Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim wears its heart on its sleeve, and is emphatic about being exactly what it is. Watching the trailer, we laughed at how it was clearly a Gundam film, but watching it, it soon becomes clear that it’s not pretending to be anything but a straight rip-off of Japanese monster films and mecha anime. The Godzilla-like creatures are even called Kaiju.

On the other hand, it is also still rooted very obviously in the Hollywood story. And the mecha subgenre in anime has grown to be very much centred on coming of age. From Gundam to Evangelion, Fafner to Gurren Lagann, the main characters are adolescents, sometimes with a time-skip to those adolescents being young adults. Piloting giant robots becomes a kind of metaphor for paternalistic control and early sexual tension abounds – as well as the sexualisation of the pilots themselves. Whereas in Hollywood, you get the action man who despite a trauma that makes him turn his back on his talents returns to kick butt and look macho. And while the latter is perhaps safer, it’s a whole lot less compelling and identifiable, and makes this for me very much a secondary experience to watching a mecha anime.

But that is not to say it is not at the same time a whole lot of fun and spectacular in a way that only a big-budget Hollywood film can be just now. The robots and monsters here are big and the CG is very impressive. There’s a great adrenaline rush from seeing a robot using a great long boat as a baseball bat, and even if the guy from Queer as Folk as a tough-guy American hero left a big hollow space at the heart of the film, especially alongside a very ordinary Japanese girl with a sad past that had to be fleshed out through flashbacks in a zero-chemistry romance, the minor players were fantastic. The two silly academics who had a peripheral but increasingly influential role on the story – essentially two up-and-coming actors channelling Rick Moranis and Lee Evans – were entertaining and crucially likeable, Del Toro of course gets his friend Ron Perlman in for an amusing cameo and best of all, Idris Elba from down the road in Canning Town is further cementing himself as a powerful Hollywood presence, perhaps doomed to always play powerful soldier types in genre films, but stealing the show every time and bringing with him a genuine gravitas that makes me want to see him play Othello.

Ah, I see he is to play Nelson Mandela soon. That ought to be something heavyweight to take him to the major leagues.

So while this didn’t feel like breaking new ground in terms of story or even Hollywood writing, it was immensely fun, a novelty to see in such a high-budget and realistic style and of course fills the quota on stuff being blown up and huge explosions. I liked how understated the Alice in Wonderland references were, too.

Some questions remain, of course, if we allow spoilers at the end here: were the sacrifices made by the Russians and Chinese really so irrelevant that nobody even acknowledges their deaths? Could Pentecost really not have packed the Aussie into an escape pod and set off his explosion himself? And making the newer robots entirely digital and able to be shut down by electromagnetic pulses – really? 

The Wolverine

They just missed the timing to have a film based on Wolvie’s time in Japan and see it do well. It is after all a little above being criticised as bandwagon-jumping, the idea that his past was at least in some significant part spent in Japan dating back to 1982 and a miniseries for which the young Frank Miller seems to consistently be given a bit too much credit. Miller was clearly a big fan of Japan and of manga – straight after that he went on to write and draw Ronin for DC – but that wasn’t the cliché it has come to be seen as today. The Silver Samurai elements of the story are even earlier – going back to the 70s. That said, the saturation of Japanese media is the reason this film comes just a little late – there’s already enough of a backlash against all things Japanese that I’m sure more than one potential viewer will dismiss this as ‘weeb stuff’.

And though it has problems, the Japanese element is not one of them. Treated rather as a more neon-lit potboiler New York, it’s very much exotic Japan packaged and presented to foreigners with certain expectations of a foreign culture. Thus, Wolvie is taken to Japan to meet a very old friend, gets mixed up in various intrigues, and ends up having to fight to save the day with his omega-level healing factor disabled – and we know how temporarily disabling omega-level mutants’ powers usually goes, right Mr. M? The Japan he enters is one of ninja, samurai and yakuza. It is one of glitzy high-rise apartments where politicians hire tall white whores – also popular in the hilariously busy and obvious red-light districts – where the super-rich live in extremely traditional old houses with sliding doors everywhere, and where people train kendo complete with absurd flips. It’s all very much how you’d expect a Hollywood superhero film to present Japan, and that’s okay by me.

The fact that Superman very obviously took its queues from how previous films have presented Logan was almost hilariously mirrored by this film, released almost simultaneously, has an almost identical set-up. Logan, wanting to get away from the life his powers give him, has become a drifter, going about small-town America with a busy beard and trucker’s clothes, trying to stay out of trouble but unable to resist meting out justice on the dumb rednecks where it is necessary, until an attractive young girl stalking him (Yukio from the miniseries with touches of Layla Miller) plucks him out of that world and into a new one of showing off superpowers in big dramatic battle scenes.

Things are a little different for Logan from before, though. Despite Scott getting not one single mention in the entire script, after the Phoenix saga Logan is haunted by guilt for killing Jean and preventing the Phoenix destroying the world. The whole premise revolves around the fact that Logan feels an immortal life is an empty one, and might welcome growing old and dying like everyone else – which remains probable even at the end, just not if it stops him making a bad situation better. Speaking of Superman, it was interesting how his getting his powers disabled reminded me that if not done carefully, a Wolverine story can be every much a Godzilla-vs-Bambi as anything from the Caped Crusader – for what tension is there when you know your hero can survive being reduced to a single atom or having his entire skeleton torn out?

Conceptually, then, the film was rich and well-judged. Unfortunately it stumbled on the basic building-blocks of a good story. I could live with the corny romance, even if it was creepy in exactly the same way Twilight is creepy (‘Hey, you were good friends with my granddad in the 40s? Well come hither baby!), but the plot was just too clunky. Captain America villain Viper is at once central to everything and peripheral, alternately seeming like mastermind and pawn, and her final motives – as well as the reason she’s kept around – all come over as muddy, which in turn make the archer character with the Silver Samurai’s original name have a bizarre story full of U-turns. If the ninja clan had expected Wolverine’s powers to be switched off, did they really think they could get him alive to the Silver Samurai? That, after all, was the plan, but de-powering him only seemed to make this harder to achieve, not easier. After all, he was very nearly dead in the Love Hotel (yes, they go to a Love Hotel, and it’s brilliant).

It’s for this reason I couldn’t wholeheartedly enjoy The Wolverine, even though Hugh Jackman is as always perfect in the role and the shinkansen scene is fantastic. It was also nice being able to understand the Japanese without subtitles 95% of the time – though I was conscious that Okamoto Tao has a bit of an odd accent in Japanese.

Then there was the scene in the credits, which was easily the highlight. How it reconciles with previous films I don’t know, but it was pure pleasure just to see those actors again, and though it was refreshing to have a film where really, the action was more James Bond than The Avengers in scale, I do want to see more of the X-Men again in Days of Future Past.