Looking for movies on Prime I saw Pacific Rim. It’s not at all the kind of thing I’d normally want to watch. I’m not a fan of Guillermo del Toro, at least not what I’ve seen by him. And modern sci-fi/monster movies? Naaah!
But call it my woman’s intuition, or whatever, I thought let’s try it. It is as dumb as I worried it might be. And it is like a Playstation Game turned into a movie. Another modern trend I’m not very keen on.
But, in its favour, first it’s just good silly old fashioned matinee movie fun. Second, it’s visually stunning enough to make up for its dumb-ass silliness. Too many modern movies like this rely on visuals, and do that quite well, but still fail as films ‘cause they’re so awful in just about every way possible.
This suffers from some of the most egregious of the faults of so much modern film entertainment, with the boneheaded reduction of human culture to a muscle bound masculinity that’s apparently totally unaffected by any form of post-Enlightenment waves of awareness, from Feminism to Woke.
But ironically it’s not regressive, so much as hyper-modern. It’s a complete and bizarre paradox of our times. A form of ultra-contemporary moron-ism, that attempts to shroud itself in anything from allusions to religion (Stacker Pentecost!? A scientist called Gottlieb, German for ‘God-love’!?*) to cyber-spirituality (the whole ‘drift’ thing’). And it’s incredibly infantile
I can’t say exactly why, but in this particular instance I just let my inner child enjoy the spectacle of the film. And that’s ultimately what it is. A spectacle for children (whatever their actual age). And a fairly fun one at that.
* God-Love’s ‘other half’ – mind-meld in ‘the Drift’! – is Newton; so science and religion can resolve their troublesome real world issues in the dark and watery neon-lit imaginarium of cinematic CGI!!! Nuts…