Pacfifc rim mind meld12/26/2023 ![]() The ick-factor of romance, and even the ick-factor of a Madame Butterfly romance is totally absent from this film. ![]() If you’re still at the girls got cooties stage of development, then don’t worry. What makes less sense is that Japan, the country that supplies us with the term for the alien enemies, only supplies the movie with its female possible love interest. That makes some sense because Germany is not a Pacific Rim nation. But the like-em or leave-em sentiments about Germany are of little consequence for “Pacific Rim” because the Germans and German don’t have much to do with this film. Of course, I don’t drink so that puts a bit of a damper on the whole we are German for a month thing in the U.S. There is still time, indeed, but this movie won’t convince you to get out and get more serious than toasting to Octoberfest. Jaeger is a German word and I confess that I never saw the need for studying German. Why else would these supposedly sophisticated machines get a German name? Despite the coolness of Samsung and Sony cellphones and tablets, Honda’s ASIMO and the Toyota Prius, the East Asians aren’t really that involved in this production. The nations of the Pacific Rim come together to construct the humanoid war machines called Jaegers that require two humans to control inside the detachable head. They are based under the Pacific Ocean, arriving through a interdimensional portal. These are extraterrestrial beings who usually take the lone-wolf approach to attack. Sometime this year, 2013, our cities come under attack by kaiju. So the story, written by Del Toro and Travis Beacham goes like this. The animation is of a high level as you’d expect from the director Guillermo del Toro who gave us such wondrous creatures in “Pan’s Labyrinth.” They have that anthropomorphic form of a man walking in a monster suit, but they move with surprising grace underwater. These kaiju are gigantic and we’re not sure how they are fed, but they could have Tokyo for lunch with a few buses as appetizers. Without a claim to the kaiju of fame, the writers decide to create their own kaiju. We could call it Godzilla envy or licensing envy. Godzilla doesn’t make an appearance in “Pacific Rim,” but you can feel his hot atomic breath in its every frame. Monsters come in all sizes and forms as all Lady Gaga followers know and that is true even for Japan where pocket monsters came from (Pokkemon). My trusty Japanese-English Kenkyūsha dictionary defines a kaiju as “monstrous beast” but we can edit that down to monster. Godzilla is a kaiju, but not the only kaiju. I also know that the writers are trying something new, but that still doesn’t make it good, particularly when you consider the tradition of the creatures called kaiju and Godzilla. ![]() I know that the movie is targeting a male audience and I’m not a guy. Watching “Pacific Rim,” I could help but think of the Rock-em Sock-em robots.
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