrating, occupying what appears to be the central slot. At any earlier phase in his life, he seems to have been hovering on the edge of being an unbearably self-satisfied rockstar/jock like Chuck Hansen, but having to live through getting his brother's ass handed to him acted as a wake-up call--now he's a survivor with very few skills and a permanently open mental wound, a slot where a co-pilot should go, the eternal, lonely silence of his own mind. Yet very little of this translates into what we've come to expect as "classic Hollywood manpain": Charlie Hunnam plays Raleigh as so eager to re-connect that his immediate pull towards Mako Mori reads like a giddy platonic crush. He WANTS to be a team--not just to have her on his team, but to be her back-up. He respects and admires her, much like he respects and admires Stacker Pentecost, but necessarily in a far more intimate way. How this somehow gets translated in people's head as posturing and caveman protectiveness I don't know, but man, it reads like jumping at shadows that aren't there.
That said, sure I ship it! And I also ship doctors Newt and Hermann, with their built-in old married couple vibe, so strong Hermann never even questions whether or not Newt's garbage-cobbled neural interface will find them Drift-compatible. There's already been a lot of ship-shaming BS about how concentrating on (or even acknowledging) the bromantic white-boy scientists is somehow misogynistic and racist, as though they eclipse Mako's WOC awesome just by existing. To me, however, it's simply simultaneously an extension of the bonding under pressure every Jaeger Project team exhibits (do you really think the Kaidanovskys were already involved when they signed up?) and yet more proof that the film's underlying thesis boils down to stand together, or fall alone. This is human race we're talking about here, man. That cowboy shit needs to go out the window, or your brain will squeeze itself to death and there's several billion dollars' worth of engineering wasted.
Also: Idris Elba. Idris goddamn Elba. That is all.
All right, I need to break off. But yeah, that's the best thing I've seen in a theatre all year.
This entry was originally posted at http://handful-ofdust.dreamwidth.org/499995.html. Please comment either here or there using OpenID.