The Players…
Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, Idris Elba, Ron Perlman and Charlie Day with Burn Gorman, Max Martini and Rob Kazinsky.
The Story…
Earth’s under attack! It’s an alien invasion! Scramble the jets!
Wait. Don’t look to the skies. These fiends are rising from the depths!
A dimensional rift has opened up from beneath the Pacific Ocean, and huge, horrible monsters are emerging and laying waste to our cities! Humanity is under attack! We’re all doomed!
Or are we?
It’s time to call in the elite battalion of battling robots to thrash these beasts hell-bent on destroying the planet.
We must summon the Jaeger Corps!
(I love anime.)
The Rant…
When I started these posts this summer past (What would one call these posts anyway? It’s not traditional Facebook fodder, and it’s not really a weblog either. Weblogs usually require an outside provider. Facebook was available. Guess we’ll call this thing of mine a Faceblog. How’s that? No? Tough.), it was kinda at the behest of a former co-worker (Jordan. You know who you are). We got to talking one slow evening about movies that were more or less “misunderstood.” Did lousy at the box office. Bad rep. Plagued by rumor. Stuff like that. That was the criteria under which The Standard was established. Now, another unmentioned point of order following a pattern for The Standard: The movie must’ve been made in the 21st Century. 2000 to present (I know the new millennium didn’t start until 2001. Just humor me).
Why this period in time? Because moviegoers have been fleeced something fierce since the turn of the century I feel. We’ve been snowed under with remakes, reboots and repeats for well over a decade now. Ticket prices have gone up, quality and imagination has gone down. Hollywood has resigned itself to a single tenet in recent years: the audience is stupid. They’ll watch anything with pretty faces and a surfeit of sh*t that goes boom. Now I like shiny just as much as the next crow, but at the same time I like a little plot depth, some character development, and a lack of pandering. When was the last time you went to see/rent/stream an alleged summer blockbuster only later to feel you wanted your two hours back? I reckon it’s happened a few times. At any rate, I had a crapload of opinions about movies rattling around my brainpan for years. Looks like Facebook became my bullsh*t pulpit. Besides, Twitter couldn’t support rants like these under sheer volume’s sake.
That being said, onto this week’s review…
Hoo boy. Here’s the magna mater of films to which I decided to do these Facebook posts. Back to where The Standard was born. Big budget film that tanked (or at least had a disappointing return) at the box office? Check. An alleged blockbuster plagued with both the rumor mill churning and a sad reality of poor writing, lousy acting or misguided direction? Check. A lotta splash and dash and not much else, appealing to the most vacant of movie goers? And check. What’s worse? A very talented director at the helm who’s reputation for handling fantasy films has been impeccable.
Until now. Right?
Drop that sandwich…
Fantasy has foremost been del Toro’s stock in trade for years (Pan’s Labyrinth, the Hellboy movies). What could be more fantastical than giant Godzilla-like monsters versus building-sized, psychic-powered gargantuan robots? Sounds unique enough to me. Not really if you’re an otaku, but still.
Pacific Rim appears to be an attempt at live-action anime. A very good attempt, mind you. Giant robots doing battle with pseudo-Lovecraftian behemoths? Gotta love that. Such ideas are overt Asian tropes nodding to the anime structure. That being said, admit it: a Jaeger clubbing a Kaiju with a derelict ship is mighty badass.
This film is 90% visual candy. The plot is razor thin, and almost an afterthought paralleled against all the wanton mechanized mayhem. The dialogue is often trite, and I truly dislike excessive exposition in a movie. It’s a movie; it’s all about show, don’t tell. The acting is wooden. There is no chemistry between any of the leads and all roles are interchangeable. Except for Charlie Day. His Dr. Newton “Newt” Geiszler (yet another improbable name) is naturally the comic relief, as well as the bridge for pushing the plot forward, such as it is. Is he funny? Kinda. Not Charlie Murphy funny; he seems to be really reaching here. But at least his performance is memorable, if only in an irritating way. Unlike the rest of the cast.
Barring the craptastic acting, Rim is oddly engrossing. Del Toro still has the eye for fantastic flair. This has to be the first true big budget he’s had access to, and he wasted precious little of his resources. The action scenes are indeed impressive, and the anime parallel runs deep. Also, the detail involved in rendering each Jaeger and Kaiju alive is nothing short of mesmerizing.
However there is this very slight feeling of weakness throughout the film, and I don’t mean in any technical way. It’s like Del Toro had a flash new toy to play with—sans the instructions—and is just barging his way through to get to the action scenes (granted there are a lot, but still). On the flipside, there is an odd subtlety to this film. Can’t put my finger on it, but I think it’s why it failed as a true blockbuster. The film simultaneously beats you over the head with crashing action and then has its quiet moments of reflection. Up and down, up and down. It’s like playing with the volume on a stereo. The inconsistency is hard to take, as well as other factors, too. Did Rim have too long a running time for the audience? Have we grown numb to CGI-infused spectacles like this? Was Charlie Day too annoying?
I don’t know. But I did enjoy the film.
Sure, it might sound like I’m complaining. I’m not really. All the inconsistency in the movie lends a peculiar charm. Rim still has that Del Toro quirkiness, which pervades his every film. And sure, Pacific Rim is a comic book movie in need of a comic book, what with its slapdash, corny premise. But it’s also a summer blockbuster with a small seam of intelligence running through it, also like most of Del Toro’s movies. I wonder why the movie failed to catch on with the popcorn-choked rabble. This film made two-plus hours stream by quite quickly; time I didn’t necessarily want back. And unlike the recent A Scanner Darkly viewing, this was a visually impressive movie that was definitely not boring.
Poorly acted? Sure. In search of a solid plot? Yeah. Questionable writing? Uh-huh. Dull?
Decidedly not.
Rant Redux (2019)…
This was a perfect trifecta of sources crashing into confluence that had happened here before. The curiosity viewing this tidbit is a lame excuse to watch a well received movie under false pretenses. It was also recommended for a haircut a curious friends. It was also demeaning scrutiny based on box office returns against critical…well, criticism. Yeah, Rim was not a mediocre movie. But was it? Depends on who you ask. Come, take my hand.
The biggest stink I heard about Rim was that it didn’t feel like a Del Toro film. Too commercial, not enough weird. This is true, but his original Hellboy flick was both commercial and weird. So much so that my then girlfriend (who was never into movies like this) was horrified by the scene I conveniently missed when I when to drain my lizard of too much Cherry Coke. Dammit, Janet. Truth be told, she went along with as a curious onlooker as to what was this new thing called a comic book movie allegedly inspired by source material which her uber-dork b/f had way too many of. She said she liked the overall weirdness of the movie, but didn’t really “get it.” Cool with me. You either go along with Del Toro’s kind of weird or not, but it’s still nice to look at.
But here’s the weirdest thing about Rim, considering most folks “got” Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape Of Water: seemingly most of America missed the satire/tribute going on in what I found a pretty straightforward S/F movie. Hence that disconnect lent to some lousy test audience scores. Don’t ask me how I know this. It doesn’t really matter on social media. What mattered overall was the box office takeaway, and it was good. Most of the critics praised Rim, which was good. The Court of Public Opinion? Let’s just ask you about Scorsese’s comments about the MCU and let the trashing commence. Like when I had to break up and toss out a pair of dweebs from my comic shop over a fight. The fight was over who was stronger: Thor or Superman? Tho’ their arguments were valid, they stunk of Cheetos and Axe saturated dirty clothes and I showed them the door (read: cut off their pull lists). Such bickering was the vox populi of Rim fans and anti-fans.
Me being on the fringe after a botched first viewing, I chose to remain an otaku.
The friend that recommended Rim as fodder agreed wholly with me as this film was an attempt at live action anime. I think we are correct still. For the uninformed, an otaku is an anime fan, extending from the Japanese pejorative “home body.” Picture a basement apartment in a family home littered with Takis, spent cans of Red Bull, an abandoned rig once meant for LAN parties before they became outdated/uncool and a now very sweaty Xbox One sits as lord of all it surveys, covered in Shrinky Dinks and shreds of cheap paper once attached to the stapled spine of Pulp comics, an offshoot of Animerica but with tits. The whole room awash in Axe and the part-time gig at Panera that sometimes waits for no one. Esp the opposite sex.
Bitter? Me? Naw. I have a nice kid and a kind g/f. But you better get the idea of what audience I was up against. And I like Axe. Yuck foo.
So that was akin to the folks who did not “get” Rim. It was as if I were invading some sort of secret society, like the Freemasons or Oprah’s Book Club. So let’s talk frankly about the otaku thing, beyond the limits of cultural cross-pollination even If that was Del Toro’s muse (and most likely was). Rim is a deliberate blend of kaiju movies (think Godzilla) and classic anime robot-team OVAs (original video animations), like the many, many Gundam series. If you were Gen X and raced home to watch the highly edited, quite mangled Voltron series every afternoon, that was OVA. I was a Star Blazers fan myself, and still am. Fast forward to this film: as a tribute “gipsy” is still misspelled. Go ask Del Toro if you don’t “get” that.
From my position, Del Toro “got it.” A lot of critics and audiences alike did not as many as the other halves did. See, a director walks a tightrope of spun glass drawing inspiration from a kind of cult pop culture. Again back to that otaku label; in the USA, it’s a compliment, an identity, a member of a club. Such clubs are along the lines of Trekkies, comic book heads, fantasy footballers and NAMBLA. All have arcane rules and regs and are snooty towards curious outsiders rather than extend the hand of welcome. These special handshakes might be tempting for Hollywood to dip into a well, and when they do there’s more times than not a backlash. The hardcore fanboys almost always cry foul when their pet fetish is translated to celluloid. You didn’t “get it!” Well, you assailed Fandango, so there.
(I’d be remiss to not mention the exception to the rule is the MCU, but that took almost a decade to establish and no self-dishonoring fan would ever grace the vestibule of a comic shop. Icky and Scarlet Johannson is hot.)
That being said, as an otaku I “got” Rim immediately, and like my friend who recommended it was live-action anime. It was almost cartoony in its delivery, a lot of techno-babble supposed to be taken as legit science, overwrought family issues plaguing/driving out heroes, hungry kaiju and our heroine with the blue tip highlights. It’s all there, naked as a babe. I’m guessing the detractors were looking more substance, but that was foolish. Like glam rock, the style in Rim was the substance. Go with it, like my ex her placing a toe down the pit of darkness that Hellboy crawled out of. It’s mecha battling kaiju, that was it and that was all and that was fun.
Get it?
More Stray Observations…
I didn’t think I’d have to do this, but upon watching Rim a second time I noted a few other noteworthy blips that tripped up my radar. Felt they were worth jotting down:
- Gipsy dragging the ship is a very classy homage to the ronin dragging his blade towards a worthless duel (EG: this will be no honorable fight; too simple, too easy and the enemy is not worth bloodying my blade. Now slash).
- “Numbers do not lie. Politics, poetry, promises, these are lies. Numbers are the closest we get to the handwriting of god.” That is a damn good line, prob the best in the movie.
- Is the character of Newt a nod to the otaku? I’d like to think so.
- “Where is my goddam shoe?” Kinda says it all. No it doesn’t.
The Revision…
Rent it or relent it? Sustained: rent it. Ignore the detractors. Haters wanna hate. Go with it. “Get it.” Mono no aware. IE: Japanese: moment of transience. Appreciate what’s good because it won’t last. Get it now?
Next Installment…
We go swim with the Lady In The Water again before she got all chased by those stupid, cloned dinosaurs. Everybody into the pool!