Pacific Rim
Dec. 14th, 2013 10:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raven(Bad mental health day today, just fyi: not sure if the following makes all that much sense, but whatevs.)
So, after you all told me to, I finally watched Pacific Rim. Wow, it really was a film about monsters and giant robots. Er.
I enjoyed it, though! I think it is the best two-hour film about monsters and giant robots I have seen, or am likely to see. I think it's very visually witty and sharp: Shim liked the fish being startled by falling Jaegers; I liked the wonderful shot of one crashing through an office block and stopping just in time to set a Newton's cradle going; I love the colourful, not-at-all-sanitised style, so there's rain and splashback and gooey kaiju brains all over the place. And of course I really like Stacker Pentecost and Mako - I love both of them, and I love how they interact, and I love seeing how the other characters ebb and flow around them both. I hesitate to say, it feels cool and stylish, because hey, representation of actual non-white people is not something you do to be cool, but I guess what I mean is, to do that, rather than the usual boring shit about white people, even though it's in a movie about giant robots: that automatically makes it a ton more realistic and believable to me, and that's pretty cool and it underlines all their other visual and narrative choices, so I'm willing to believe that when monsters come out from under the ocean, this is how it's going to go.
The problem is I'm never fannish about movies - I have the attention span of a gnat; you need to push me into watching episode after episode, or reading chapter after chapter, before I get that switch flicked - but what I like about it in the fannish way is the Drift. (I'm a sucker for fiction that is ambitious enough to try and create a new kind of human interpersonal relationship: which is why I adore telepathy as a trope and keep writing Star Trek AUs just so I can create more telepaths, and also, this is why I loved Temeraire, actually - because of the unique, not-romantic not-friendship not-familial relationship between Laurence and Temeraire.) I kind of want to use this idea for a tonne of other people, which is why I'm sort of toying with writing a fic where some people (Hermione and Tonks (and Ginny?); Cecil and Dana?; probably Ben and April) are, and are not, Drift-compatible, and hijinks ensue. Is there fic about this already? There must be. Anyway, please tell me if you have thoughts on this movie, I would love to hear them.
So, after you all told me to, I finally watched Pacific Rim. Wow, it really was a film about monsters and giant robots. Er.
I enjoyed it, though! I think it is the best two-hour film about monsters and giant robots I have seen, or am likely to see. I think it's very visually witty and sharp: Shim liked the fish being startled by falling Jaegers; I liked the wonderful shot of one crashing through an office block and stopping just in time to set a Newton's cradle going; I love the colourful, not-at-all-sanitised style, so there's rain and splashback and gooey kaiju brains all over the place. And of course I really like Stacker Pentecost and Mako - I love both of them, and I love how they interact, and I love seeing how the other characters ebb and flow around them both. I hesitate to say, it feels cool and stylish, because hey, representation of actual non-white people is not something you do to be cool, but I guess what I mean is, to do that, rather than the usual boring shit about white people, even though it's in a movie about giant robots: that automatically makes it a ton more realistic and believable to me, and that's pretty cool and it underlines all their other visual and narrative choices, so I'm willing to believe that when monsters come out from under the ocean, this is how it's going to go.
The problem is I'm never fannish about movies - I have the attention span of a gnat; you need to push me into watching episode after episode, or reading chapter after chapter, before I get that switch flicked - but what I like about it in the fannish way is the Drift. (I'm a sucker for fiction that is ambitious enough to try and create a new kind of human interpersonal relationship: which is why I adore telepathy as a trope and keep writing Star Trek AUs just so I can create more telepaths, and also, this is why I loved Temeraire, actually - because of the unique, not-romantic not-friendship not-familial relationship between Laurence and Temeraire.) I kind of want to use this idea for a tonne of other people, which is why I'm sort of toying with writing a fic where some people (Hermione and Tonks (and Ginny?); Cecil and Dana?; probably Ben and April) are, and are not, Drift-compatible, and hijinks ensue. Is there fic about this already? There must be. Anyway, please tell me if you have thoughts on this movie, I would love to hear them.
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on 2013-12-15 10:40 am (UTC)no subject
on 2013-12-15 08:29 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-12-16 08:52 am (UTC)no subject
on 2013-12-16 08:53 am (UTC)no subject
on 2013-12-14 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-12-14 11:10 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-12-14 11:56 pm (UTC)I think it's an enjoyable movie, and I love that Mako has a character arc that is largely non-romantic. LOVE Stacker Pentecost. Wish they had kept in the explanation as to why Chuck is so angry at Herc. Wish there had been more (read: any) character development of the Wei triplets and the Kaidonovskys.
Del Toro said he didn't want the Rangers to have a military structure but it's pretty damn impossible not to have a military structure in a war. And it's clear they DID have a military structure; he just didn't want it to be completely defined or uniformed. One thing that is in the novelization but not in the book: they nuke San Francisco once and Sydney twice to kill kaiju, and yet it doesn't seem to keep people from living there. Hmm. Sydney's lovely as is SF and yet I find that somewhat hard to believe considering modern nukes. While I understand that he wanted to have a creature that only giant robots could defeat, it seemed to me that air and ocean forces could at least create some sort of a delaying action with missiles and so forth.
It was a universe that gave me enough that it inspired me to write fic that is at 60K+ words right now and will probably be 120K when I'm done, so that's a strong statement.
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on 2013-12-15 12:45 am (UTC)Sorry about the bad mental health day. *hugs*
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on 2013-12-16 08:54 am (UTC)no subject
on 2013-12-16 08:57 am (UTC)no subject
on 2015-08-09 12:50 pm (UTC)