Pacific Rim

Imagine if the first 30-50 minutes of Speed Racer were devoted to explaining what a 'car' is, and why people were racing them. "I was fifteen when I saw the first speed race... They called them automobiles... Driving very quickly... We built them because horses were too slow..." Just interminably. That's Pacific Rim.

Del Toro fans might recall how Hellboy 2 unceremoniously ditches the bland human audience-identification character from the first film, having Hellboy and the other monsters go rogue from their government organization to have wild pagan monster adventures. Imagine if they killed off Hellboy instead. That's also this film.

The grievous sin of Pacific Rim is that both the monsters and robots have no personality. They don't. Gipsy Danger 'should be' a character, displaying a combination of traits from both pilots in its actions and mannerisms. This only occurs, however, in the actually-good sword scene. Mako presses a huge red button labelled SWORD, causing the limp blade to flop out of its sheath. She then yells "for my family!" and her rage causes the flaccid sword to literally grow erect so that she can thrust it into the kaiju. No other scene actually shows the psychological connection between pilot and machine in the same way that Mako's rage sprouts from the machine as a gleaming metallic phallus.

The next closest shot is when hero guy's brother holds a holographic boat gingerly in his hand, establishing that the blue augmented-reality interface represents the 'mind' half of some mind-body dualism. We are never provided with a Jaeger POV shot. What do they see? How do they see? The little blue boat is the closest thing, and the only. There's little other indication that the jagers are powered by psychological health. Since we don't know why they succeed, we don't know why they fail. (Was Cherno Alpha's crew just not vengeful enough?)

Consider the 'soulmate' imagery and the throwaway line about 'angering the gods' in the context of Aristophanes's speech from Plato's Symposium, in which humanity is imagined as a four-legged race of siamese twins:

Symposium posted:

Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, attempted to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods.

Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained. At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way.

He said: 'Methinks I have a plan which will enfeeble their strength and so extinguish their turbulence; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.'

The resulting compulsion in humanity to reunite its halves is called 'love':

Symposium posted:

So ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, seeking to make one of two, and to heal the state of man.

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the tally-half of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men. The women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they have affection for men and embrace them, and these are the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature.

This is what the film is about, but this imagery of humanity being punished by the gods 'for a reason' is absent from the film. There is a line about global warming, but there is no imagery of global warming (outside of a quick-and-easy reference to Blade Runner in the design of the bone slums). We are told the apocalypse is coming, but there is little apocalyptic imagery because the film is already basically post-apocalyptic). The kaiju don't have the weight of a monster from Revelations - they aren't awesome in the original sense of the word. They're already commonplace - evoking malaise, not catastrophe.

Someone joked earlier about the kaiju being all female, but it's true. Being clones, the kaiju lack sexual difference - and there is an obvious theme of things squeezing in and out of yonic slits. The rift itself is a 'throat' that 'dilates' at regular intervals. A baby kaiju is birthed by Cesarian section, then Ron Perlman crawls out of a wound in its belly, covered in fluids. One kaiju gets Mako's erect sword rammed so hard down its throat that it's bisected. This is all Very Obvious.

But the kaiju, besides being gooey and female, don't do anything. There is maybe five minutes total of monsters attacking cities in the movie, and most of it takes place in a dream sequence. With a kaiju, what they destroy and how they destroy it is characterization. Consider how Clover decapitates the statue of liberty while screeching with wide-eyed terror in his film. I defy anyone to describe the actions of any kaiju here in even such basic terms.

What unsettles me in the film is that we open with the quick WWII montage - people used to believe in the fight (Rosie the Riveter!), but that iconography has been reduced to cliched fodder for action figures and videogames. You get the additional scene of the kid complaining about the old, crappy robot toy to cement this. But the message isn't that crass consumerism is bad. It's that we need new and better products to consume. The scene on the beach is a very obvious statement of 'this ain't your daddy's giant robot movie!' - which is definitely crass, no? It reminds of the mean-spirited scene in the Clash of the Titans remake where toy robot Bubo is thrown away, declared worthless now. Clash Of The Titans and Pacific Rim have the same screenwriter.

While I don't doubt Del Toro's genre intelligence (see the above reference to Plato), the end product seems mostly for the kind of 'fan' who says "of course I love star wars; I own all the actions figures!" and "of course I love kaiju films; I devoured that stupid shit when I was 12 years old!" You see this in the praise the film's unabashedness but not its quality. In cartoons, long scenes of characters back in base describing what's going on are a product of budgetary limitations. It's expensive to animate an expressive robot battle that conveys all the themes via punching. When Del Toro uses that 'anime style' here, it's like when deviantart people draw characters with anime side-mouths. It's an unnecessary compromise.

The fact is that Man of Steel deals with near-identical themes, but they show the ID4-hivemind terraforming laser, and they show humanity staring up in confusion as it looms over them. They show the mind-meld dream sequence where the apocalyptic plan is made visual. When Charlie Day has his encounter with the kaiju brain, he sits in a chair and tells us how cinematic it was - describing a zoetrope effect, 'like blinking your eyes really fast.' Thanks, Charlie! But why couldn't we see the kaijus battling T-Rexes on the cinema screen?

And when you really get down to it, Superman isn't a PMC.

(Now, watch as people use my demand for kaiju v. dinosaur big battels as evidence that I 'hate fun'.)

Act of Valor

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3525872&pagenumber=63&perpage=40#post411496993

On this note, Act of Valor is some next-level shit. It's a fascist film far superior to The Dark Knight Rises. It's pretty good!

Here's the trick: Act of Valor presents the terrorists as cool dudes, and the only characters with, well, characterization. The scene where the terrorist leader is shown the hi-tech suicide vests is deliberately modelled after the 'Q' scenes in 007 films. "You could hide this under a tuxedo." Act of valor is more successfully anti-Bond than most of these recent Craig films. It's primarily anti-cynicism.

A scene of a hostage rescue in the Costa Rican jungle is frequently intercut with 'insect vs. spider' imagery. Except it soon becomes clear that the navy seals constitute the web - the collection of weak threads that are strong when grouped together. (The fasces is literally referenced at one point.) So: what is the spider?

Here's the opening voiceover, presented as a letter written from a father to his son:

"Before my father died, he said the worst thing about growing old was that other men stopped seeing you as dangerous. I've always remembered that, how being dangerous was sacred, a badge of honor. You live your life by a code, an ethos. Every man does. It's your shoreline. It's what guides you home. And trust me, you're always trying to get home."

The way it's dropped right in there, it's a big dump of abstract information, and then you parse it: being perceived as dangerous creates the feeling of stability. That is what constitutes the titular 'acts of valor'. The film is about the act of storytelling.


http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3525872&pagenumber=65&perpage=40#post411505324


The opening scene of Act of Valor, after the voiceover'd prologue, shows the SEALs leaping from an aeroplane during a training exercise in San Diego. The cameraman pulls back and films the parachutists from above as they descend on a town of some sort. SMASH CUT to a street scene in the Phillipines. The camera glides precariously over the motorbikes. WHIP-PAN to a passing van and CUT to the interior, to show that it is being driven by a shifty terrorist.

Note that the scene of SEALs parachuting has absolutely no plot function. It's aesthetic. The SEALs travel in swift, synchronized motion, faces obscured and anonymous. They look downwards, with clear vision, onto the 'abstract' grid of houses. This grid view is then overlaid with simulated computer graphics with GPS coordinates. The smash cut carries their swift, forward motion into an entirely different scene, establishing that this is metaphorically what they will descend into. But, importantly, the POV is now moving independent of our supposed protagonists. The camera darts between cars and bikes, now fully 'disembodied' but subjective and unstable. This gliding motion is then violently interrupted by the terrorist, suddenly 'popping out of' the scene.

I think, earlier in this thread, that someone found it risible that one of the SEALs would get shot in the head and then suddenly regain consciousness, screaming obscenities, 15 minutes later. Really though, (beyond this being an actual Act of Valor (as they say in the commentary) (read: threatening story)) imagery of undeath is all over the film. Characters continually prepare for death, act as if they are dead already, or are literally half-dead - leading to the chilling scene where a torture victim is told 'it wasn't for nothing' by a SEAL showing her a crucial smartphone he retrieved during her rescue. In other words: the mutilation of your body was 'worth' the preservation of this data. Even the scenes of the heroes lovably interacting with their families are inappropriately superimposed with those onscreen graphics taken from Quantum of Solace (though far less obnoxiously overdesigned). In Quantum, this data is manipulated 'from above' by godlike experts. Here, the 'M' figure is simply a woman in a headset reading what she's shown. Everyone is subordinate to, and devoted to the maintenance of, the network of intelligence and information-gathering.

The villains of the film are differentiated from the heroes by way of their self-centeredness. "Die for us," they say, as opposed to the SEALS' "we will die for you". Implicitly, then, the terrorists and druglords stand in for the American government, conspicuously absent from the film, who are themselves ordering the SEALS to die for 'the cause' from afar. Paired sequences late in the film directly equate an American soldier to a suicide bomber. This is entirely in keeping with how the film destabilizes the protagonist/antagonist dynamic. The 'jihadist' is simultaneously a James Bond and Blofeld figure. The SEAL protagonists are both noble heroes and the faceless SWAT ciphers from a Chris Nolan film. I'm liking this one a lot.


http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3525872&pagenumber=93&perpage=40#post411767416

First of all, watch it. Yes, it is propaganda - but no more so than a given Marvel Studios production. I actually find it less objectionable because it is both upfront about its funding and so genuinely well-made that it has the nuance and subversive qualities of a John Milius or Michael Bay film (I'd actually place it somewhere between those two, aesthetically).

But as I said, it's basically a remake of Plan 9, touching on most of the same themes and plot points. It's just presented through the lens of millennial war films instead of 50's scifi, and told from the perspective of the 'humans'.

As in Plan 9, the narrative centers around a flawed, egoistic terrorist/artist/alien and his determination to succeed in spite of cuts to his already too-small budget and the general ignorance and indifference of the public he's trying to sway. On the other side are a group of blank ideologues, ostensibly the protagonists, defined more by their uniforms than anything else. Neither side is presented as terribly sympathetic thanks to this dynamic of banal, stupid good guys fighting an unapologetically evil underdog.

The shift in perspective and aesthetic from low to high budget allows the film to operate as a companion piece rather than a retread. It's 'politically incorrect' in a valuable way, refusing to go the tolerant, liberal Avatar route. It doesn't present terrorists as a bunch of sad poors who happened to stumble across some bombs. And a lot of the good qualities it finds in The Troops are sincerely good, though they are ultimately fighting to maintain the status quo of their (conspicuously offscreen, mostly unmentioned) superiors.

Sequences blurring fiction and documentary footage, though seamlessly integrated, play a role roughly analogous to Plan 9's stock footage. There's an essay to be written here.

But it's overall just a well-made, challenging film. Parts of it genuinely evoke Michael Mann, Kathryn Bigelow and even Terrence Malick. No joke.


http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3525872&pagenumber=183&perpage=40#post412454852

That's the feel of VALOR. Clearly you're not used to it!

But for real though, I thought the film was remarkably even-handed - along the lines of Red Dawn. It's no more 'propagandic' than Battleship or Iron Man, which likewise featured the involvement and support of the US military.

Iron Man is actually far worse for being a kid-movie pean to liberalism with one-dimensional terrorists and a token 'good Arab'.

Act of Valor is R-Rated, obviously political film with a nuanced presentation of both sides - arguably presenting them as 'both worse'. They overtly put the head terrorist in a Darth Vader role, not unaware that Darth was a uniquely powerful and somewhat sympathetic character in an uncomfortable alliance with the Empire. Darth Vader took being 'evil' extremely seriously - as an ethical commitment.

One thing that Batman 3 got right was in making Bane a similar Darth Vader figure, until reduced to a 'mere human'. Act of Valor does the same thing in making the terrorist a weirdly sympathetic figure who, contrary to what you'd expect, fails because he doesn't go far enough - succumbing to cowardice, megalomania and other human failings.

The good guys, on the other hand, are merely drones, filling the same role as the aliens from Aliens or Battle: Los Angeles. The film has no Ripley or Sgt. Nantz figure - unless you count the terrorist, who fails to be their equal.

It's in a conversation with these other films, and frankly up there with them,