Wednesday, July 17, 2013


Why I <3 Pacific Rim




A List Of The Reasons As To Why I <3 Pacific Rim, Which Is A Movie

That I <3 A Lot

(because sometimes a thing is so awesome you just have to spend a lot of words and time just talking about how awesome it is)

***but yo if you haven’t seen the movie for the love of god don’t read this as it pretty much lists like every single thing that happens in the movie***


And here is the list:

cause “don’t get cocky”

cause this fight yo



cause so many match cuts oh the glorious match cuts

cause Charlie Day is just the best scientist

cause it’s about resistance

cause not only is there is a guy named Hercules Hansen...


 ...but there is a guy named Hercules Hansen who actually looks like he should be named Hercules Hansen

cause the Dads oh god the Dads

cause fortune favors the brave, dude

cause the Tokyo Kaiju attack is exactly what a real tokyo Kaiju attack would look like and that alone would have been enough to etch the movie in my brain forever

cause the alley shot in Tokyo (you know the shot)

cause the shot, of lil Mako hiding behind a dumpster in an alley from a battle of two Giant Fucking Things, backs up its already significant aesthetic power with even more significant emotional heft and in a world of shooting for “trailer moments” that just does not happen enough



cause that little girl fuckin killed it!

cause every single element of a fictional world centered around one of the most basic conflicts imaginable is still somehow startlingly original

cause as the dudes on the escalator out behind me said, “they don’t don’t overexplain anything”

cause they don’t because they don’t have to, they just make it work

cause in every aspect of the movie, they just make it work

cause the whole movie is people just making it work

cause more thought went into just the color palette of this movie than probably 90% of the things that have ever been done by anyone


cause it’s not a sequel or reboot or adaptation for once

cause it’s the least grey-blue tinted blockbuster/action movie I have seen in like… a long time

cause every shot of the fucking Jaegers makes me feel like it’s the first shot of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park

cause FOR MY FAMILY!!!

cause FOR MY FAMILY!!!! AND THEN A FUCKIN SWORD

cause when that happened a sentence went through my head and it was: “this is the most beautiful movie I have ever seen”

cause there are no “plot twists”

cause you can take a kid to see it without tearing their faith in humanity to shreds and/or traumatizing them

cause I wish it had been PG instead of PG-13 so more kids could have seen it

cause Stacker Pentecost, Hannibal Chau, Raleigh and Yancy Becket, Mako Mori, and Chuck and Hercules Hansen are the actual names of characters in an 190 million dollar movie

cause there’s a lil bulldog! how could there not be a lil bulldog

cause all it took to get over the “hero’s refusal” was for Idris Elba ask him whether he’d rather face the end of the world inside a Jaeger

cause the Kaiju are the fuckin dinosaurs!!!

cause the Kaiju are totally Saiyans too think about it though!!!!

cause this dude...



...IS JUST STRAIGHT UP PULLED OUT OF SOME ANIME OMG

cause “numbers are as close was we get to the handwriting of god” “…what?”

cause Charlie Day built a machine out of junk and connected with a Kaiju’s brain

cause it is not about the “dark side” of anything

cause the main American guy and the douchey Australian guy look so laughably fucking similar to the point where at the first screening I thought the Australian guy had won the fistfight and there is no way this wasn’t on purpose

cause alllll the steadicam

cause scientist buddy high five!

cause canceling the apocalypse and then actually stopping a specifically designed apocalypse clock

CAUSE THEY DIDNT KISS AT THE END BUT HAD A MOMENT OF GENUINE CONNECTION AND RELIEF AND THE STORY WAS ALL THE BETTER FOR IT

cause the conveniently placed toilet

cause the Russian giant robot and giant robot pilot team...



...are the most Russian fucking giant robot and giant robot pilot team anyone could possibly have ever imagined

cause distinct fighting styles!

cause reusing the same weapons and getting to know/feel them instead of just breaking out new throwaway gadgets

cause of striking the most happy medium between respecting the gravity of PTSD and making a giant action movie for everyone that at least I personally could imagine

cause holy shit those cockpits

cause I once got lectured over the internet by some dickhead about how the word "awesome" has lost its original meaning of instilling godlike rapture or whatever not just "cool" or something as it's usually used today or something I dunno I stopped reading but WELL GUESS WHAT DUDE THIS MOVIE IS THAT TOO AND THE AMOUNT OF AWE IS FAR MORE THAN JUST SOME

cause the 3d actually worked

cause Ron Perlman plays a Hong Kong-based one-eyed black market Kaiju body parts dealer who wears gold plated shoes and is named after his favorite historical figure and his second favorite Szechuan restaurant in Brooklyn because of course he does


cause despite the absolutely ridiculous scale of everything in the movie, I’m pretty sure said shoes are still the largest thing in the entire movie

cause the set of the Alaskan wall could probably sustain like 10 movies entirely on its own, and it was only in the movie for like five minutes

cause I'm pretty sure there is an entire movie to be told about this guy:


--and HE was only in the movie for like five SECONDS

cause the attention to detail in this movie actually makes me worry about Guillermo Del Toro’s mental health a little

cause there’s a hologram interface in a movie that doesn’t look like every other hologram interface in a movie

cause everything every giant robot and giant monster did made you feel like you were experiencing everything every giant robot and giant monster did for real

cause dialogue that would be cheesy if used to drive character can incite cheers and laughter and fist pumps when driven by character, and this is a movie about people who drive things

CAUSE A GIANT ROBOT HIT A GIANT MONSTER WITH A CARGO SHIP WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT CMON

cause I really don’t need to tell you awesome Idris Elba is as the ultimate resistanceleader/general/dad/greatestJaegerpilotever-man

cause right before he dies, Mako says “I love you sensei” in unsubtitled Japanese

cause the accents are all over the place

cause seriously though, the 3d not only worked but had the coolest fucking particle effects ever and usually those are the most annoying thing

cause “you and I both know the Kaiju has a second, smaller brain it needs to control its whole body, like  dinosaur"

cause future Hong Kong


cause the opening shot of the tear actually tears you into another world

cause the everything from the largest, beaten-to-hell Jaeger to the smallest street sign in Hong Kong is there to show you that the world of this movie isn’t just exist in a future, but that it also has a past

cause I will ingest any piece of media about the Russian team in any format you give me. seriously. I will take a fuckin flipbook if I have to

cause the movie opens with definition of “kaiju” and “jaeger” and they are exactly what you want them to be

cause said opening is in 2d in green font on a black computer screen

cause the douchey australian guy only doesn’t win the Hong Kong battle because of the EMP, so he might actually still be a better pilot than the main dude, but he never even brings it up and sacrifices himself for him anyway

cause it is an analog movie in a (literal) digital world

cause Mako Mori is an intelligent, courageous, powerful Asian woman who speaks English in a strong, non-European accent and is not for one moment mocked, victimized, objectified, or punished by the movie for any of these qualities

cause in addition in to meeting this very low (yet still rarely met by Hollywood) bar Mako Mori FUCKING ROCKS

cause humans have been fighting monsters and gods and giants and giants in stories for as long as we’ve told them, and it turns out we're still just as good at it as ever

cause there is exactly zero cynicism in this movie

cause simplicity is underrated

cause the dedication

cause you can always find me in the drift

cause a ton of rappers are about to start talking about how their rims are so large, they call them pacific

cause this movie is going to make thousands of kids either explode, go and become the next Guillermo Del Toro, or both (and in that order)


cause the sounnnnnnd

cause the score will not leave my head and that’s cool because I do not want it to

cause when I started writing this it was going to be an actual article but then I started listing all the things I wanted to include and now here we are 1350 words later

cause that same has happened every time I’ve tried to have a conversation about it

cause I expected to be hyped as fuck after, but instead I just felt… at peace?

cause a movie about giant fucking robots fighting giant fucking monsters made me thrilled, terrified, crack up, fist pump, applaud, turned me back into a little kid, and then made me feel at peace

cause we live in a world where hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on a move about giant robots fighting giant monsters and it was worth every penny

cause of how many equally <3-worthy things I have probably forgotten to write down even now

cause I am about to watch a whole lot of Kaiju movies now

cause the idea that we should work together is so seemingly simple and obvious and cliche, and yet when you look at the world you see that maybe it’s not, and that maybe it’s actually the most important thing you could ever think

and cause maybe there is no better way to think that thought than like this:



err, like this:


--err...


--errrr...


(awww)

--ah fuck it was just gonna be a picture of a giant robot killing a giant monster with a sword in orbit but if you really want to see that done actual justice just go see the movie on largest, most three dimensional screen possible. I will probably be there too.

<3

--hst