On the Big Screen: PACIFIC RIM (2013)

It would have been hard to believe in 2008 that Guillermo del Toro would not make another movie for five years. The field seemed wide open for the Mexican horror specialist after the pop success of his second Hellboy movie quickly followed the arthouse triumph of Pan's Labyrinth. Many projects were announced afterward, but only now has he released his next film. Most notoriously, he had to bail out of The Hobbit after Warner Bros. kept him and Peter Jackson dangling for an unconscionable period. His own dream project, an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, is a long-term tenant in development hell, Hollywood balking repeatedly at the story's lack of action, female characters, etc. Thwarted, del Toro turned to a project he'd been thinking about since at least 2010: a homage to Japanese monster movies (kaiju eiga) pitting massive mecha against beasts from the bottom of the sea. The actual idea was Travis Beacham's; he and del Toro co-wrote the screenplay, which proves as much an homage to military aviation movies as it does an amped-up monster movie. Just about every cliche you can imagine from such pictures shows up in Pacific Rim, making the plot pretty predictable and underscoring the superficiality of all the characters. Right there some del Toro fans will be disappointed, but the director's main concern this time is with spectacle as an end unto itself. If he can deliver that and instill a sense of wonder like that his own generation felt watching the original Godzilla films, Pacific Rim will be a success in spite of its shallow human element.

By one standard, the film fails miserably as an homage to kaiju eiga because Beacham and del Toro's kaijus are just about completely lacking the personality the old men in suits sometimes managed to give their characters. If Roland Emmerich's Godzilla erred by rethinking the monster as some sort of animal, Pacific Rim errs by making its monsters into aliens. The kaiju -- so the world dubs them -- burst from an apparent dimensional rift at the bottom of the Pacific to attack cities on either side of the ocean. Existing military technology (the first attack takes place this very year) can take down the kaiju, but it takes a long time during which the monsters can do unacceptable damage. Working on a familiar level of childish intuition, the world's military and scientific experts determine that giant humanoid robots that can punch, throw and, yes, shoot the kaiju will make more effective defenders of humanity. In a long prologue, the experts are proven right to the point where kaiju become objects of pop-culture mockery -- but like bacteria, our enemies are adaptive, learning new ways to defend themselves and overwhelm the jaegers -- though no Germans are shown piloting the robots, they are dubbed auf deutsch, begging the question why this film isn't called Jaegermeister. Instead, the countries with skin in the game -- the U.S., Canada, Australia, Russia, China and Japan -- what about Mexico, Guillermo? -- take the lead in robot combat. The complicated robots require double brainpower to operate, with pilot teams bound by family ties preferred. The Americans, for instant, use two brothers to pilot "Gipsy Danger," but you know that can't last.

Needless to say, the surviving brother (Charlie Hunnam) goes into a five-year funk, while the jaeger program is dropped in favor of erecting impregnable sea walls to protect Pacific Coast cities. Needless as well to say, one of those walls gets pregged, and soon our hero's old commander (Idris Elba) picks him off a wall-building project to man one of the last jaegers for a last-ditch defense against newer, better kaiju. By now, scientists -- or at least the two eccentrics working with the jaeger program -- have figured out that the kaiju are coming through a portal that can be closed by dropping a big enough bomb down its "throat." By the way, aren't you getting tired of superhero or sci-fi movies in which everything hinges on closing or opening a dimensional portal? If not, Pacific Rim is the movie for you. But before any throats get bombed, our hero has to bond (or "drift") with the obligatory Japanese character (Rinko Kikuchi) -- and I'm not being sarcastic; a Japanese character is obligatory in a kaiju eiga homage -- who has relatives of her own to avenge, as well (it emerges) as surrogate-daddy issues with our overprotective stalwart commander. Our mismatched team must prove themselves to skeptical peers, including an almost equally obligatory arrogant jerk, defying the rules (as American heroes must) if necessary, while on top of everything else, our stalwart commander has the Movie Disease, though in a twist on the formula the blood comes out of his nose. Do you think he'll die of it???

I probably could have spared you all that since I've already said that the spectacle makes or breaks the film. The results are mixed. I have a feeling I made the right choice not watching Pacific Rim in 3D, since, like so many films presented that way, del Toro's is inexcusably murky. On top of that, he sometimes films the kaiju-jaeger fights so close that clarity is lost, especially considering that they almost always fight in the rain and in the ocean. One of the reasons the kaiju lack personality, despite each one getting a code name you may be expected to remember at the toy store, is that you never really see them clearly. Del Toro is too ambitious a director to film the battles as straight-on as they did at Toho back in the day, but when you never see the kaiju straight on they end up as so many roaring blobs, a few of which at least have semi-distinctive heads. It's probably no accident that the best action scene is on land, when Gipsy Danger must battle a kaiju in the streets of Hong Kong. When del Toro deigns to give you a clear shot of a jaeger throwing a picture-perfect punch or using a freighter like a club, Pacific Rim delivers as promised. Overall, his pictorial sensibility is too strong for the picture ever to fall too long into incoherence. It often looks pop-perfect, for which the production designers and cinematographer Guillermo Novarro deserve shares of credit. Inevitably, no matter how much del Toro professes his love for monster movies, this film will look thematically impersonal compared even to the Hellboy films, but a few moments when his horror-film sensibility shows itself are among the film's best. Both scenes tap into the nightmarish fantasy of being personally persecuted by giant monsters. In a flashback, a weeping child toddles through a devastated city, perhaps a lone survivor, one shoe on and one off, as a kaiju approaches. In comic mode, a newborn monster literally targets a specific person, a comedy-relief scientist who inadvertently taps into the kaiju hive-mind. As far as acting goes, the comic scientists (Charlie Day is American; Burn Gorman a Colin Clive-ish Brit) are tolerably obnoxious, welcome for at least having personalities, while del Toro mascot Ron Perlman puts in his expected yeoman work as a dealer in black-market kaiju parts. As our drifting heroes, Hunnam and Kikuchi are no less than earnestly likable, while Idris Elba is painfully overqualified for his cliched commander role and needs to get out of the genre ghetto fast -- but Thor 2 is next, I'm afraid. Ideally, Pacific Rim's spectacle should redeem its unimaginative characterizations, but it doesn't do so by as decisive a margin as I'd hoped for. It's an entertaining film and those who like what del Toro likes will like it, but it wasn't unreasonable to expect something more than mere entertainment from any del Toro film, and a sense of disappointment may linger once the entertainment is forgotten.

On the Big Screen: SUPER 8 (2011)

Think of a pastiche as a remake of a film that doesn't actually exist. J.J. Abrams's homage -- to use a euphemism -- to Steven Spielberg is just such a movie. For audiences of a certain age, it's impossible not to feel that you've seen it before, and that seems to be the point of the project. Abrams is out to fill an invisible hole in Spielberg's filmography, with the master's approval and the Amblin Entertainment seal. It's an imitation of the director, not a commentary on his work, though Abrams tries to distinguish Super 8 with variations on Spielberg themes. So a young hero has to deal with an absent mother rather than an absent father, and an alien is not quite benevolent. But in all the superficial essentials it's recognizably a Spielberg film (or a Spielberg production) of a certain age, as well as a nostalgic visit to 1979 and its popular music. Moreover, it's self-consciously a Spielberg pastiche or homage. Indeed, Super 8 is nothing if not self-conscious about itself. A film about juvenile filmmakers that is also a Spielberg pastiche could not be other than self-conscious, and its overt self-consciousness about being a Spielberg pastiche and a film about the wonder of moviemaking is part of the big dare that defines the whole project. Abrams knows that he's made a self-conscious Spielberg pastiche and he knows that you probably know it. So he goes further to unveil the mechanics not only of moviemaking but of story construction. A little auteur has read somewhere that giving a character a love interest will increase the audience's emotional involvement with the character. So he recruits a girl to play the romantic interest of "The Case," and the girl will prove to be the romantic interest of Super 8. Abrams is telling us up front that this is a device, a ploy, a bit of that emotional manipulation for which Steven Spielberg is despised by many critics. It's all a part of the dare. The director shows us his bag of cinematic tricks, sets up his self-evidently unoriginal story, and in effect dares the audience not to respond or not to feel anything.

By the time our hero chooses to symbolically let go of his mother -- the scene involves a powerful magnetic field -- one probably has to have the proverbial heart of stone to not cry or laugh. What you do may depend on your feelings for Spielberg or for 1970s genre cinema or movies about moviemaking. My feelings were influenced by the nostalgia I felt for the era portrayed, a largely lost world like Super 8's steel town. However predictable the story was, Abrams had me with his evocation of 1979 -- though the soundtrack was predictably heavyhanded. Super 8 is arguably the antithesis of Rodriguez and Tarantino's Grindhouse: a trip back in time with state of the art effects rather than modern stories told with primitive movie methods -- though "The Case," when we finally see the finished work during the end credits -- seems like a spiritual brother to "Planet Terror" and "Death Proof." There's a touch of the grindhouse to the whole film, a slightly meaner spirit than prevailed in the sort of Spielberg film Abrams invokes, though not entirely alien to the Spielberg of Jaws and Jurassic Park. In a way, Super 8 is a synthesis of some Seventies themes and their presumed Spielbergian antitheses. Spielberg himself tapped into Seventies paranoia in Close Encounters, but his authoritarian antagonists weren't as mean or vicious as Abrams's military villains. Nor, of course, were his aliens, and if anything is offputting about Super 8 it's the juxtaposition of conventional Spielbergian epiphanies with the slaughter of so many other people. Spielberg films are about families rather than communities, and as long as two families were strengthened by Super 8's ordeal the families that were destroyed don't have to matter as much. Abrams is daring us to care, but only about certain people. That's not an issue in a Spielberg film when other people aren't dying all around the heroes. Here it became an issue with me and made an inevitably inferior imitation of Spielberg a little more so.

But Super 8 is still a fairly entertaining "roller coaster ride" movie in the old style with a refreshingly realistic sense of place that seems more three-dimensional than many 3D movies. The kids are consistently amusing if not exactly "mint" in either the film or the film within the film. Abrams is an efficient cinematic storyteller, though he comes up somewhat short of Spielberg's ideal clarity, and his pictorial sense is often inspired. His opening shot sets a tone of loss that's brilliantly simple: a steel mill has a sign boasting of its safety record, adding steadily to the number of days without an accident. But we see a worker change the tally from 479 to 1 and we know something awful has happened. Elsewhere, a crudely drawn, bloodstained map fills the screen until something grabs it from behind and crumples it -- a hand we had thought dead. Moments like these mark Abrams as having great potential that he may realize more completely once he has whims like Super 8 out of his system. That film may prove one of this year's best "summer movies," but I couldn't shake the feeling that Abrams should have had better things to do. This'll do for an undemanding weekend, and you'll probably care the way Abrams dares you to for exactly as long as the movie lasts -- but definitely no longer. It's a thing of the past before it even ends, after all, but at least they knew how to make summer movies back then.

ATRAGON (Kaitei Gunkan, 1963)

Here's a Toho Studio special from the golden age of their monster and sci-fi films, but one that I'd never really seen before -- probably because it doesn't have any of the major monsters in it, and the monster it does have is pretty minor. But I was nearly won over immediately when we're introduced to two enterprising photographers, who are played by none other than Tadao Takashima and Yu Fujiki, who were the Abbott & Costello-like (or are they closer to Martin & Lewis) minions of Pacific Pharmaceutical in King Kong vs. Godzilla. That film is one of my all-time guilty pleasures, and it's a hoot to see those two as a team again. But it was unsettling, too, since they've been dubbed into English by different actors this time. I couldn't help feeling that these weren't their "real" voices, absurd as that may sound.

In any event, our heroes are quickly caught up in intrigue involving a mysterious attack by apparent aliens, mysterious stalkers of women and a beatnik-like journalist who asks too many questions. It turns out that agents of the undersea Mu Empire are after the daughter of Capt. Jinguji, a navy officer who fled with his advanced submarine just before the end of World War II. These Mu people are rough customers, as Agent 23, for instance, has "special energy" that makes him invulnerable to conventional attacks. In a movie reel intended for world viewing, the Mu folk reveal their obsession with Jinguji, whose abandoned sub fell into their possession. They're convinced that Jinguji is somewhere working on a more advanced sub, and they expect the surface people to put a stop to his scheme, or else face devastation. By the way, Mu intends to conquer the surface world in order to re-establish the rule they exerted everywhere until their continent sank. The United Nations are unimpressed by the threat, perhaps because the film includes embarrassing footage of Mu religious rites. For their disrespect, Venice and Hong Kong are destroyed.

The Japanese government puts pressure on Jinguji's former superior officer to account for his possible existence. Fortunately, the fellow who's been stalking Jinguji's daughter is, in fact, one of Jinguji's sailors, who can lead the admiral, the photographers, the daughter, and the beatnik reporter to a secret base where the great man himself reveals that he has indeed been building a super sub, which he unveils with the name of ... Gotengo!

Gotengo? Shouldn't that be Atragon? Well, it seems like another American distributor has pulled a "Godzilla" on us and slapped an entirely alien name on the project without really bothering to apply it to the submarine. As you'll notice, Gotengo isn't the name of the movie in Japan, either. The original label translates rather prosaically as "Undersea Warship." Said warship is equipped with a drill, an ice gun, and the power of flight. An ideal weapon against Mu, perhaps, but Jinguji isn't thrilled about saving the world in general, even if that means succeeding where an American super-sub had miserably failed. Speaking of absurd, Toho would have us believe that the U.S. Navy, at the height of the Cold War against godless communism, would name a submarine in their fleet the "Red Satan." The religious right, however, will take comfort in that ship's destruction under crushing undersea pressure. Jinguji, meanwhile, seems to want to hold Gotengo in reserve for a new round of imperial conquest. That gets put on hold, however, when the beatnik reporter proves to be another Mu spy and sabotages the sub.

Everything is building up toward an attack on Japan by Mu (including some cool model earthquake footage) and a showdown between the Gotengo and Manda, the vaunted god of Mu. This invincible creature is in fact a rather puppyish sea monster that frolics in the deep and tries to constrict ships to pieces. Once the sub is up and running (or flying) again, it manages to shake off Manda and freeze it. Then it's on to a genocidal attack on the Mu power center, Jinguji having realized that he's been a "knight in rusty armor" once he appreciates his daughter's peril. It looks like the captive Empress of Mu is going to be the empire's last survivor, but she is honorably allowed to jump into the ocean and swim toward the burning ruin of her city. And so we wish the Empress well on her long ... well, not so long journey home.

"Atragon" is really more of a fantasy film than anything else, and as such it's okay. Kaiju eiga fans will be underwhelmed by Manda. while sci-fi fans may get a kick out of the Gotengo's capers. Despite the appearnce of those two well-remembered performers (and several others from the Godzilla series), this movie never quite becomes the all-out fun experience that King Kong vs. Godzilla is -- in English, at least. Japanese genre fans should enjoy the widescreen DVD from Tokyo Shock, which does justice to Ishiro Honda's direction and Eji Tsuburaya's designs. It may be best appreciated on a camp level, or as a document from a certain historical moment of moviemaking. Either way, your time won't be entirely wasted.

Here's the Japanese trailer:

And you can see an American trailer here.