{"id":13885,"date":"2013-08-05T16:12:10","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T15:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=13885"},"modified":"2013-08-05T16:47:12","modified_gmt":"2013-08-05T15:47:12","slug":"at-the-movies-pacific-rim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2013\/08\/05\/at-the-movies-pacific-rim\/","title":{"rendered":"At The Movies: Pacific Rim or Not Quite The Monster Apocalypse Markgraf Wanted"},"content":{"rendered":"

I HAVE BEEN MADE TO SWEAR A BLOOD-OATH TO YOU ALL THAT I WILL NOT MAKE ANY “RIM” JOKES IN THIS REVIEW ON PAIN OF MY NEW NEON GREEN KURT GEIGERS BEING CONFISCATED<\/strong><\/p>\n

OH, ALSO THERE’S MINOR SPOILERS<\/strong><\/p>\n

I ain’t gonna lie, readers; it took me a while to write this one.\u00a0 I got home from seeing Pacific Rim<\/strong>, irritated and betrayed (for reasons I’ll explain), and got on The Internet, ready to share my frustrations with the film with a giant swathe of the population that I assumed would doubtless have the same irritations I did.<\/p>\n

\"Pacific_Rim_FilmPoster\"<\/a> I found no such people.\u00a0 In fact, I found a great number of people whose feminism and opinions I respected claiming it this great inclusive\/representational victory and lauding the characterisation of the, um, one woman.\u00a0 My crest fell.\u00a0 I suddenly felt ashamed and cowed.\u00a0 Maybe they’re right, I thought.\u00a0 Maybe Pacific Rim is this Big Thing after all and I’m just this picky little boy who should swallow my face and look grateful.<\/p>\n

Or maybe it’s like Avengers Assemble <\/strong>all over again, where everyone and their dog made Joss Whedon<\/strong> into a Maypole and danced around him, singing the praises of his Black Widow and how boss she was, and all I could think was “yeah but she still strangles men with her thighs in a black leather catsuit though doesn’t she”.\u00a0 It’s a step forward, but even further steps could have been so easy, yet weren’t taken.<\/p>\n

Let’s look at Pacific Rim’s director, Guillermo del Toro<\/strong>.\u00a0 Now, Guillermo is my homeboy.\u00a0 We go way back.\u00a0 He’s made some of my favourite films in the world ever, and written some of the best women in filmland, and then put them in main roles (example: Pan’s Labyrinth<\/strong>).<\/p>\n

Mako (Rinko Kikuchi<\/strong>) is good in Pacific Rim, sure, but despite what others say about her getting the protagonist’s development arc, she isn’t<\/em> the protagonist, Boring Raleigh (Charlie Hannam<\/strong>) is, and that’s where the film focuses.\u00a0 It needn’t have done, as Mako does indeed get a nice narrative arc of her very own – but it really does focus on Raleigh instead.\u00a0 Why, Guillermo?\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n

Why focus on the boring guy?\u00a0 The boring inexplicable guy who is not only tedious, but a TERRIBLE choice for “massive robot pilot saviour of mankind” because he consistently makes awful decisions?\u00a0 Decisions so awful, in fact, that I thought that maybe his progress through the film would punish him for his reckless endangering of human lives – but then he was eventually lauded for them!\u00a0 I just. No. <\/em>(There was a lot wrong with Raleigh, like why doesn’t his hideously traumatic co-death with his brother have more of an effect on him – but I honestly don’t have the wordcount to get into it!)<\/p>\n

\"mako\"<\/a>There were no end of cool background people that would have made the film a) more interesting and b) less inevitably-focussed-on-the-white-American-dudebro.\u00a0 Loads of internet has spaffed cheerful over the Soviet team (Heather Doerksen<\/strong> and\u00a0 Robert Maillet<\/strong>) – and they’re right to do so; they’re bossly and cute as hell (and let’s not forget that BLOODY SEXY Brutalist Jaeger design!!) but they get three lines, all of which are techy floundering and then they die<\/em>.\u00a0 That’s… that’s not great, guys!\u00a0 Three lines!\u00a0 I had more lines when I was an extra at the local Methodist church panto when I was 14!<\/p>\n

Mako wasn’t terrible.\u00a0 There was a standout bit for me where she pilots a Jaeger for the first time and loses it completely as Her Traumatic Past flings nightmare fuel into her face until she endangers the life of everyone else in the Jaeger playhouse – and yet her co-pilot Boring Raleigh somehow manages to swallow down and stamp on the MASSIVE PTSD that presumably he’d have (along with brain damage, surely??) from sharing a brain with his beloved brother as he died an extremely brutal death<\/em>.\u00a0 I just.\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 Maybe I’d have been less bothered by her shortcomings if she hadn’t been forced to carry the flag as literally the only woman in the film with lines.<\/p>\n

“But they didn’t kiss at the end!” people have said, delightedly.\u00a0 And in a world where films appear to be literally impossible to put on celluloid without The Day Being Saved By Heterosexuality, that’s great.\u00a0 I’m all for non-sexual relationships.\u00a0 But that’s not how the film was shot or put together.\u00a0 If it was, it didn’t do enough to undermine the romantic overtures between Raleigh and Mako all the way through (Del Toro says that he did their fight scene “like a sex scene”<\/a> even), so while no, they didn’t kiss – they honestly might as well have done, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had done.<\/p>\n

Frustratingly, it’s not 100% crap.\u00a0 I say “frustratingly” because I’d love to just shit all over this thing wholesale and be done with it, but I can’t.\u00a0 The world of Pacific Rim is absolutely spectacular.\u00a0 Del Toro has done his worldbuilding trick where he’s made everything in the setting fantasticly beautiful, cruel and bleak.\u00a0 But then stitched the actual narrative and characterisation out of tropes.\u00a0 Tropes aren’t a bad thing per se<\/em> – but I honestly felt that I had seen this film before in a million different cinema-sittings.\u00a0 When you can predict a character’s story before he (and it’s always a he) has even done it?\u00a0 Not great.<\/p>\n

But the good bits are really good<\/em>.\u00a0 The robots are heavy, work-worn and believable.\u00a0 The Kaiju are so beautiful they made me do facewaters on numerous occasions.\u00a0 You know when Newt (played by Charlie Day<\/strong> – but I’ll come back to him in a minute) braindives into their world to spy?\u00a0 That black passing body over the giant red sun?\u00a0 The fiery skies and the knowledge that Kaiju are their<\/em> answers to mechs?\u00a0 The hot, prickly balloon of delight inflated in my chest and I felt this sudden desperation for Del Toro to make the film he’s clearly always wanted to, carry on from Hellboy II<\/strong>‘s overtones of human punishment monster Apocalypse, and give it the “and then everyone died” happy ending that I’ve always wanted to see him do.<\/p>\n

“We terraformed it for them,” Newt says breathlessly.\u00a0 Humans have ruined the world, and now monsters want it to play in.\u00a0 I wept.\u00a0 “Yes!” I yelped in the cinema.\u00a0 “Stamasfodfpohssadjfdk!” I elaborated, which I think in this context meant, “Please give me all the monster Apocalypse porn I need to make my heart complete, Guillermo.”\u00a0 My boyfriend patted my knee sharply, which I think in this context meant, “Please stop making the sounds that will inevitably get us kicked out of the cinema”.<\/p>\n

But it didn’t happen.\u00a0 I felt personally betrayed.\u00a0 Come on, Guillermo, I thought we were bros.<\/p>\n

Speaking of bros, I did ship\/love Newt and Herman (Burn Gorman<\/strong>, who is a hottie), the rivalrous, hilarious, day-saving, vitally-important-to-the-plot-and-yet-still-somehow-endearingly-rubbish scientists.\u00a0 “You can’t ship them!” cried my lovely housemate.\u00a0 “Did you see how they fumbled a *handshake*?\u00a0 That is what the sex would be like.\u00a0 Flapping, awkward and inaccurate.”\u00a0 Yes, it would.\u00a0 Just like regular sex.<\/p>\n

Newt was great though.\u00a0 We follow him through the underground Kaiju-part trade as he shambles off on his quest to find this one particular drug-baron.\u00a0 Ron Perlman<\/strong><\/a>, of course, plays this…<\/p>\n

s p e c i f i c\u00a0\u00a0 c r i m<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

and…<\/p>\n

…no, I think we’re done here.<\/p>\n

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:<\/strong><\/p>\n