A Look Back at Pacific Rim

Time for a thought exercise.

I want you to imagine a child. A kind of small, impressionable young boy. He's playing in the bathtub with toy boats and rubber ducks and basically having a real fun time. And then he's like, oh man, what if the boat was a boat and the duck was a Godzilla. And he smashes the duck into the boat, making fake Godzilla roars with his mouth and just reliving the same moments he just saw on TV in black and white, but, like, it's him doing it. And he's pretty happy about it.

Now I want you to imagine that the kid has grown up and their name is Guillermo Del Toro and they're given millions of dollars to do the duck and boat thing but instead of a rubber duck and a toy boat in a bathtub, it's a real boat and a giant CGI duck in the Industrial Light and Magic office. And instead of making fake Godzilla roars with his mouth, it's Tom Morello making weird cool noises on his 'lectric geetar on the soundtrack. You've pretty much just imagined how Pacific Rim was made. Probably.

Review: "The Lego Movie"

The Lego Movie is high art. I stand by that statement with 100% conviction, too. Despite being a laugh-a-second, impeccably-timed, must-see family comedy, it is smart. And by that I mean book-smarts smart; it brushes on so many themes, most of them having to do with Lego itself as an institution, that it kind of defies rational explanation. It's majestic in its audacity and it is audacious in its majesty, and directors Chris Lord and Phil Miller have bought an influence to the table that is completely bereft of irony and cynicism. Which isn't so impressive considering their prior masterworks, until you realize it's a goddamn Lego movie.

In a world entirely made of Lego, we follow our protagonist Emmett, a minifigure so devoid of imagination, personality and free will, that he is a literal blank slate. He lives by the rules. He follows the instructions. The benevolent leader President Business (secretly the villainous and super-evil Lord Business) has basically brainwashed the entire world to be unquestioning and passive; none moreso than Emmett, who is basically destined to be completely forgotten. His only defining feature is that he is utterly generic and indistinct... until he stumbles upon the Piece of Resistance, and fulfils an eight-and-a-half-year-old prophecy, becoming The Special - a Master Builder so powerful he can stop the ancient weapon known as The Kragle, and save all the universe. Chased by Business' robotic minions, the schizophrenic Good Cop/Bad Cop, and his own looming sense of inadequacy, it's a race against the clock to save the world before Lord Business destroys it.

How "Man of Steel" Made Being Alive Painful (And Other Observations)

Man of Steel made my being alive painful. While watching Man of Steel, the visual and aural bombardment - the speed, the jerkiness, the brightness and the screeching - made existence a chore. I refer explicitly, mind, to the last fifty or so minutes of the movie, the so-called "climax," in which the "characters" engaged in "fights". These scenes (if one is willing to afford them such a status) made me motionsick, and gave me a pounding headache. But it is the insult to my intelligence that truly made me wretch.

Review: "Pacific Rim"

If the idea of a director at the top of his game making a movie solely on the basis that it excites his inner child somehow doesn't appeal to you, I need you to stop reading. Right now. This film isn't for you. Go and watch The King's Speech or something droll. Alright? Alright.

So. Guillermo del Toro is indisputably an expert filmmaker, having mastered a fair degree of genres and amassing well-deserved popularity, and that might just be me, but I'm pretty certain it's an established fact. He explored similar "monster movie" ideas in films like Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy series - so, in a way, Pacific Rim is a culmination of his previous interests into one colossal, big-budget summer release - a film where giant robots punch giant lizards in the face, with all of the polish such a concept has rarely deserved (or afforded).