Film: Pacific Rim
Jul. 22nd, 2013 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livReason for watching it: When I first became aware of Pacific Rim it sounded completely uninteresting to me, I assumed it was just going to be showy designed-for-3D special effects and pointless fight scenes. But then I started reading comments and reviews about it which suggested it had more depth to it, in particular this one, which sites the film at the intersection of Japanese and Western cinematic history. Also ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rysmiel, whose taste I trust, said positive things about it, and reassured me that I would be perfectly allowed, indeed encouraged, to sympathize with the giant robots.
Circumstances of watching it: With a bit of wrangling, I was able to achieve an actual date with my husband. I had to convince him that Pacific Rim would be worth seeing; like me, he'd assumed it was a trashy summer blockbuster. We're both somewhat stressed and busy at the moment, and maybe going to the cinema wasn't the most productive thing we could've done with a very sparse couple of hours of free time, but I think we kind of needed a break.
Verdict: Pacific Rim is very good at what it does, and about the most successfully thrilling film I've ever seen.
If you have any possible interest in a film about giant fighting robots, Pacific Rim is just about the apotheosis of the genre. The giant robots are just made of sheer unadulterated cool. They look solid and real and there's an amazingly good sense of Titanic scale. And the fight scenes (there are many, many fight scenes) are both visually gorgeous and really exciting. I quite liked the monsters too; I wasn't sure about the blue glowy bits but they managed to look kind of animally, rather than looking like the final boss guy in a computer game, (skin parasites!) though they are less perfect than the robots. And the stunning visuals worked well in normal 2D, there was a pleasing lack of shots that looked like they were just setups for yet another "object looms at you out of the screen" experience.
If you want a film that's subtle, or cleverly plotted, or that makes you think, or has any kind of interesting character development, watch pretty much anything else in preference. PR is on a hugely epic, almost mythic scale. It keeps up the emotional tension with various interpersonal stories, but they are all utter, utter clichés and not even particularly well acted. The initially hopeless ex-hero who returns to save the world and find true love! The military commander with a brusque manner and a secret softer side who must learn to let his protégé grow to be independent of his protection! The father who is too macho to communicate properly with his somewhat jerkish son yet ultimately takes pride in his heroism! I was surprised how much I cared about all these storylines, perhaps because they are so obvious and predictable rather than in spite of this; they really did feel like modern-day archetypes rather than individual human interest stories. The film was cathartic like Greek drama, or non-Shakespeare Renaissance theatre, is cathartic, only you don't have to be a period scholar to get it, because the tropes are utterly contemporary. By bouncing between the awesome fight scenes and the personal arcs the film kept up the pace throughout; there wasn't a single scene that dragged, and it never turned into a boring list of fight moves nor dwelled excessively on angst.
The world-building makes very little sense, but it doesn't really matter. The background is just set up for the amazing last battle of the last handful of heroes courageously defending humanity from the monsters (with their giant robots, yay!) And the monsters really are monsters; sometimes that's what I want from a film, beasts of pure antagonism and destruction, not sentient, sympathetic aliens. I'm a bit disappointed they didn't do more with the dystopian stuff from the early scenes. Lots of Tumblr was getting excited about the in-world propaganda posters urging people to volunteer to defend humanity against the monsters, and the scene with the construction workers fighting over deadly dangerous jobs because that's the only way to get food rations was really creepy. But then they kind of dropped that in favour of the absolute bog standard Hollywood cliché of near-future Hong Kong where everything is neon-glittery and bustling and Exotic. Which kind of made me wonder where they were getting an industrial base when the monsters kept devastating major cities; the dystopia made more thematic sense and the contrast didn't favour the setting of the bulk of the film. I did like the aesthetic of the Shatterdome as military base; there's a real sense of industry, and a mix of shiny ultra-high tech (particularly appreciated the way that the computer interfaces have evolved in the imagined coming decades, beyond looking exactly like contemporary iPads) with giant hunks of rusting metal.
The only half-decent actor in the film is Idris Elba, and although his character is somewhat of a cliché, Elba plays the Marshall really well, with a really great range of emotion. Other than that, everybody seems really generic. I don't really get why they made the protagonist white; there seemed to be no plot reason for it other than, I suppose, to have an identity figure for the typical Hollywood audience. It's not even like they had a particular actor they wanted to cast; Hunnam's previous acting career was in Byker Grove (!) and in PR he is very much your generic muscled blond Hollywood hero. I think the film could also have done with giving him a bit more back-story; ok, he's sad about his brother's death, but that's just about it, and even in the scenes where his copilot ~travels into his memories~ there's just nothing of any substance. I somewhat liked Kikuchi as Mako; she's gorgeous and actually a Japanese actress cast as a Japanese character. Also the point of her character is at least as much to be awesomely competent as to be the prize for the hero. There's surprisingly little gratuitous nudity; the only time she shows skin is when she's sparring in the martial arts ring and in that scene she wears a practical outfit, similar to the male characters. In fact there's even a little female gaze scene of Mako ogling Raleigh while he's getting changed. But I would still have preferred it if the central relationship of the story had been ideally a non-romantic partnership or at least non-heterosexual. The conceit of having the robots powered by empathy between the two co-pilots is one of the strengths of the film, and I think that co-pilot relationship would be more interesting if it didn't just default to romance with the film's one substantial female character.
The bromance between the two scientists, one quirky and eccentric and one uptight and caring more about numbers than people, was a bit awful but did manage to move me when after all the bickering they managed to work together at the crucial moment when both their skills were needed. I read the quirky one as Jewish and the uptight one as German, which is not exactly my favourite thing, butjack didn't think that was particularly highlighted. Wikipedia thinks Gottlieb is supposed to be a stiff upper lip Englishman, but I am sure that if that's what the film was going for they wouldn't have called the character Hermann Gottlieb? And maybe Newt Geiszler is supposed to be just a standard Hollywood clownish geek and I'm being paranoid by reading him as Jewish?
Anyway, that was a lot of fun. I came out feeling as if I'd just spent the afternoon at a theme park sampling all the thrill rides. So glad I saw this; many thanksrysmiel for helping to persuade me.
rysmiel, whose taste I trust, said positive things about it, and reassured me that I would be perfectly allowed, indeed encouraged, to sympathize with the giant robots.Circumstances of watching it: With a bit of wrangling, I was able to achieve an actual date with my husband. I had to convince him that Pacific Rim would be worth seeing; like me, he'd assumed it was a trashy summer blockbuster. We're both somewhat stressed and busy at the moment, and maybe going to the cinema wasn't the most productive thing we could've done with a very sparse couple of hours of free time, but I think we kind of needed a break.
Verdict: Pacific Rim is very good at what it does, and about the most successfully thrilling film I've ever seen.
If you have any possible interest in a film about giant fighting robots, Pacific Rim is just about the apotheosis of the genre. The giant robots are just made of sheer unadulterated cool. They look solid and real and there's an amazingly good sense of Titanic scale. And the fight scenes (there are many, many fight scenes) are both visually gorgeous and really exciting. I quite liked the monsters too; I wasn't sure about the blue glowy bits but they managed to look kind of animally, rather than looking like the final boss guy in a computer game, (skin parasites!) though they are less perfect than the robots. And the stunning visuals worked well in normal 2D, there was a pleasing lack of shots that looked like they were just setups for yet another "object looms at you out of the screen" experience.
If you want a film that's subtle, or cleverly plotted, or that makes you think, or has any kind of interesting character development, watch pretty much anything else in preference. PR is on a hugely epic, almost mythic scale. It keeps up the emotional tension with various interpersonal stories, but they are all utter, utter clichés and not even particularly well acted. The initially hopeless ex-hero who returns to save the world and find true love! The military commander with a brusque manner and a secret softer side who must learn to let his protégé grow to be independent of his protection! The father who is too macho to communicate properly with his somewhat jerkish son yet ultimately takes pride in his heroism! I was surprised how much I cared about all these storylines, perhaps because they are so obvious and predictable rather than in spite of this; they really did feel like modern-day archetypes rather than individual human interest stories. The film was cathartic like Greek drama, or non-Shakespeare Renaissance theatre, is cathartic, only you don't have to be a period scholar to get it, because the tropes are utterly contemporary. By bouncing between the awesome fight scenes and the personal arcs the film kept up the pace throughout; there wasn't a single scene that dragged, and it never turned into a boring list of fight moves nor dwelled excessively on angst.
The world-building makes very little sense, but it doesn't really matter. The background is just set up for the amazing last battle of the last handful of heroes courageously defending humanity from the monsters (with their giant robots, yay!) And the monsters really are monsters; sometimes that's what I want from a film, beasts of pure antagonism and destruction, not sentient, sympathetic aliens. I'm a bit disappointed they didn't do more with the dystopian stuff from the early scenes. Lots of Tumblr was getting excited about the in-world propaganda posters urging people to volunteer to defend humanity against the monsters, and the scene with the construction workers fighting over deadly dangerous jobs because that's the only way to get food rations was really creepy. But then they kind of dropped that in favour of the absolute bog standard Hollywood cliché of near-future Hong Kong where everything is neon-glittery and bustling and Exotic. Which kind of made me wonder where they were getting an industrial base when the monsters kept devastating major cities; the dystopia made more thematic sense and the contrast didn't favour the setting of the bulk of the film. I did like the aesthetic of the Shatterdome as military base; there's a real sense of industry, and a mix of shiny ultra-high tech (particularly appreciated the way that the computer interfaces have evolved in the imagined coming decades, beyond looking exactly like contemporary iPads) with giant hunks of rusting metal.
The only half-decent actor in the film is Idris Elba, and although his character is somewhat of a cliché, Elba plays the Marshall really well, with a really great range of emotion. Other than that, everybody seems really generic. I don't really get why they made the protagonist white; there seemed to be no plot reason for it other than, I suppose, to have an identity figure for the typical Hollywood audience. It's not even like they had a particular actor they wanted to cast; Hunnam's previous acting career was in Byker Grove (!) and in PR he is very much your generic muscled blond Hollywood hero. I think the film could also have done with giving him a bit more back-story; ok, he's sad about his brother's death, but that's just about it, and even in the scenes where his copilot ~travels into his memories~ there's just nothing of any substance. I somewhat liked Kikuchi as Mako; she's gorgeous and actually a Japanese actress cast as a Japanese character. Also the point of her character is at least as much to be awesomely competent as to be the prize for the hero. There's surprisingly little gratuitous nudity; the only time she shows skin is when she's sparring in the martial arts ring and in that scene she wears a practical outfit, similar to the male characters. In fact there's even a little female gaze scene of Mako ogling Raleigh while he's getting changed. But I would still have preferred it if the central relationship of the story had been ideally a non-romantic partnership or at least non-heterosexual. The conceit of having the robots powered by empathy between the two co-pilots is one of the strengths of the film, and I think that co-pilot relationship would be more interesting if it didn't just default to romance with the film's one substantial female character.
The bromance between the two scientists, one quirky and eccentric and one uptight and caring more about numbers than people, was a bit awful but did manage to move me when after all the bickering they managed to work together at the crucial moment when both their skills were needed. I read the quirky one as Jewish and the uptight one as German, which is not exactly my favourite thing, but
jack didn't think that was particularly highlighted. Wikipedia thinks Gottlieb is supposed to be a stiff upper lip Englishman, but I am sure that if that's what the film was going for they wouldn't have called the character Hermann Gottlieb? And maybe Newt Geiszler is supposed to be just a standard Hollywood clownish geek and I'm being paranoid by reading him as Jewish?Anyway, that was a lot of fun. I came out feeling as if I'd just spent the afternoon at a theme park sampling all the thrill rides. So glad I saw this; many thanks
rysmiel for helping to persuade me.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-22 09:11 pm (UTC)... are you actually in Hong Kong?
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-22 09:25 pm (UTC)I definitely recommend seeing this film, as long as you're expecting it to be quality entertainment and nothing more than that. I really enjoyed seeing it with
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-22 09:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-23 10:12 pm (UTC)Del Toro is another one who thinks of the money every so often in order to pay for the good stuff.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-24 03:09 am (UTC)(After seeing Black Narcissus, I am going to forever feel the non-existence of a Powell and Pressburger At the Mountains of Madness as a hole in the world.)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-25 10:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-25 02:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-25 04:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-25 10:42 am (UTC)If Pacific Rim is Del Toro doing obvious commercial pap in order to pay for the good stuff, I really want to see the good stuff! What do you recommend of his?
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-24 03:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-25 10:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-24 04:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-25 10:55 am (UTC)Here's a more negative review, for balance. The gist is that Hollywood is normally so utterly atrocious at feminism and diversity that people are squeeing over a rather white-male-centric film just because the bar of better than the typical offering is so very low.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-28 10:28 am (UTC)I'm currently trying to persuade Tony to see The Heat with me, which led to a discussion of comedy cop buddy movies, and our shared enjoyment of Rush Hour - which is led by a black man, an asian man and there's the competent woman from the bomb squad who helps to save the day.
(I now can't find the review of the Heat which convinced me I'd like it, thought it was on dreamwidth but am not succeeding.)