{"id":4479,"date":"2014-02-26T00:00:51","date_gmt":"2014-02-26T05:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=4479"},"modified":"2014-02-26T00:00:29","modified_gmt":"2014-02-26T05:00:29","slug":"pacific-rim-an-inauthentic-giant-monster-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/pacific-rim-an-inauthentic-giant-monster-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"Pacific Rim: An Inauthentic Giant Monster Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n

\nPacific Rim<\/a>\u00a0(2013)
\n<\/strong>Directed by Guillermo del Toro
\nWritten by Travis Beacham & Guillermo del Toro
\n131 min.<\/p>\n

Note: If you haven\u2019t seen Pacific Rim, this review could be considered spoiler-ific, and even a little esoteric\u2014so, you know, see the film first.<\/i><\/p>\n

I love Tokusatsu. For those of you who are baka gaijins, Tokusatsu (or Toku) is a genre of Japanese media. Though it literally means \u2018special effects\u2019, a better translation would be \u2018cool stuff with men in rubber suits in it.\u2019 Doctor Who<\/a> airs as a tokusatsu in Japan, perfectly fittingly. On top of that, I love mecha anime\u2014the sheer fact that an entire genre <\/i>has sprung up from the concept of giant robots punching things is a testament to the beauty of the concept. I\u2019m also a big fan of Guillermo del Toro and his films. So when Pacific Rim<\/a> went into production, I was highly optimistic, given that I am precisely the choir to which del Toro is supposedly preaching.<\/p>\n

Why, then, was Pacific Rim so disappointing?<\/p>\n

Although fellow smugster Alex Hiatt dislikes the film far more than I do<\/a>, I agree with him that the main problem with the film is that it fails to execute its premise entertainingly. But the question I\u2019m asking is, why?<\/i><\/p>\n

One answer is that it\u2019s not Toku<\/i> 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.
\n
\nDel Toro, on the commentary track for the movie, goes into vast detail about how rather than drawing inspiration from monster movies or anime (the material to which Pacific Film owes its entire existence) his basic concept for the plot was inspired by sports movies<\/em>. Indeed, many of the characters in the film fall into sports movie archetypes. The main character\u2014so woefully uncharacterized beyond being a walking, talking, sports movie stereotype that I can\u2019t remember his name offhand\u2014is the returning veteran with a jaded history with the game; Mako Mori is the plucky, young, inexperienced rookie; the younger Australian pilot\u2014again, if I\u2019m not remembering a name, it\u2019s because their character was that <\/i>unmemorable\u2014is the jerk with a heart of gold who learns to be a team player; Stacker Pentecost is the coach ex-player who had to quit because of an injury\u2014the list goes on. I\u2019m not claiming that drawing inspiration from sports movies for the situations the characters find themselves in is implicitly a bad idea\u2014I\u2019m simply positing that in a two-hour film about robots fighting giant monsters, wasting a majority of the runtime hammering home sports movie tropes\u00a0is a huge mistake.<\/p>\n

I personally think this happened because the film is, ultimately, a product of Hollywood. Standards vary greatly from one country to another\u2014in Japan, the premise of Pacific Rim would go unquestioned, because it\u2019s a commonly-seen theme. In America, making a film with Pacific Rim\u2019s premise goes firmly against the grain. Compromises are demanded, and complied with\u2014effectively eroding the \u2018love\u2019 aspect of the love letter.<\/p>\n

The first twenty minutes of the film feature the most pointless voiceover I\u2019ve ever heard, which bothers to explain in detail what a Kaiju is, what a \u2018Jaeger\u2019 is, why a Jaeger is good to use for fighting giant monsters, and that you need two pilots to operate it\u2014things a film should trust the audience to just pick up along the way. It comes off as both condescending and under-confident\u2014not only am I being treated as too stupid to understand the vast complexities of a giant robots vs. giant monsters movie<\/i>, the story is trying way too hard to \u2018justify\u2019 a premise that needs no justification. I already suspended my disbelief about massive humanoid mechas and gnarly beasts when I bought a ticket\u2014you don\u2019t need to resell me on it.<\/p>\n

The characterization is also completely off. Not only is the film preoccupied with adhering to a sports movie dynamic, it doesn\u2019t even do these characters justice. For instance, the film boasts a sci-fi device that allows characters to unite their brains and think as one, sharing thoughts, memories, and dreams\u2014yet, I don\u2019t actually know what any of these characters even think about when they\u2019re fighting. Contrast that with mecha shows, which always have really strong characters. Mazinger Z<\/a>, one of the most popular mecha\u2014del Toro even gushes about it on the commentary as being an inspiration on him\u2014revolves around Kabuto Kouji, a teenager who is utterly crazy and completely defies most traditional Hollywood main characters. In fact, as far as I can tell, Mazinger Z\u2019s creator, Go Nagai, has never written a show whose central characters weren\u2019t<\/i> the most interesting part of the story. Nagai understand that while the robots were essentially characters themselves, so were, you know, the actual<\/i> characters.<\/p>\n

The most interesting character in Pacific Rim, Newt, played by Charlie Day, is psychopathic and self-destructive in his pursuit of understanding the Kaiju in a way that is, admittedly, hilarious to watch\u2014and a film populated by other characters as over-the-top in their strengths and flaws would have been incredible. But here, his scenes are treated as largely incidental\u2014the film focuses instead on two boring characters working out their issues in order to have entertaining but not-that-great fights with uninspired monsters. He is even explicitly referred to by other characters as a mere \u2018Kaiju groupie\u2019! A character that exemplifies the most interesting human elements of the genre that inspired the film, waved away as a silly dork. There can be no greater proof the film\u2019s inauthenticity than this.<\/p>\n

The only flaws we see in the non-Newt characters is that they are sad about things that have happened. No joke, that\u2019s the bedrock of their psyche. And for these characters, a character saying \u2018get over it\u2019 is enough for them to finally solve their trauma. It\u2019s almost as if Del Toro and Tracis Beacham had faith that the audience could accept the existence of giant robots (after excessive justification of course) but by no means could be able to accept human characters with actual human feelings and misgivings.<\/p>\n

Sorry del Toro, but the best western toku film is still Evil Dead 2<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\n

\nPacific Rim<\/a>\u00a0(2013)
\n<\/strong>Directed by Guillermo del Toro
\nWritten by Travis Beacham & Guillermo del Toro
\n131 min.<\/p>\n

Note: If you haven\u2019t seen Pacific Rim, this review could be considered spoiler-ific, and even a little esoteric\u2014so, you know, see the film first.<\/i><\/p>\n

I love Tokusatsu. For those of you who are baka gaijins, Tokusatsu (or Toku) is a genre of Japanese media. Though it literally means \u2018special effects\u2019, a better translation would be \u2018cool stuff with men in rubber suits in it.\u2019 Doctor Who<\/a> airs as a tokusatsu in Japan, perfectly fittingly. On top of that, I love mecha anime\u2014the sheer fact that an entire genre <\/i>has sprung up from the concept of giant robots punching things is a testament to the beauty of the concept. I\u2019m also a big fan of Guillermo del Toro and his films. So when Pacific Rim<\/a> went into production, I was highly optimistic, given that I am precisely the choir to which del Toro is supposedly preaching.<\/p>\n

Why, then, was Pacific Rim so disappointing?<\/p>\n

Although fellow smugster Alex Hiatt dislikes the film far more than I do<\/a>, I agree with him that the main problem with the film is that it fails to execute its premise entertainingly. But the question I\u2019m asking is, why?<\/i><\/p>\n

One answer is that it\u2019s not Toku<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,2024],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-harrys-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4479"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4481,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4479\/revisions\/4481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}