"Pacific Rim" - - Failed At What It Wasn't

"Pacific Rim" is an average movie. And that breaks my heart.

On a scale of 1 to 10, no scratch that. It's better to compare it like this. "Pacific Rim" is near the same level of the first "Transformers" movie. It's loud and dumb, the characters are just broad shades of nothing, and every one speaks their lines like they're reciting them for the movie trailer. There's nothing special about this movie,  this movie just exists, and if it never existed, we never would have missed it.

Here's the thing, though. I'm old enough to remember seeing "The Matrix" opening night at the movie theater. And I'm watching it, and back then we didn't have all these movie spoiling websites and nerd gossip, we just had the commercials. And the commercial was: "What is the Matrix?"



"Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it for yourself." That was it, those were the ads they aired, you had no idea what the movie was about. They just showed you all those crazy action scenes and it just set your brain on fire. 'No movie can be that cool,' I thought to myself.

But as I'm watching "The Matrix" for the first time opening night, I realized I was watching something important. This was a movie that was a bench mark for my generation. It was the cynicism of the 90's portrayed as "The Agent" and "The Matrix" as literal constructs. Grunge music and gangster rap were both a "fuck you" to the mainstream. "The Matrix" was blowing up the ivory towers of suits and ties and telling us that it was all an illusion.

The Internet was new to us, we didn't know where it was headed. "The Matrix" embraced the mystery in a New Wave cyberpunk fantasy. It blasted Marilyn Manson across TV ads that played during episodes of family sitcoms.

Instead of the beefy action heroes of Rambo and the Terminator, it gave us a computer hacker named Neo, and Trinity, the (gasp!) female action hero who starts the film off by kicking ass. No disrespect to Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley, they're also in the action hero hall of fame. But they start off as women who turn hard over the course of their films. Trinity knows her shit from the get-go. These heroes were us. Even if we could never be as strong as Arnold, we could be the Chosen One. It was about fate. It was about believing you could do something, even if reality said it couldn't be done.

We could learn kung fu.

"The Matrix" was the beginning of a new era of action films. I'm not saying it was the best movie ever, but it did change things. I remember walking out of it, mind blown, and I knew the new "Star Wars" movie was coming out soon but I didn't know how it would compare to this film. And when "The Phantom Menace" did come out it seemed so old fashioned. It was like hearing Nirvana play a live set for the first time and then walking across the street and going to a Bon Jovi concert. Things had changed, and there was no going back.

So here's my beef with "Pacific Rim," and it's *sigh* you know, the movie is what the movie is, it's boring and dumb. There's one real monster-in-the-city-robot-kicking-ass action scene in it, but most of what you see in the trailer is a montage of the first five minutes of the film. The bulk of the movie is people talking about how much they want to get in giant robots and beat up monsters and the last twenty minutes they get in robots and beat up giant monsters under the water in the dark. The end. That's my review.

Here's my issue, though: That is not what this movie should have been.

I'm not going to go piece by piece and pick apart the plot, I'm not going to try to say I could make a better movie . . .but this movie should have been important. It could have been, easily, the "Matrix" for the post 9/11 generation.

Giant monsters destroying cities. Unneccsarry carnage, people are dying and we don't know why. We don't know how the creatures are getting here, or why they want to kill us. But they just won't stop. It happens over and over again. The people on the ground hope the solidiers know how to save them, the soldiers hope they survive another battle with an unrelenting enemy.

As I was watching this movie, I realized most of the audience would be about this girl's age, watching those towers fall, and being just as helpless as she was.
















But she grows up in an uncertain world where terror can strike at any moment. We grew up as well, and while our monsters didn't come from the ocean, they came from everywhere else. They attacked our temples where Sikhs worshipped, they attacked our movie theaters and our elementary schools and our marathons.

I would have loved to see more action in "Pacific Rim" but imagine a subplot where the first creature got out as a mistake, and it gets blown up. So why are they sending creature after creature? To avenge what the aliens perceive as the murder of one of their own. Give it some political weight. Why not have the creatures' overlords say "You know what, manifest destiny, we are here to make this world a better place. Oh by the way, worship us or die." Or just have them be crazy monsters who have no agenda, just like the crazy guys who stab 20 kids at school just because? Instead we just get "Oh they want to invade us because resources/that's what they do/blah blah blah" same old crap we've already seen in the Avengers, Man of Steel, War of the Worlds, etc, etc.

And if the Kaiju were the personification of terror rather than stock movie monsters, the Jaegers would represent the best of us. They are the ones to stand up against this terror. But we all have to work together to build them. We all have to have the political will to put all things aside to stop evil. It takes two pilots to operate but it takes a nation to build them. Instead the movie starts off with some stereotypical bureaucrat saying "Oh, we're cutting your funding in 8 months to build a wall" so the good guys have to sell monster guts to get the money to repair their trillion dollar war machines. Ridiculous.

How we move forward as a nation is going to be based on the actions of those kids who grew up post 9/11. My generation, like "The Matrix" itself, is too cynical. We believe by it's very nature that the system is corrupt so how do you cure the cancer of a system that worships cancer? The generation behind us, the Baby Boomers, is too invested in the system, so they have everything to lose by change. They will do nothing. So what will the kids who are growing up now do?

The moral of "Pacific Rim" is even though America makes a shitty robot that is almost a decade older than every other country's robot, it's still the best cause America. It's ok for two adult men to fight over "the honor" of an adult woman even though that's one of the leading causes of death among men in real life. I'd love to see Trinity put up with that kind of macho bullshit.

This generation needs a "Matrix." It needs a movie that tells them "Shit happens, and it's going to keep happening, until you do something about it."

"Pacific Rim" is not that movie.