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Pacific Rim, Romance, and Conspiracy Theories
February 26, 2024
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Back in 2013 I saw Pacific Rim in the theater. Twice. And until it became something of a joke on Criticless, I hadn't really given it much thought since. The first time I saw the movie it was because a friend and I had an afternoon to kill. But that was also the summer I was helping at a summer camp for aspiring journalists (they exist! Or they did, anyway), and I suggested we go see it so I could teach the campers how to think critically about film.

For the record, they all hated it.

Now that it's on Netflix, I thought it might be fun to give it another look. Movies have changed quite a bit, as have I, in the last eleven years. So it can be good to go back and reassess the things we once enjoyed, or were at least found mildly amusing. Also, I'd just seen the original Godzilla and had kaiju on the brain. 

Not as headache inducing as you might expect.

But first, let's talk conspiracy theories. People in that sphere love to talk about the revelation of the method, which is the idea that popular culture sometimes disguises truth as fiction. Back in 2013 nobody I knew was talking about that. Watching it now, in 2024, not only am I all too aware of how The Simpsons predicted the future (or warned us in ways they knew we wouldn't understand), but also all the thoughts around extraterrestrials.

Now much of this stuff is common knowledge.

Spend any time at all listening to current paranormal podcasts and you'll hear about UFOs coming out of the ocean and/or through portals. Where do the kaiju in Pacific Rim come from? A portal in the ocean. There's a theory that the atomic bomb tests opened a portal to the spiritual realm, which makes sense when you realize how deeply into the occult those scientists were. In the movie, the monster attacks stop after a nuke is dropped through a portal to close it.

Literally no one was talking about those things in 2013. Except this movie. Weird, huh?

Anyway. Pacific Rim gets off to a promising start. After a brief prolog, slickly done, we meet the Hero, in his Ordinary World, who basically Saves The Cat before acquiring a Wound. He gets a Call to Adventure and Refuses it before Accepting. Why anyone would refuse a Call to drive a giant robot that smashes things is beyond me, but I guess that's why we suspend disbelief. At any rate, we're in familiar Story territory.

Joseph Campbell and Blake Snyder would approve.

But the longer the movie drags on, the more muted the familiar elements become. Sure, we're still having a good time with the giant robots smashing kaiju. We're distracted. It's only later that we find ourselves unfulfilled, and wonder why such an awesome movie failed to land. There's every reason to like this movie for someone willing to surrender to its silly concept.

But it's about as satisfying as Big Mac value meal when we were expecting a gourmet burger.

Simply put, the majority of Pacific Rim is spent sorting through the plot at the expense of the story. Stopping the kaiju is the puzzle. Figuring out how is the focus. Other things get sacrificed. It's the Christopher Nolan effect (sorry, not sorry). Back in film school my classmates and I would have thrived working out a story with this level of complexity. And to be honest, I'm not sure we could have done any better.

Or worse.

Of course, there's also studio interference. Today we love to talk about studio interference. It happens, though it should never be an excuse. Director del Toro may have had some misgivings, and if so, dug in his heels a little. The studio obviously wanted a movie that would play well at home and in the Asian market. Problem is, when you try to please two audiences one side will receive favor over the other.

As usual, US audiences got the smaller piece of the pie.

More than anything else, this movie needed some sexual tension. Some romance. I don't particularly like Starship Troopers, but it got this right. You can have soldiers and smooching without it being weird. Our hero Becket needed to go through the meat grinder and keep going out of his love for Mako to discover who he really was. Then he needed to find that love reciprocated. I don't need an actual sex scene, but notice that they never kiss. Maybe an interracial romance wouldn't have played overseas, but us Americans expect "a little bit of sex," as Sullivan's Travels points out so well.

No one ever came back from the dead because of a true friend's hug. 

If Pacific Rim had been allowed to explore that one thing and thread it through the story, it would arguably be more satisfying. Our Hero's Journey would have run deeper and been complete. As it is, all we get is a fun (if simple) puzzle and giant robots wrecking stuff.

I don't mean to sound down on this movie. What's there is really, really good. But what it's missing keeps it from being anything that resonates.

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New article is on the way, but I'm feeling too overwhelmed to crank it out.

00:01:17
Update!

I cover it in the the video, but I've got some new professional writing opportunities coming up and I'm trying to finish my next novel, all while navigating a change in schedule. So look for more pictures and videos, and new articles here on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

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He Who Rides on the Clouds - Conclusion

Leo and Britt come face to face with a prehistoric god a new cult on Saturn. Can they save the children doomed to sacrifice and escape?

He Who Rides on the Clouds - Conclusion
He Who Rides on the Clouds - Part 2

Leo and Brittany have arrived on Saturn, but not in the way they'd hoped. Captured by a pagan cult, they don't have time to stop the unthinkable from happening. But they'll try anyway.

Content warning: language and sexual situations.

He Who Rides on the Clouds - Part 2
He Who Rides on the Clouds - Part 1

Star Wars is dead and the more apathy you show the faster it will be allowed to rest in peace.

Instead of griping about what Disney has done, why don't you listen to my space adventure story? He Who Rides on the Clouds is supernatural noir that spans space and time. When children on Mars go missing, Alexis Leonard and his ex-wife Brittany go looking. Their search leads them to a pagan temple and an ancient religion.

If you'd like to buy the story and read ahead, it's available in the Fall 2020 issue of Cirsova, available here: https://amzn.to/3yRRywY

He Who Rides on the Clouds - Part 1
No Posts This Week

Hey everyone, with BasedCon coming up this weekend I'm busy catching up on things and getting ready to go. But I'll be back next week with lots of new thoughts!

Big Changes Ahead

Hey Friends, I've got some big life changes on the horizon and should be able to create more content. What would you like to see? More fiction? More fitness? Maybe you'd like more video or audio content. Let me know in the comments.

Also, if you aren't a paid subscriber, what would get you to pay $5 a month?

Is Ladyballers Doomed from the Start?

The most honest analysis I've seen.

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F1 is Modern Western

As a nation, the United States is unique. We don’t share a genetic heritage, but a creed. Americans and our ideas come from all over the world. But we’re at our best when take those outside ideas and make them our own. Everything we have came from another culture, but there was a time when we could take things and collectively make them better.

Democracy? Check. Rock’n’roll? Check. Heck! Chinese food? Yes, we did.

Don’t hate. You know I’m right.

One of the greatest art forms we’ve given the world is the western genre. While rooted in courtly romances of King Arthur, we took the idea of the man on horseback who makes things right on his quest for something spiritual and made it distinctly American. Most of the time, these stories aren’t historically accurate, but that’s not the point. They’re soaked in the American ethos. For better or for worse, the western has become the American myth, even more so than 1776.

And the cool thing about myths is that you can take them and tell other stories. 

Star Trek (and later Firefly) took the western to space. 

A few weeks ago I was able to see F1: The Movie on IMAX, and I had high hopes. Director Joseph Krasinski had proved himself with Top Gun: Maverick, which is about as American as a modern movie can get. But mostly, I just wanted to see if he could do with racecars what he’d done with fighter jets. In that regard, I was everything I’d hoped it would be. The idea of Americanism didn’t even cross my mind, since F1 is primarily a European sport.

Boy, was I surprised.

Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes with all the careless cool of Paul Newman in his prime and a Steve McQueen swagger. While Pitt has never played a cowboy and isn’t a racecar driver in real life, Newman and McQueen played both, and did both. Hayes has been keeping himself busy with no-name races since an F1 crash nearly killed him some 30 years before. But when Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), an old friend and rival, needs some wins to save the team, he tracks down Sonny.

And the old dog knows a few tricks.

Naturally, his tactics put him at odds with his teammate, Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris), and his cocky attitude is a big red flag to the team’s engineer, Kate McKenna (Kerry Conden). So the movie all the tropes of a sports film, and I don’t think I need to summarize further. But it’s not a sports film. Or rather, it’s not just a sports a film. Surprise, surprise, it’s the western myth transposed into a racing a story.

It’s spelled out in the trailer, but it didn’t strike me until the very end.

Kate calls Sonny Hayes an “old school rough and tumble cowboy” in a line used in the marketing. When he arrives in the garage, only Ruben knows him. Sonny is the stranger in town. Like James Garner in Support Your Local Sheriff, his method of restoring order and winning is unorthodox and effective. Like Shane, in that Alan Ladd classic, he’s guarded about his past. And like John Wayne in The Searchers and so many other westerns, Sonny Hayes is the outsider who must leave civilization once he’s made it civilized for those who belong there.

But he doesn’t.


Perhaps the hardboiled crime story, another uniquely American genre, is also an outgrowth of the western. Philip Marlow is the man who must walk down mean streets, who is not himself mean. As Raymond Chandler said, “He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.” Basically, the man he’s describing is dangerous, but not cruel. Dispassionate in taking revenge, and restrained by a code of honor.

But destined to be lonely, nonetheless.

Why we’ve made that an essential part of the American is a topic for another time. But there it is. And it’s the story of Sonny Hayes. At the end of the movie [SPOILER], he rides off into the sunset as the credits roll. The western isn’t dead. It’s still there, in essence, speaking to our hearts in different ways.

Nothing more American than that. 

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Girl-Power Isn't the Problem: Stop Treating Movies Like TV Pilots

Last weekend I was able to sneak off the theater for a screening of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. Did I feel silly, telling the high school girl at the ticket counter, “One for Ballerina, and a small drink”? Well, not in the moment. 

I probably drank a liter of cherry vanilla Coke Zero, and that didn’t feel so great.

Plenty of box office analysts and Hollywood types are wracking their brains, trying to figure out why movies like Furiosa and Ballerina aren’t drawing huge crowds. Mad Max and John Wick are popular franchises, but apparently telling the stories of the women in those worlds isn’t working. Even if the movies are pretty good.

I’ve seen both, and they’re pretty good.

Some are arguing that no one will go near a movie that looks like it’s feminist girl-bossing. Others counter that movies like Alien and Kill Bill are female-led action films that were successful. Now, I’m not going to say that Ballerina is on par with those modern day classics. But I will say that, as a man watching the movie, it didn’t offend me. The movie never challenged me to confront any internalized misogyny. The small girl doesn’t take down John Wick in hand-to-hand combat.

Honestly, if you like franchise, whether you’re male or female, you should watch Ballerina.

In short, from a purely cinematic experience perspective, neither Furiosa nor Ballerina would be any better or worse with a male lead. Maybe that’s a hot take. But that’s mine, for whatever it’s worth. Well, okay, I wouldn’t watch a movie called Ballerina if it stared a dude. Nevertheless, I think you get my point. Petite women warriors aside, the plots and action are exactly as expected.

So what’s the deal?

Well, what no one seems to have noticed is that Ripley and The Bride weren’t replacing anyone. As we were watching their movies for the first time, we weren’t thinking about other characters for whom we already had a preference. Movies are more like TV than TV right now, and replacement characters have always been a hard sell, regardless of gender. We all remember Sam and Diane. Who still talks about Sam and Rebecca (even though Kirstie Alley won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the part)? I had to look up her name. 

No, they aren’t technically replacing them. It’s a spin-off, set in the same world.

Spin-offs tend to succeed when the characters are already well established (eg: Frasier). Furiosa and Ballerina are more like backdoor pilots, where new characters are dropped in for a single episode to sell us on the idea of a new show. This technique is very hit and miss on TV, and I can’t think of a single example of this working in a movie franchise. Film and television are very different mediums, and should be treated as such.

Still, if it doesn’t work on TV, it’s probably not gonna work at the movies. Not where new characters and spin-offs are concerned. 

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Going Back to 1995

Maybe I’m just getting old, but it doesn’t feel like we had the thriving and distinct pop culture of past generations. Has there been a look or stye, or feeling, that defines this moment? Everything seems to have stagnated for the last twenty years. And it’s not as if I don’t pay attention. 

It’s making me nostalgic. 

Consequently, for the rest of the year, I’m prioritizing movies from 1995, the year I was twelve. At that time, my family didn’t really go to the theater, and when we did rent VHS tapes, more often than it is was older Disney movies or entirely forgettable Christian titles. Now that I’ve grown tired of trying to keep up with new releases, not there’s much worth watching anyway, it feels like a good time to catch up on those 30 year old movies that have become ingrained in what’s left of our pop culture.

So over on Criticless, I made a list.

Some of these are movies I’ve seen before, but not in a long time. Others will be first time watches for me. There’s really no rhyme or reason to what I put on my list. It’s just movies that either interest me, or are currently in my collection, sadly unwatched. As things become available on streaming, I may add to the list. And if I don’t get to everything before the end of the year, no big deal.

Hopefully, they aren’t going anywhere. 

I’ll be posting some reviews and analysis as I go, so be sure to follow me here. 

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