I don't give two shits about boats, but I can stand there and look supportive and give the captain looks of "Oh my god, I'm sorry, we're totally wasting your time, I'll remove him in a second", but the conversation was taken over by the big burly black hotel manager guy named Jeremy, who kept insisting that we both should sign on as crew next year and sail with them. Obviously, as expected, the Puppy went haywire and I was like "nope nope nope". I know people who have worked on cruise ships, and it's apparently one of the shittiest things you can do for money. It was a bit awkward, but still, now I have all this useless knowledge about sailing ships I didn't have before.
I met up with a friend of mine to hang out and go to the movies. We're equally huge movie geeks/geeks in general, and decided after seeing the trailer to Pacific Rim that this was a movie for us (because a girl's night out isn't a girl's night out without nerdy movies). Huge monsters? Gundam-styled mecha? The computer being voiced by GLaDOS? Charlie Day as a hyper scientist? Aw man, it was just too much awesome to miss, and we weren't disappointed. Pacific Rim officially rocks.
The plot is pretty simple - huge monsters attacking cities of millions, tough dudes strapping themselves into huge-ass machines and then proceeding to beat the crap out of the monsters. So far, so awesome. And it doesn't really need more of a plot than that. It's cliched, it's kinda ridiculous and not very believable, but Pacific Rim is one of those movies that go by Rule Of Cool - if it's cool enough of an idea, then to hell with realism. I kept getting the feeling that this is a kind of modernized Errol Flynn-kinda movie, with spectacular heroes in far-fetched plots doing ridiculously bad-ass stuff and saving the day in a super-dramatic way. I left the cinema feeling elated and awesome - so awesome in fact that I forgot my hat at my seat and didn't notice until I was almost back at Hemingway's. Shit.
That's not to say that Pacific Rim is perfect - far from it. It would absolutely not pass the Bechdel test for an instant, as there was only one female character properly established - Mako Mori (played by Rinko Kikuchi, who looked surprisingly like a mix between Knives Chau and Ramona Flowers in Scott Pilgrim. I kept waiting for the blue highlights (that were there for no other reason than Rule Of Cool, forever perpetuating the stereotype that Japanese people all have super-funky hair) to get punched out of her hair, but that didn't seem to happen (although they did kinda seem to disappear sometimes...). There was a Russian woman featured, briefly, as being totally bad-ass, but the Russian Gundam (or Jaeger as they're called in the movie), that had been promoted as being totally awesomely bad-ass, was promptly defeated within five minutes along with the Chinese supposedly 'state of the art' Gundam piloted by hot triplets (who I knew from the start were going to die, as they had no spoken lines and they were all wearing red shirts). Seriously, the only minority who wasn't beaten in a stupid amount of time was the Japanese woman. American much?
Speaking of her, she was apparently awesome at fighting and beat the protagonist, yet when the stereotypically cocky Aussie insulted her, she stood back, lip quivering, while the male hero beat the Aussie's ass to defend her honour, which made me facepalm a bit. Also, she lost control of her emotions instantly when being connected to the hero in the Gundam, because shit, trusting women to keep their emotions in check is like trusting a dog to walk a tight-rope, at least if you're a Hollywood writer. I was happy they didn't have a make-out moment at the end at least, that would've just been stupid.
So yeah, stereotypes all around (and terrible Japanese being spoken by actors who clearly don't know the first thing about speaking Japanese), and a typical male-dominated movie misogyny leads me to feel that this movie wasn't as awesome as it could've been, but looking past all of that to the pure whimsy, it was still one of the best action movies I've seen in a really long time, and I was psyched coming out of the theater. I tried explaining how awesome it was to Hemingway, saying that he should totally see it, but he doesn't seem to enjoy giant monsters and mecha the same way I do for some reason. They pick up a friggin' boat and use it as a sword, how is that not amazing? Ah well, I'll get around to showing him the light soon enough. Until then, I can only highly recommend it to any of you silent readers who are equally enamored with this stuff as I am. It was epic.
No comments:
Post a Comment