The ‘God’ in Godzilla: ‘Godzilla’ vs. ‘Pacific Rim’

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Mild spoilers.

So, the new Godzilla movie is great.

What struck me most was the size of the monsters. The film consistently keeps things at a human’s perspective, and maintains a sense of enormity in Godzilla and his new enemies, the MUTOs. This is something rarely achieved in films dealing with multiple kaiju at once. There are no crappy, over-the-monster’s-shoulder shots, or anything of the sort that puts the viewer on their level. Instead, you are consistently reminded that these creatures are of mythic proportions that exceed human comprehension. Gareth Edwards has done an excellent job with the material—I think the film would function perfectly and make a splash even if it were a small-time production with no previous entries. (Of course, this is to be expected from the man who made Monsters, which achieved exactly that.)

Invariably, Godzilla is going to be compared to Pacific Rim, simply for being the latest film to feature large things hitting each other. This is an unfair comparison—Godzilla, in spite of being the one with the long and intricate history behind it, is actually interested in telling its own story and standing out. I spoke of ‘authenticity’ in my piece on Rim, and that is precisely is the main difference between the two—Rim is ‘about’ kaiju eiga, whereas Godzilla actually is one of those movies. Being about movies is not a bad thing in and of itself, but Rim failed to do a competent job of it.

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The Movie Lied: Tactical Realism and ‘The Return of the Living Dead’

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I really like zombie films. Not because I find the creatures interesting, but because these films tend to be open and blunt about their ideas. The first three of Romero’s Dead movies are not really about the zombies themselves—they’re about how, in many ways, we’re zombies already. Dawn of the Dead’s shots of zombies milling around in a shopping mall is one of the most haunting things I have ever seen.

What I don’t like, however, is a particular brand of zombie fan—the ones who obsess over the idea of the zombies themselves, like they’re some kind of mathematical puzzle that can be ‘solved’. This leads to the creation and popularization of books like The Zombie Survival Guide. This completely misses the point of the films these fans supposedly like, and has led to a school of film viewership I will hereby refer to as ‘Tactical Realism’.

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Pacific Rim: An Inauthentic Giant Monster Movie




Pacific Rim (2013)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Written by Travis Beacham & Guillermo del Toro
131 min.

Note: If you haven’t seen Pacific Rim, this review could be considered spoiler-ific, and even a little esoteric—so, you know, see the film first.

I love Tokusatsu. For those of you who are baka gaijins, Tokusatsu (or Toku) is a genre of Japanese media. Though it literally means ‘special effects’, a better translation would be ‘cool stuff with men in rubber suits in it.’ Doctor Who airs as a tokusatsu in Japan, perfectly fittingly. On top of that, I love mecha anime—the sheer fact that an entire genre has sprung up from the concept of giant robots punching things is a testament to the beauty of the concept. I’m also a big fan of Guillermo del Toro and his films. So when Pacific Rim went into production, I was highly optimistic, given that I am precisely the choir to which del Toro is supposedly preaching.

Why, then, was Pacific Rim so disappointing?

Although fellow smugster Alex Hiatt dislikes the film far more than I do, I agree with him that the main problem with the film is that it fails to execute its premise entertainingly. But the question I’m asking is, why?

One answer is that it’s not Toku enough. Not just in the obvious sense that the robots punching each other are, woefully, CGI rather than actors in rubber suits, but because the entire film represents a compromised version of what del Toro is crafting a love letter to.
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The Star Wars Prequels Are Better Than You Think They Are

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The Star Wars prequels are widely regarded as the worst additions to a beloved franchise of all time. Red Letter Media’s feature-length eviscerations of each film are some of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, but I don’t agree with the central argument. I regularly sit down and watch all six movies, and you know what? The prequels are the best part of the experience every time.

Here’s why.
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I Hate Metascores, And You Should Too

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Metascoring, in case you aren’t aware, is the process of gauging a movie’s quality through aggregating lots of different reviews and spitting out a score based on the percentage of positive reviews it’s gotten. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are two very popular websites that metascore, and you’ve probably visited one or both at some point in your life.

The entire concept is bunk.

Even just the idea of applying a ‘score’ to a movie is stupid, and yet it’s become customary for critics to tack them on at the end of their reviews for some reason. We’ve all seen the five-star system, the four-star system, the percent-out-of-a-hundred system—or out of ten, but with decimals—or maybe the most offensive, the A to F grading, which treats the film as though it were a High School essay on Wuthering Heights rather than a comprehensive piece of art.
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