Don’t you diss Pacific Rim
This movie is important, if you ask me.
Okay, sure, I like giant monsters, I like giant robots, I like when they punch each other and I adore Guillermo Del Toro. Especially his bombastic, block-busteresque freakshows like Blade 2 or his Hellboy series — far more than his more quiet, contemplative movies in fact. This guy has a knack for building a believable universe from unbelievable premise. He make them feel lived in. His set designs, his formal approach and his love for freaks and outcasts all coalesce to give you the best popcorn movies a freak can get, if you ask me. He and the Wachowskis are my go-to people should I ever have a thousand million dollars to spare. “Here you are, go nuts”, I’d say, and I’m sure I’d love the result, whatever that is.
And Pacific Rim is all that times ten. It’s bombastic, it’s larger than life, it’s about outcasts trying their best, it’s full of baroque arrangements and machinery, unbelievable but oh-so-lovable characters, setpieces straight out of geeky sources mashed together, and there’s a giant robot using a cargo ship to bust a giant monster’s face. What’s not to love.
But it’s not the only reason I adore this flick.
Let’s talk about my faith
So it happens I’m from a weird religious cult. Its members believe that movies can be “about” something, that they’re not just a list of things that happens to people who don’t exist. That each and every movie is a sequence of scenes, of course, but that this particular sequence showing these scenes in this order with this tone can also be seen as a sentence, not just a mumble of words. That a movie is a desperate endeavor carried by dozens, hundreds, tens of thousands people trying to tell you something they feel is important enough to be worth days, weeks, months of their lives, whether or not a. they know it or b. they succeed.
Movies tell us things by showing us who fails and who succeed, who lives and who dies, who’s on top and who’s behind. What happens to whom in consequence to what.
Take Back to the Future. Marty seems cool but he’s a slacking loser, right? He’s shown going nowhere, doing nothing of note, hanging with the only loser in town with some time to waste on him, and a girlfriend who’s cute but seems to pity him a bit. He doesn’t dare send his demo tape to a studio even though he’s clearly talented. His lack of real confidence and his fear of rejection are stunting him. At his audition for the school dance, he tries too hard to overcompensate and blows it. Strickler cast upon him the darkest prophecy a teenager can hear: “no McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley”.
Sure, Marty comes back with a “that’ll change” sotto vocce but you can see in his eyes it’s more a bet than a promise, a bet Marty’s not so sure about. The whole film shows how he eventually wins this bet, for him and his whole family. He sees his father at his own age, and all he sees is a reflection of himself. And the more he tries to tell his father what to do, the more he gets that he himself doesn’t really practice what he preaches. So he dares put himself out into the light for once. Sure, he only did because his life was on the line, and it was painful at times but in the end, didn’t he learn a valuable lesson?
What this movie tries to tell you is to grow a backbone, trust yourself and get out there because it can change your life, and the lives of your loved ones, for the better.
That’s what it’s about. That’s how a movie can be about something. And I feel like what our latest blockbusters were about was absolutely shitty lately.
How blockbusters were shitty
I eat blockbusters like what’s left at the bottom of a Dorito bag: messily, loudly, undiscrimately and spilling all over. So when there’s a bad streak I tend to notice it later, when my stomach hurts and I’m stuck on the pot and I hate myself and wish for the sweet release of death.
And this late 2000’s, early 2010’s batch of action blockbusters seems to really, really tell things like:
- “talking solves nothing: punch or shoot the problem until it goes away”
- “the only way to protect people effectively is to act above the law”
- “this is something a True Hero need to do alone”
- “real men grit their teeth, shred ONE tear or scream like hell, expressing feelings any other way is a sign of weakness”
And sorry to sound like a dirty socialist — I’m from Europe, it’s a stereotype — but if you ask me that is some grade A pseudofascist bullshit.
Sure, violence is fun on screen and sometimes the only line of defense in the real world but maybe it’s a bit suspect to push most action narratives where it’s the first — and best — response? And what do you call a police force that doesn’t care about following the law? I may be alone, but I call it “corrupt”. And sure, Julius Caesar invaded most of Europe — but like the good Berthold asked: by himself, really? Like, he didn’t have thousands of men doing the work for him, dying for him? Didn’t those men, whose names few of us know, actually did most of the heavy lifting?
And don’t get me started on that whole “a man must walk like this” bullshit — I walk the way I like, thank you very much, and the way I walk is not emotionally stunted, because I’m an adult.
Let’s be clear: I lurve myself some prime piece of pseudofascist bullshit, just like I like French fries and burgers —kill me before I let go of my copy of Commando. There’s a reason fascism works: it taps into our most basic instincts: tribalism, self-righteousness, mindless agression, fear of change, just like fast food taps into our innate love for fat, rich food. But a daily diet of French fries and burgers can’t be healthy for your belly, just like a steady diet of pseudofascist bullshit can’t be healthy for your brain. I mean, if we care about what we put in our stomach, why would it be stupid to care what we put in our heads?
I can’t just put John Wick on repeat and leave it at that, as much as I want to.
So, anyway, that’s how I think. I’m not telling you this to change your mind or anything. Like what you like, eat what you eat: I’m not your real dad. I’m just telling you this so you get how I tick. So when I tell you I think PACIFIC RIM is the messiah, you don’t think I’m joking.
Why Pacific Rim is the messiah
And here it comes, swaggering like a fedora-clad pickup artist douchelord at a women-only electronic game tournament: PACIFIC RIM in all it’s chromey, piston-pumping glory.
Here’s a film where Hero, as Whitey mcSquarejaw as he is, is Hero because he’s pretty fly with his emotions. Drifting, remember ? His being okay with who he is and how he feels, being a good listener and caring for his brother is what makes him qualified to punch a kaiju with a giant steely fist, nothing else. It turns out that if you want to punch giant monsters in the jaw with a fist made of steel and justice, love and trust are the secret ingredients.
And those kaiju, man. They’re not just giant monsters, they’re natural disasters. The voice over says so, and so does the movie itself. They show up with storm and rain, they come through tsunamis and thunderstrikes. They’re man-made — well, alien-made — but no doubt they’re forces of nature first and foremost. Blind rage and wanton destruction. You can anger them, sure, and you can set them loose, but there’s no controlling them.
And facing those disasters, what do humans do? Bicker over the proper solution, of course! On one hand, team Robot, gathering people across nation lines because we’re all in this together, and deciding that facing the end of the world, we should join hands and find new solutions for everybody’s sake. On the other, team Wall, pushing the “everybody stay home, close the door, build a GIANT FUCKING WALL AROUND THE HOUSE and wait for it to pass because status quo is awesome” agenda. Guess which team is the underdog? Guess which one is eventually right?
Wait! Whitey mcSquarejaw? His arc is him learning to step aside and help the real protagonist be heard and do amazing things. At first he’s a little pushy because, hey, Whitey mcSquarejaw, but he really gets it. He gets that Mako’s enthusiasm is the right way to feel about things. He sees she know more about the jaeger program than he, himself, who actually piloted one. He learns to support her voice and guess what: it works. Mako proves herself to be exactly the kind of person you should give a giant robot to pilot, and they’re so “in synch” eventually they kick so. Much. Ass.
PACIFIC RIM’s towering presence is never threatening. Sure, its huge robot fist is twice the size of your mom’s station wagon, but it’s open and reaching. It seems to tell us that yeah, let’s not beat around the bush here, as a species we’re verging on fucked and the people in charge don’t really seem to give a damn, except when it comes to secure their own wellbeing and property. But it’s okay, says the big robot who seems totally chill, if we stick together and get real with each other, if we don’t bury our head in the sand but take action and trust each other, we can do it. We don’t have to be a lot, this giant robot of a movie goes on: as long as there’s a few of us and we stick together, we can do it.
Together, we can cancel the apocalypse.
And that, people, is one of the most glorious thing a giant robot has ever said to me. It’s the polar opposite of pseudofascist bullshit.
It’s a rare action flick that manages to get there, if you ask me.
Also this robot has a reactor in its elbow to punch monsters harder and his pal has a reactor cooler for a head what more do you want people.
Pictures in this article come from Pacific Rim (Warner Bros/Legendary, 2013), Back to the Future (Universal, 1985), Man of Steel (Legendary/Syncopy/DC Entertainment/Cruel & Unusual, 2013) and John Wick (Thunder Road, 2014).
If you want more about how we men should be more like Riley because Riley is the shit, here’s doctor Nerdlove laying on thick. If you want more white cishet male gushing about Del Toro’s blockbusting freakshows, here’s Patrick H Willems about Blade 2, ie. Vampire Ninjas vs. Mutant Vampire Cavedwellers.
