When I was in college back in 2010, I took a two week theater course in London where my classmates and I were able to see a different stage production almost every night. Our professor gave us a list of questions to think over and answer after each show, and one of the questions was is we thought the spectacle of the show (the visuals, the audio, etc.) were covering up the flaws of the show itself, by means of distraction. It's a good question to keep in mind whenever the biggest draw of some form of entertainment is based solely on its aesthetics. I had to bring that question up again two weeks after London, when I saw Avatar. But that's not the movie I want to talk about.
Pacific Rim was something I was looking forward to ever since the first trailer. Who wouldn't want to a movie where giant robots beat up giant monsters, especially one made by the man behind Pan's Labrynth? And make no mistake, in the theater last night, I was completely enthralled by the movie. Walking out, however, I started thinking about what exactly I was enthralled by. The robot/monster fight scenes were swimming around in my head, but everything having to do with the characters was kind like white noise in my mind.
This is the sticky part: While I don't think that the scenes with just the humans were useless, they weren't exactly that memorable either. Put it another way, the only character's name I remembered was Mako's, only because her same was said over and over by everybody. It felt like all the character development and drama was just kind of rushed through, a means to the end, with the end being these amazing fight between mechanical and prehistoric colossi. And the fights are amazing, don't get me wrong. This is a movie that knows an enormous robot would use an ocean liner as a club for no other reason than why the hell not? It's the line of thinking a bunch of kids in a playground would follow, and it's something you don't see enough of in movies lately.
But compare it to a summer movie from last year. What were the memorable scenes from Avengers? The finale, sure, or the three-way tussle between Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America. But also the interrogation scene between Black Widow and Loki. No visual action, just a lot of walking around a cage an talking or each other. But the characters are well developed enough that we have a vested interest in them outside of the action. Even the small conversations between Tony Stark and Bruce Banner are as memorable as the movie's finale. The only scenes from Pacific Rim I could remember that didn't involve robots or monsters fighting were ones involving Charlie Day's character, since his scenes involved going somewhere other than the army base.
However, every time I come up with a criticism about this movie, how it feels like more style than actual substance, I think about how I felt watching it. This is a fun movie. There have been plenty of movies that have better developed, fleshed out characters, like Dark Knight Rises or Man of Steel even, but they just don't leave you with a feeling of pure happiness in you gut the way Pacific Rim did. Like I said before, the human characters feel like just a means to an end, but I don't believe that's always a bad thing. The motivations of the humans and the world the movie has developed is simple, and in this case simple is what you want. Simple gets the job done. Simple doesn't let the movie get bogged down with its own weight and leaves room for everything else to spread out to its fullest. Simple lets you have fun. Fun based entirely on its spectacle, but given how little you see that lately, it's a good thing.
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