Kaiju theater: Godzilla Minus One

I finally saw Godzilla Minus One. I went on a Tuesday night and was equally surprised and delighted to see the screening was maybe 75% full. Contrast that with my previous experience of seeing a first-run Japanese Godzilla in theaters, when I was the only person there for a showing of Godzilla Millennium back in 2000. I have to report, with no degree of exaggeration, that Godzilla Minus One is easily the best Godzilla movie ever made. The conventional wisdom with Kaiju films is that the human characters/plots don't matter, that they are merely filler between monster fights. This is the first GOdzilla film where not only are the human characters compelling, but they are critical to framing the sheer scale and terror of Godzilla's rampage. This is what I was hoping we'd get (but didn't) with the U.S. Godzilla/Kong films (not in terms of plot, but rather in compelling human narrative, ie a smart script).

This is a film that has a LOT to say thematically about Japanese culture, WWII, PTSD, found family, the ease of dying vs. the difficulty of living, forgiveness, vengeance... I'm still processing it all.

The cinematography is lush and sophisticated. The direction is confident and intentional. The script is tight, thoughtful and very smart. The performers are all acting in an intense period drama... that just happens to have a giant Kaiju destroying cities. I won't go so far as to say this is the best film of the year as others have, but I will say it is among the best films of the year. It should absolutely earn a Oscar nomination in the best foreign film category.

While I don't think this is technically a remake of the original 1954 Godzilla, it is absolutely a remake. There is no way this film exists without that predecessor. So many story beats and visual cues are direct callbacks to that landmark movie. That said, this is its own film that is not slavishly retreading the trail blazed by the first. A significant part of the narrative was recycled from 1991's Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (a very fun film, but also a very dumb one) far more effectively than in that earlier film. Also, Isao Takahata's 1988 masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies echoes throughout. I never thought I'd say that about a Toho Godzilla film, but the comparisons are inescapable. My one complaint is that the monster design is influenced by 2016's Shin Godzilla, an interesting film but not my favorite Godzilla interpretation.

Not all in this film is doom and despair, however. I literally squeed in the theater when I saw what plane would be used in the finale. No spoilers, but this is literally my favorite fighter design of World War II and was the clearest sign that the filmmakers are 1) history buffs and 2) were pulling out all the stops.

Godzilla Minus One was produced for a reported $15 million. It looks like a $150 million film. Seriously. It is magnificent. Like Colossal did in 2016, it resets expectations of what stories Kaiju films are capable of telling. Among Godzilla Minus One, Shin Godzilla and the Godzilla anime trilogy, Toho is pushing the proverbial envelope with its Godzilla films. There is an inventiveness in these films, a willingness to think outside the box and take risks with a franchise recognized around the world. For this, I applaud them and hope they continue to surprise us for decades to come. If you have even passing interest in giant monster movies, so see this one. It's that good.

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Christopher Robin

This past weekend, The Wife and I took our son to see Disney's new live-action Christopher Robin film. In case you're not aware, the plot centers around a grown-up Christopher Robin, of Winnie-the-Pooh fame, who has lost touch with his childhood joy and imagination. When stress and the burden of responsibility threaten to overwhelm him (and break up his family) the stuffed animals of his childhood emerge from the Hundred Acre Wood to come to the rescue.

That's a gross over-simplification, but you get the idea.

For context, I grew up with Pooh. I imprinted on the Disney animated shorts from the 60s-70s. I loved going to Sears because they had a licensing deal with Disney and featured lots of Pooh. I had the original A.A. Milne books illustrated by E.H. Shepard and read them until they literally fell apart. I know Pooh's given name is Edward Bear and that the original plush toys are all on display at the New York Public Library (save Roo, who was either lost in an apple orchard or chewed up by a dog). I know from Pooh.

The movie is, by and large, exactly what you expect it to be. It's not terrible, but neither does it rise above expectations to become great. Watching the particular way the stuffed animal characters are portrayed, I can't help but think Disney was taken aback by the success of the Paddington films and decided to capitalize on the bear-in-the-city conceit, an easy call given their trend of remaking their animated library as live-action films. The result is a movie that is relentlessly sentimental and nostalgic, that shamelessly pulls emotional strings of my generation that grew up with the original works, and does a serviceable job of entertaining the kids who are more familiar with the various animated TV series and direct-to-video movies that followed. The plot and themes echo those of Mary Poppins in places, and perhaps conscious of academic criticisms that the Poppins film contained messaging that "poor people who know their place are happier for it," Christopher Robin's finale instead posits that workers are exploited by the upper class and deserve, at minimum, annual leave to spend time with their families.

Cynical or sincere, the film is carried by a very earnest Ewan McGregor as the titular character. Bronte Carmichael does a solid job as Christopher's daughter, and the great Hayley Atwell is pretty much wasted in a generic "concerned mother and wife" role.

There are no fart jokes, although Eeyore almost goes there with a reference to his bum hurting. Tigger doesn't break into rap (although he does do his song, to great effect). Most of the cringe-inducing cliches that plague "modernized" adaptations are thankfully absent. The computer animation of the stuffed animals is outstanding--they felt like animatronics much of the time, very textured and physically present. The character designs are halfway between the E.H. Shepard illustrations from the books and the animated shorts. That sounds like a forced marriage, but it works very well. Tonally, this is recognizably a Pooh film. If it's narrative isn't terribly inspired, well, plot's never been the character's strong suit. It is what it is, and you, dear reader, probably already know if this film is for you or not.

I feel compelled to address the Heffalump in the room, however. For much of his life, Christopher Milne resented Pooh. Not his stuffed bear and other animals, but the wildly successful books by his father and the subsequent animated films and merchandising. He felt his childhood was being exploited by others for material gain. And you know, he's got a point. The fact that the Christopher Robin of the film has a life and family very different from Christopher Milne's doesn't much matter. The fact that Christopher Milne died in 1996 didn't impact the unease I felt at various places throughout the film. I couldn't help but remember Disney's equally earnest, yet somewhat cynical, Saving Mr. Banks from 2013. In the finale of that film, author P.L.Travers is depicted as weeping for joy at seeing Mary Poppins screened for the first time. In truth, she did weep at the premiere, but only because she viewed Disney's film as a debasement of her beloved story.

As a peripheral character, Christopher Robin was mostly inconsequential, a proxy for the children reading or watching the adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood, a bridge to connect them to the silly characters inhabiting that land. By moving Christopher Robin front and center, however, the dynamic is changed in significant ways. Christopher is no longer a stand-in for the viewer, but a real character, deeply flawed and not entirely sympathetic. We saw this with Spielberg's dreadful Hook and there are moments in Christopher Robin where that awful film briefly comes to mind, but thankfully, those moments are fleeting. Christopher Robin is a far better movie than Hook, if only because they never lose sight of the heart that makes Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and Eeyore so endearing. Despite the obligatory redemption and triumph, Christopher Robin doesn't fare so well. The implied transference of fictional character baggage to the real-life person who always resented the cinematic intrusion on his life just feels... wrong.

Ultimately, Christopher Robin is a fictional character, whereas Christopher Milne was a real person. Where the two overlap is a fuzzy Venn diagram where truth meets fiction. The real Christopher is rapidly fading from living memory, and I doubt even a quarter of the people watching this movie are even aware the was a real person. Soon, the fictional portrayal by Ewan McGregor will be the only version to survive.

As Pooh would say, "Oh, bother."

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The Space Between Us

The new "boy-from-Mars" movie, The Space Between Us, opened this weekend in the U.S. and was pummeled at the box office, earning the distinction of being a massive bomb.

Good.

Never have I suffered through a movie so clueless about what it's actually about, and what's more, absolutely no intention of even trying to find out. To paraphrase A Fish Called Wanda, I can't call it stupid because that would be an insult to stupid films. Rarely have I paid cash money to see a film in the theater and found myself actively hating it 10 minutes in, but that's what happened with The Space Between Us. It opens with a pretentious, unnecessary, 10-minute infodump from a Burt Rutan/Elon Musk tech visionary stand-in called Nathaniel Shepherd that got applause lines from the on-screen audience at entirely inappropriate moments. As the interminable, self-congratulatory scene dragged on, I found myself thinking this actor was doing a very, very bad Gary Oldman impression. Only afterward did I realize that it really was Gary Oldman. Things went downhill from there.

Here's a quick run-down of the plot for those of you unaware of this film: A female astronaut on the first Mars colonization crew discovers she's pregnant two months into the mission. She gives birth shortly after landing, and promptly dies, as birth-giving mothers do in these kinds of films. And naturally enough, the powers that be decide to cover up the baby's existence. Instead, the baby is raised on Mars by astronauts until he grows up to be Asa Butterfield, who falls in love with a girl back on Earth nicknamed "Tulsa" through the miracle of Skyping. When Butterfield is finally brought back to Earth, he promptly escapes his captors, finds Tulsa and embarks on a cross-country road trip to find his mysterious, unknown father. Hijinks ensue. Or, you could just watch the trailer:

This had all the makings of a light-hearted coming-of-age genre romp, a pleasant diversion for a few hours with the potential to be more. Alas, it's none of those things. Which is a shame, because the only time the film isn't mind-bogglingly awful is when Butterfield and Britt Robertson (aka "Tulsa") are onscreen together. Their interactions are charming, and these two talented young actors manage to make even the clunkiest, cliche-ridden dialogue work. For the most part. Robertson, in particular, has been playing the disaffected loner type for most of her career, and if she doesn't quite manage the grit Jodie Foster showed in similar roles at a similar age, she still manages to rise above the material. Their road trip cinematography is lush and alive, from the Albuquerque Balloon Festival to the vermilion stone formations of Sedona (at least, it looked like Sedona), when these two are together the viewer is briefly lulled into forgetting how bad the rest of the film actually is. Don't believe me? To escape the authorities, the pair steal a crop duster, only to have to engine lose oil pressure and force an emergency landing. Apparently, the contrived script believes a burned-out biplane engine is impossible to shut off, because once on the ground they can't stop it ("no brakes" has got to be one on the most ludicrous lines among a host of them) and jump out before it crashes into an old, wooden barn. Which promptly explodes into a gigantic fireball. Seriously. This is the kind of nonsense The Simpsons makes fun of, with exploding soapbox derby cars and the like. I actually threw up my hands and laughed aloud at the tone-deaf stupidity of the script.

Butterfield and Robertson deserve so much better.

Leaving aside the technobabble medical diagnoses of Butterfield and Oldman (I'll cut them a little slack here, even though some of the facts are wobbly at best) the script's basic grasp of reality is horrifying. At one point, with Butterfield dying from "too much gravity exposure" on Earth, their solution is to pile him onto an experimental space plane of Oldman's which may or may not have ever flown before--all the viewers know is that Oldman has repeatedly blown up in a flight simulator before ever reaching orbit. According to the dialogue amongst the characters, if they can just get up into the Earth's stratosphere--a mere six miles up--they'll be far enough away from Earth that the gravity will be lessened and Butterfield will survive. Just flying higher reduces gravity that dramatically? Who knew? The next thing you know, they're in orbit--Oldman took over and flew them there, because hey, he only ever blew up in the simulator but he knew the ship wouldn't blow up this time!--and Butterfield recovers quickly enough for zero-G snuggles with Robertson before returning to Earth and boarding a rocket back to Mars. I again laughed aloud when they showed the space plane (a carbon copy of Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser, really) orbiting the Earth backwards. Look, space launches go from west to east, harnessing the rotation of the Earth as an extra boost to get into orbit. Going the opposite direction means the spacecraft would have to overcome the Earth's rotational velocity in addition to reaching orbital velocity. The bar is set much higher, which is why nobody launches rockets east-to-west. For a little ship that supposedly can barely make orbit under the best of circumstances... well, maybe it's easier to orbit in the stratosphere?

What else can I rant about? Oh, yeah. The initial colonization mission launches in 2018, which is laughable and throws verisimilitude right out the window. The bulk of the story takes place about 18 years in the future, but everything looks exactly the same as it does today. Everyday technology hasn't advance, apart from a cool projector bracelet Butterfield wears and omniscient iPads which let Oldman spy on Butterfield and Robertson even when Oldman doesn't actually know where they are. Carla Gugino is given little to do as a veteran astronaut/proxy mother to Butterfield beyond expressing worry and frustration. But she gets off better than the other astronauts, none of whom are given names or dialogue, much less personalities. The most offensive element of the film comes in the aftermath of Butterfield's birth, following the death of his chirpy, can-do astronaut mother, Sarah Elliot. Over and over again it's hammered home that "She was irresponsible," "She jeopardized the mission," "I can't believe how selfish and irresponsible she was." Over and over she's blamed for the pregnancy, to the point where he death comes off as a 19th century morality play, that she got what she deserved because she dared to have sex. There is nothing from her perspective given--that her contraception failed (hey, even pills and implants have a failure rate) or some other extenuating circumstance was at play. No, the party line is that she was bad, period. This is particularly troublesome at the end of the film, when it's revealed that Oldman is actually Butterfield's father--a cheap bit of information withheld from the audience until the appropriately-cliched reveal. Actually sharing that information have negated Butterfield's entire road trip to find his father, so the awful script kept it secret. Worse that that, however, is the fact that Oldman is the loudest of the chorus condemning Astronaut Elliot for her "irresponsible behavior" even though he knows that it was he who knocked her up the night before the mission, or whatever. I just... ugh.

Seriously, there is just so much wrong with this movie I'm exhausted just thinking about it. The screenwriter, Allan Loeb, is responsible for the recent turkey Collateral Beauty as well as other cinematic masterpieces such as Here Comes the Boom, The Switch and Just Go With It, so I guess the awfulness of The Space Between Us shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Still, this has all the markings of a prestige picture, where the writer of low-brow fare cuts loose and shows what he's really capable of. Too bad he couldn't be bothered to put in the effort to do actual research, when pulling ideas out of his ass is so much easier.

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Batman v Superman: Bleak and nonsense

I despised Zack Snyder's Superman reboot, Man of Steel. I despised it because it was almost a good Superman movie. Despite a bunch of clever ideas and a central plot concept (Phantom Zone Kryptonians terraforming (ha!) Earth to make a New Krypton) that showed some imagination, it all went to naught because Snyder made Superman a broody, self-absorbed prick who, if he bothered to do something even remotely heroic, did so grudgingly. Since then, I've learned that Snyder is a devotee of Ayn Rand, which pretty much explains his apparent worldview that anyone who willingly does the right thing for the right reasons is a chump.

So I finally saw the Bats and Supes slugfest last night at the Alamo Drafthouse, and had my expectations set suitably low. I'm sorry to report that the film lived down to to them. So as not to come off as relentlessly grim as this film, I'll list what worked for me: 1) Ben Affleck's Batman/Bruce Wayne is mostly great. I say mostly, because Bats' indiscriminate killing and disregard for the safety of innocent bystanders is almost as egregious as Superman's from the first film. As the world's greatest detective, Batman figured out that Lex Luthor was manipulating public opinion against Superman--and directly caused the bombing of the U.S. Capitol Building with all the death that entailed--yet still decided to go ahead with his plan to kill Superman because, I dunno, he'd already gone through all the prep and it'd be a shame to let those cool SFX go unused. 2) Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman is mostly great. I'd worried that Gadot might not be physical enough for the role, or be too sword-and-shieldy, but once all was said and done, Wonder Woman's brief screen minutes count among the highlights of the film. And her accent made me very happy--I've heard people complain that they couldn't understand what she was saying, but these people are morons. Wonder Woman is not an American, and does not speak English as her first language. Having a vaguely Mediterranean accent brought the character home for me. That said, the Macguffin of getting her involved--Luthor had stolen a photo of her that she was trying to get back--makes absolutely zero sense, as what she eventually chases down is a digitized scan which has been copied at least three times (and probably more) by the end of the film. Huh? Ultimately, I came away looking forward to the upcoming Wonder Woman film, although the World War I setting remains something of a head-scratcher.

Beyond that, the movie is vastly inferior to the sum of its parts. Snyder didn't just take cues from The Dark Knight Returns, he lifted entire sequences and vast chunks of plot. But what wasn't widely reported in advance was the fact that Snyder also folds in large chunks of the Death of Superman storyline from 1992. Yes, Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer are credited with writing the actual script, but they wrote the script Snyder wanted. Snyder's fingerprints are all over this, and looking back over his previous films, this movie falls squarely within his oeuvre. Here's the thing: I don't think Snyder has ever actually read The Dark Knight Returns or The Death of Superman or heck, even The Watchmen before that. Oh, sure, he owns the books, and they're probably well-worn and tattered from his thumbing through them constantly, but I am convinced Snyder doesn't actually read them. He only looks at the pictures. How else to explain his slavish recreation of spectacular visual sequences from said comics whilst completely misunderstanding (or simply missing) the substantive underpinnings to those sequences?

When Superman SPOILER ALERT! dies at the end, this is supposed to be emotionally devastating for the cinema audience. It's not, because throughout two films now, Superman has not been presented as a hero to cheer for. He's a self-centered jerk who seemingly only dies to impress his girlfriend at the end. Snyder was rightly criticized for Superman's lack of regard for saving human lives in the first film, so in this film he tries to rectify that with a montage early on showing Superman saving people from burning buildings, exploding rockets, deadly floods... except none of these rescues actually come off as heroic. They're filmed like sequences from horror movies, with ominous music playing as Superman slooooowly descends. Often scowling. There's no urgency, no emotion, no concern. He stands around brooding as the unwashed masses fawn over him. A number of characters in the film tell us that Superman is beloved, but the film never shows it. If anything, these ominous "rescue" sequences serve to validate Batman's nightmare visions of the coming of Darkseid and Apokolips--hardly something that will ensure the audience is emotionally invested in the character. Ditto the people of Metropolis' (and by extension, the world) sudden grief at the loss of Superman. Not very much earlier, everyone had turned on Superman when a crazed bomber took out half of the U.S. Capitol, then started destroying both Metropolis and Gotham when Doomsday showed up (and really, as problematic as the comic version of Doomsday is, at least he was visually distinctive and menacing. This one looks like a cave troll extra from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings). The emotional arc is not there. Chris Reeves' Superman? Not a problem. He was beloved by the people in his cinematic universe as well as audiences. Brandon Routh's? More problematic, but ultimately, yeah, he'd be mourned. Cavill's? Apart from those few people he grudgingly saved, this Superman hasn't really given anyone reason to trust him, much less like him.

Snyder, as a director, is very much a poor man's version of J.J. Abrams. They are both about the on-screen eyeball kick, and in my opinion, come up with various eyeball kicks for their films first, around which they then construct a script. For this reason, their films don't normally make a tremendous amount of sense and are rife with logical inconsistency and plot holes. The difference between Snyder and Abrams, however, is that Abrams understands character and gives the audiences compelling personal narratives and motivations even if they exist within an exploding world of dazzling nonsense. Snyder, instead, only offers nightmare dream sequences of Jack Kirby's unrecognizable New Gods, bizarre non sequiturs so disengaged and irrelevant to the events at hand that I was at a loss to explain any of it to my baffled family even though I probably understood what was going on better than anyone else in the half-empty theater. Jesse Eisenberg's lunatic, evil Mark Zuckerberg take on Lex Luthor conveys nether genius nor menace. His unhinged erraticness is more evocative of the Joker than a worthy rival of Superman, but hey, his insanity allows him to scare Batman by confirming his bad dreams about Darkseid coming are all true! For Snyder, this is what passes for subtle foreshadowing.

There are rumors circulating about an extended director's cut, an R-rated cut, all sorts of cuts of this film that will "restore" all the sequences and scenes left on the cutting room floor and make the choppy, helter-skelter nature of the film flow better and make more sense. Sorry, but watching more if this mess is the last thing I want to do. Even if an hour of film that is pure character development is added back in, that doesn't change the fact we're still starting with two-and-a-half hours of celluloid that has none to start with. I've seen every one of Snyder's films at this point apart from the cartoon about the owls--yes, even his "passion project" Sucker Punch--and I've yet to see anything that leads me to believe he has any better grasp on pacing than he has on character. The best thing that can be said about Bats vs. Supes is that it's rapid collapse at the box office may finally be enough to convince Warner Brothers to remove Snyder from any future DC Comics films and give them to those who've show an ability to deliver movies with coherent character, narrative and emotion in addition to pure spectacle--and preferably all of the above.

Once all is said and done, I can't even bring myself to despise Batman v. Superman the way I do Man of Steel. The latter has an arrogant contempt for the source material that is simply wrong. This one... Batman v Superman is a hapless kid who sits in the back of the class and eats paste all day. You can't hate that. You just pity him and get on with your life.

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Tomorrowland by any other name is Yesterdayworld

Tomorrowland is screenwriter Damon Lindelof's strongest work.

Tomorrowland is director Brad Bird's weakest work.

Tomorrowland's ambitions are a mile wide.

Tomorrowland's substance is an inch deep.

If you want to avoid any potential spoilers, then stop reading here. This is a film suffering a profound identity crisis. It desperately wants to be a reaction against the flood of dystopia narratives filling bookstores and cinema screens, but ultimately is just as much a dystopia as Hunger Games or Insurgent or Maze Runner. In fact, it's worse. Despite its obvious good intentions (and the film punctuates its Good! Intentions! so often that they're impossible to overlook) it is ultimately cynical in its approach to those very ideas as well as toward the audience sitting down to enjoy the show. Case in point, this is what Tomorrowland promises:

That's selling point. That promise is the only marketing of the film. That promise is inherent in the title. Yet, George Clooney's Frank in the film has the most profound, unintentionally self-aware line in the entire movie when he rants (slightly paraphrasing here due to spotty memory), "You were sold a lie! It's a commercial!" The Tomorrowland promised literally doesn't exist anymore. For a movie that relentlessly insists that imagination is one of the most important traits a human can possess, the script has precious little of it when it comes to narrative. The plot is teh same old formulaic plug-and-play Hollywood trots out ad nauseum. But beyond the basic failure of imagination when it comes to the plot, the story also shows a distinct lack of imagination (or interest) in its own self beyond gorgeous window dressing. Why doesn't Tomorrowland exist as promised? Dunno. That's never explained. Why did Tomorrowland exist in the first place? Um... smart people. Plus, Edison and Tesla hated each other, but were drinking buddies with Jules Verne and Alexandre Eiffel. Or something. What happened to all the people Frank saw in Tomorrowland when he first arrived? Why was Frank even kicked out? Why is Hugh Laurie's Nix trying so hard to keep Tomorrowland secret? Why are there packs of Terminator-style assassin androids roaming modern America, disintegrating police officers willy-nilly without raising any suspicions? And really, why is it that all futuristic robot/android societies feel the need to exterminate humans? (Did anyone else notice the similarities betwixt this movie and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow? Anyone?) And while I'm at it, the Tomorrowland pin macguffin has got to be the biggest virtual reality liability lawsuit waiting to happen. If Casey breaks her neck falling down the stairs, or drowns in the lake, Athena's going to look pretty stupid. Then again, we never found out what happened to the recipients of Athena's other pins--Tomorrowland recruitment may well have an astronomical mortality rate.

None of these--and many other--questions are ever answered. Wait, I take that back--some are answered in passing, but by that point the audience is distracted and has lost interest. Others are non-explanations, that acknowledge said question and offer a few details that seem, at the time, to resolve things, but are ultimately just hand-waving. Are we seeing a pattern here? Yes! I have just described every script Lindelof has ever written! I've complained about Lindelof's writing before, here and again here. There is one particularly egregious moment in the first half of the film where Athena (an android girl who is literally the only character with a complete understanding of the situation and the catalyst of the plot itself) fakes a fail-safe shutdown for the sole purpose of not providing necessary information to Casey, the protagonist. This sets up an amusing character gag a little later in the film, but that doesn't excuse the fact that most of the intervening mayhem, death and destruction could've been avoided had Athena not inexplicably decided to be a dick for the sake of being a dick.

Lindelof is a writer who has never shied away from questions. The problem is, he has no clue as to what the answer is, and has zero interest in figuring it out. Instead, he dances around and fills his scripts with hand-waving, hoping audiences don't notice the gaping plot holes or break down of all logic. He could not write a script that progressed from point A to point B without having characters withhold vital information from each other--information they had every incentive to share! He has not improved one iota as a screenwriter over the course of umpteen projects. His is superficial masquerading as profound, and reminds me of another filmmaker unable to break out of a stagnant creative loop--M. Night Shyamalan.

So what, if anything, is it worth seeing this movie for? Well, the female characters for one. There's a glorious bit of squabbling that goes on halfway through the film that could've come straight out of The Incredibles and reminds the viewer that Brad Bird is still in charge. Casey, played by Britt Robertson, is infectious with her enthusiasm. Although there are moments when she's trying too hard (the film stops just short of "Insert Soapbox Here"), when she's simply allowed to inhabit the character there are flashes of Jennifer Lawrence-level investment. Raffey Cassidy's Athena steals the show, however. A fiery spark plug of a character, Cassidy reminds me of Maisie Williams with her seemingly limitless capacity to be simultaneously annoying and endearing. She also gets all the best lines. As for the rest of the cast, eh. Clooney plays the same Clooney character he portrays almost exclusively these days. Hugh Laurie is wasted as the one-dimensional, mustache-twirling villain Nix. The rest of the cast is merely there, serving their roles but neither adding nor subtracting from the film.

The movie's a great deal of fun when it's not trying so hard to Convey An Important Message. Bird knows pacing and keeps things moving at a brisk pace. The few glimpses we get of a fully-realized Tomorrowland are magnificent. Jet packs. Rockets to the stars. The suspended, multi-level swimming pools are particularly inspired, and had my swim team daughter bouncing in her seat with excitement. That's the movie we wanted. That's the movie we were promised. Instead, we a bleak, "Paradise Lost" dystopia with a facile "Feed the right wolf" moral to the story. Yes, there's hope at the end, the idea that Casey and Frank and all their robot helpers will get it right this time (even though we're never really clear on what actually went wrong). They face the future with optimism, that tomorrow will be better than today because of sacrifice and determination. Once you get down to it, though, isn't that the same as The Hunger Games?

Tomorrowland is the very thing it condemns.

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My genius time travel movie

So there's a new time travel movie out, Project Almanac, that The Wife and kids want to see. From what I understand, it's about a group of people who travel back in a time machine, change something in the past, and all hell breaks loose. Which is pretty much the plot of every time travel movie from Back to the Future to Hot Tub Time Machine. Yeah, there are some others that don't fit the mold, like Primer and 12 Monkeys and such, but when you want a go-to Hollywood time travel plot, changing up the past to screw up the present is a cinematic workhorse.

Naturally, my brain started turning this idea over, as my brain is wont to do. My first published short fiction was "Project Timespan," which showed why time travel could be discovered once and only once. I have an unpublished comic script titled "A Sound of Blunder" which is a shameless riff on the Bradbury story, in which hunters from the future travel back in time to hunt dinosaurs only to encounter a dragon instead. Hilarity ensues (not to mention massive destruction to the time line). So I can play around with time travel when the mood strikes me. And thinking of Project Almanac, the mood struck me.

What is the one constant in time-alteration plot movies? That the characters responsible for the changes to the timeline are aware of said changes when they happen. Think of Marty McFly with his fading photo, or his confusion when he returns to the future that is unfamiliar to him. Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. This is usually explained in a hand-waving way, that since he arrived from the unaltered future, his memories from that time are preserved. Or that reality has been split into an alternative timeline. Whatever. All of this is a conceit to keep a consistent viewpoint character to anchor the audience.

But what if one was to discard these shackles of convention? What if one was to write a movie where cause and effect were fully unleashed, that any changes to a single timeline reverberated through said timeline to impact the characters who traveled back in the first place? Any change they affected would not appear to them as a change at all, since it would be instantly incorporated into their remembered history. This has been done some in literature, but it's not terribly easy to pull off since the baseline is erased--none of the characters in the story remember what's happened if the author is playing by the rules.

My idea--which will never be made, mind you, because that's the way these things go--involves a group of time travelers whose every action impacts the time stream and is instantly incorporated into their history. From the instant they arrive in the past, things begin to change, starting with subtle alterations to their uniforms. And the characters are completely unaware, because for them, there are no changes being made. This is their established history. For the audience, however, the changes come faster and more furious as the story progresses. In essence, there are dozens of simultaneous divergent narratives of which only a few scenes of each appear on screen before being supplanted by another. Characters change gender, disappear entirely, relationships twist and flip, the mission goals change, the history of the world morphs over the progression of the film to something very, very different from where it started. No single actor would appear for more than half the total running time (let's peg it at 90 minutes for argument's sake) and probably less. A couple dozen actors and actresses would play the evolving lead roles. It would be a strange, frenetic film, essentially the antithesis of Richard Linklater's Boyhood.

The nice thing is that it could be made for a modest budget. It's not an effects-driven film, but rather a character piece, albeit with characters changing out with regularity (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus comes to mind as an example of multiple actors portraying the evolution of a single character). I do not see how I could convey this vision in prose--it is a visual conceit, and needs a visual medium. I'll not likely write it any time soon, but I'll file my notes away for safe keeping. Any ambitious indy filmmakers with access to a large cast and interested in the time travel genre should feel free to give me a shout.

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Bettie Page Reveals All

Bettie Page Reveals All is a fascinating, if flawed, documentary feature about the world's most iconic pin-up and fetish queen. Page died in 2008 at the age of 85, a famous woman who disappeared at the height of her modelling career to become an enigma. Popularized in part by artist Dave Stevens including a Page-like character in his comic The Rocketeer, Bettie Page's pin-up work saw a resurgence in popularity in the 1980s that continued to grow as the years past. For much of this time, Page was unaware of her return to the spotlight, subsisting on Social Security as she lived a life of anonymity. Eventually, she was located and connected with an agent who ensured she received compensation for the rampant use of her likeness. Her later years were comfortable.

Page rarely appeared in public following her rediscovery, and avoided having her picture taken, as she preferred people remember her as she had looked in the 1950s. Fortunately, before she passed away, she gave extensive interviews about her life, which makes up the bulk of this film. Age had turned her voice gravelly, but hearing her southern accent matter-of-factly discuss this topic or that is fascinating, even if the clip art and stock footage used to illustrate her story in the early going is arbitrary at best.

The fact that Page essentially tells her own story is both the film's greatest strength as well as weakness. Many of the topics she touches on are jarring in their abruptness, one or two sentences at best before moving along. Frustratingly, over and over again she makes a comment that begs for a follow-up question that never comes (the interview was conducted in a Q&A format, but apart from a couple of brief interactions, the interviewer is edited out). Speaking as a professional interviewer (is that even a thing?) the myriad things left unsaid and unexplored are maddening. One example come early on, when discussing Page's education. In high school, she desperately worked to become valedictorian, because Vanderbilt guaranteed full ride scholarships to the top student in every Tennessee high school class. Despite her efforts, she ended up salutatorian, mere tenths of a point behind a male classmate. Instead of a full ride to Vandy, she got a $100 scholarship to Peabody College. The immediate thing that leapt to my mind--and The Wife's as well--was that in 1942, women didn't often pursue higher education. In many cases, they were active discouraged. It doesn't take much imagination to picture a school principal in Tennessee tweaking the grades so that the Vandy scholarship wouldn't be "wasted" on a woman. Page would face gender discrimination--if not outright misogyny--time and again throughout her life, and her valedictorian/salutatorian issue would've added an interesting bit of context. Alas, the question remains unasked, that bit of history unexplored.

Despite the wide swath of questions not asked, Page does cover a tremendous amount of territory with her good-humored voice over. Others who played a role in Page's life, from Paula Klaw to Bunny Yeager to Hugh Hefner provide extensive commentary in their own right, either via new or archival footage. Even if their thoughts are not deeply insightful, the anecdotes are certainly entertaining and amusing. A minor annoyance--Paula Klaw actually took the vast majority of the Page photos sold by her brother, Irving Klaw, but the film portrays her more as a business manager than a creative talent. A very interesting revelation involved the mediocre 2005 movie The Notorious Bettie Page, starring Gretchen Mol (the film's worth watching for Mol's impressive turn as Page). At the time it came out, Page was very vocal in her displeasure with it, yet certain scenes that were dismissed as fabrication at the time are confirmed here by Page herself. There were several other points where Page seemed to be fudging the truth some, or simply mis-remembering events. It would've been nice to have some cross references, a corroborating witness or document to back Page up, but this is very much her show and what she says goes unquestioned. For the most part, she's bluntly honest, and it's a credit to her that her solo narrative can carry the film so long.

To be honest, as I watched this film, I was struck more and more by the similarities between Bettie Page and Edna Milton, who I interviewed extensively before she died for my book on the infamous Chicken Ranch (which is still sitting on publishers' desks, looking for a home). Both were born in the 1920s in poor, rural America--Milton in Oklahoma, Page in Tennessee--to dysfunctional families with the Great Depression and World War II disrupting their lives. Neither had children, yet both went through a string of tumultuous marriages while making a living as best they could before abruptly disappearing to anonymity at the height of their fame. There's a difference between pin-up modeling and prostitution, but in 1950s America the distinction was a very narrow one. They survived in an era of rampant discrimination and succeeded despite the deck being stacked against them because of their gender. It's a sobering thought to imaging how many times that same story played out across the country in that era, and how many women didn't have the happy ending Page did, or even Milton's relatively soft landing.

Anyone who is a fan of Bettie Page--devoted or casual--will enjoy this documentary. After a bit of a slow start, it builds momentum and simply dazzles with hundreds of still photographs of Page (many of which I'd never seen, and some never-before published). Her sad descent into schizophrenia is well-chronicled, as is her religious beliefs and efforts to become a missionary. It's all here. Check it out. You'll be glad you did.

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GRAVITY fails

So, "12 Years A Slave" beat out the realistic science fiction survival epic "Gravity" last night for Best Picture at the Oscars.

Good.

I couldn't bear to watch the Oscars beyond 10 p.m. last night out of fear the over-blown "Gravity" would take home the big prize, thus becoming the 2014 version of "Crash." Because "Gravity" is a dumb film. Dumb, dumb, dumb. It is as stupid and nonsensical as any Michael Bay explosion-fest, but unlike, say, a moronic film like "Armageddon" that knows and accepts the fact that it is dumb, "Gravity" is the cinematic equivalent of the classroom dunce who starts wearing glasses to look smarter.

Director Alfonso Cuarón certainly knows how to put together a pretty film. He had a state-of-the-art light box filled with LEDs in order to realistically simulate the 360-degree tumbling an untethered astronaut would experience in space. He dusted off a cool piece of 1980s NASA technology, the MMU, so George Clooney would have a nifty jetpack to go swooping around the space shuttle in. He spent a tremendous amount of effort getting all the little details right, then turned right around and shat all over the Big Picture.

Look, I don't really care that there isn't really a Chinese space station circling the Earth, nor that the ISS and Hubble Telescope don't share anywhere near the same orbits. I'll buy that--this is an alternative reality, and in some other timeline the decision may well have been made to put these massive objects in close proximity to make servicing missions easier. Maybe all the space stations share the same orbit specifically to make emergency rescues more viable. I don't know. But it can be justified, even if improbably so. I'm fine with that. I'll even accept the cascading cloud of space debris--that's the Macguffin that gets the ball rolling, after all.

But then Cuarón chunks all his hard-won world-building out the window. Objects in space are moving targets, okay? That means they wouldn't be in the same location for said cascading debris cloud to come flying back every 90 minutes to pound them. And debris clouds expand (the term is "diffusion") so even if Sandra Bullock and George Clooney were stationary targets (which they weren't--they're orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes as well, see?) the debris cloud would be so diffuse as to pass unnoticed. But no, having the same cloud come back to illogically menace our heroes proved an irresistible bit of false jeopardy Cuarón couldn't resist, effectively turning the film into a stalker film in space. I hated when they did that to "Sunshine," and I hated it here as well. But it doesn't end there. Any last vestiges of goodwill, of doubt I was willing to give "Gravity" the benefit of, vanished when Clooney, holding onto a tether connecting him to the ISS, let go and plummeted to Earth in a noble, heroic sacrifice. Except, what would really have happened was that Clooney would just continue to float there, looking fairly foolish. Inertia is a bitch. Cuarón wanted Clooney to make a heroic sacrifice--one that left a slight possibility of his survival, so Hallucinatory Ghost Clooney could come back and tell Bullock how to save herself--but couldn't be bothered to come up with something realistic. It's easier fake emotionally dramatic episodes than actually make them plausible. You know another film that casually inserted random directional gravity into an otherwise zero-G scene? "Wing Commander," when the space bulldozer pushes the wreck space fighter off the space carrier's flight deck. The wrecked space fighter falls like a stone--just like Clooney does. Yes, you heard me right--"Gravity" is film making on the same level as "Wing Commander." Only "Gravity" had a bigger budget.

Why am I so harsh on "Gravity"? After all, I like big, dumb films. The difference is, "Gravity" is pretentious. It positions itself as a smart, "realistic" film that puts it in the company of "The Right Stuff," "Apollo 13" and even more overtly science fictional classics such as "2001: A Space Odyssey" (and yes, while those first two aren't SF, they are undeniably the peers "Gravity" aspires to rub shoulders with). But again, "Gravity" is far, far dumber than it's betters, more in keeping with turkeys like "The Core." Hell, even "Avatar" with its derivative plot and rubber science is far more consistent in its world building than "Gravity" can ever hope to be. "Gravity" lies. It pretends to be something it is not. While most of the film-going public are buying that particular brand of snake oil, I cannot get past it.

But aside from that (and folks far smarter than I have annotated the film's scientific missteps to unbelievable length), "Gravity" fails simply because Cuarón--who wrote the damn thing, after all--doesn't care. He wants to give the impression that he cares, but doesn't want to actually do the heavy lifting. Otherwise he would've given us actual characters, other than thinly-written Generic Clooney and Generic Bullock characters. Instead, smarmy Clooney mugs for the camera and weepy, doe-eyed Bullock is defined by her womb. That last big of unfortunate misogyny continues throughout the film--why else show off Bullock's legs in such gratuitous fashion? There's no more reason for that than the much-maligned T&A shot from "Star Trek: Into Darkness." But defining women by their womb seems to be a habit of Cuarón's--he did this throughout his other overrated film, "Children of Men," which turned into little more than a thinly-veiled "Logan's Run" remake. Want evidence that Cuarón simply doesn't care about the big issues he injects into his films? When the Clive Owen character, who is trying to get the pregnant woman (SHE'S GOT A WOMB! AND IT WORKS!) to Sanctuary (or Iceland, whatever) someone challenges him with the question of the cause of worldwide infertility. Owen's telling response? "It doesn't matter." Bullshit. That's the only thing that matters, otherwise, the pregnant lady gives birth and it's a one-off. Without knowing the cause, any single pregnant woman is absolutely meaningless. Maybe it's not the woman at all, but one man, somewhere, who has viable sperm? Those three words uttered by Owen show a deep and profound disinterest in the topic Cuarón has chosen to build a film around. A persistent shallow thinking, and a refusal to consider the issue at a deeper level. Cuarón wrote those words, and they are very telling.

What does Cuarón care about? Metaphor. Metaphor. Metaphor. I think he might like metaphor, too. That, and eyeball kicks. He's very good at those.

Oh, and did I mention "Gravity" is misogynystic? Well, it is misogynystic. There's a lot more discussion on this out there in internet-land if you're interested.

Despite this, I still think Cuarón is a talented director. His "Prisoner of Azkaban" is still, for me at least, by far the best film in the Harry Potter series. "Great Expectations" is lovely and stylish with fantastic performances from the cast, while "Y Tu Mamá También" is a powerful, gripping emotional roller-coaster. So Cuarón is a talented director who is a shit writer, at least where deeper understanding of his subject matter comes into play.

But then again, I don't really know anything about film. I have this on good authority from folks who shouted me down for having the nerve to suggest that "Man of Steel" might not become the first super-hero movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Oh, wait. Look at that, "Man of Steel" didn't win, either. Imagine that.

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Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Count me among the many fans of Suzanne Collins' dystopian teenage arena combat novel The Hunger Games. It's a tight, lean piece of writing, with subtle and deft foreshadowing, sly detail and above all, an engaging sense of purpose. It's not hard to see how YA audiences far an wide fell in love with the reluctant, bow-slinging heroine, Katniss Everdeen. The follow-up, Catching Fire, suffers in comparison. Here, sequel-itis is in full bloom, with Collins trying to give the audience more of what made the first book so popular, but simultaneously adding new elements and raising the stakes so that the narrative isn't just a re-hash of the first book. The foreshadowing is not quite so deft, the plot not so tight. The story meanders a bit, particularly through the first half of the book, as Collins devotes a lot more of her writing efforts to back story and world building. She also does a good bit of set-up for the final book in the series, Mockingjay, and that undercuts some of the effectiveness of Catching Fire, which is very much a "middle book." As for Mockingjay, Collins didn't stick the landing. I see what Collins is trying to do with the book, a big meta statement on the consequences and inhumanity of using child soldiers in warfare, turning the revolution into one, big, kill-or-be-killed Hunger Game, and the Capital itself into a chaotic arena. The reality of war crimes and unintended consequences are a major driving force here. But it doesn't hold together. Mockingjay reads, to me, like a first draft that Collins rushed to get finished in order to make contractual deadlines. Foreshadowing here amounts to telegraphing what's going to happen at the end of the chapter. There's a lot of narrative flailing going on, political intrigue that isn't all that intriguing, clumsy infodumps and a general uncertainty about how all these loose ends are going to be tied up. The arena battles and traps, so crisply defined and clear in the first two books, are vague and baffling and--more often than not--nonsensical. But worst of all, Katniss is very, very passive in the final book, not driving the narrative, but instead watching from the sidelines as most of the action takes place without her until the final quarter of the book. Even then, her actions aren't really of her own accord, as she's essentially set up by The Powers That Be. Given another six months to do tightening and rewrites, I expect Collins would produce a book worthy of the first in the series. As it is, many readers are disappointed with Mockingjay, and with good reason, I say.

Which brings us to Catching Fire, the second installment of the Hunger Games movie franchise, which will be four films once all is said and done, as Mockingjay is being split into two films (I'll wager Peter Jackson is kicking himself for not doing this with Return of the King). I did not like the original Hunger Games movie. The acting was fine, and the film dutifully ticked off most of the high points of the novel, but it felt cold and distant to me. One feature of the novels is that everything is so intimate, so closely tied to Katniss' point of view. That was missing from the movie. There was no intimacy. Rue's death is pretty much the only part of the film I liked better than the book. For everything else, there seemed a distinct lack of gravity, of danger, of pain, of suffering. I understand director Gary Ross was trying to tone down a violent, R-rated book narrative to a family-friendly PG-13 rating, but I felt he neutered the entire theme. Without suffering, without consequences, the entire reason for the Hunger Games books is lost.

Catching Fire is very, very different. I went in skeptical. If the strongest book in the series resulted in such an underwhelming film, then what hope was there for a lesser book? Quite a bit, actually. Director Francis Lawrence is a tremendous upgrade over Ross, and I'm as shocked to write that as anybody. This is the guy who gave us Constantine and I Am Legend, two movies guaranteed not to instill the viewer with confidence. Yet he does excellent work with Catching Fire, keeping the narrative moving without feeling infodump-y, conveying the bleak turmoil of the districts, and crucially, Katniss' emotional suffering and slow, psychological unraveling. The violence is more real here than in the previous film, despite most of the deaths and fighting taking place off-camera. There's fear, concern, pain, pathos here the other film lacked. And that doesn't mean there's simply more gore. There's not much actual blood shown at all, come to think of it. Instead, most is implied (except for Gale's whipping--hoo boy, is that painfully graphic!) and that shows a remarkable confidence and subtlety from director Lawrence. Look, we all know Jennifer Lawrence is one of her generation's great actresses, so I won't waste time praising her performance (although I will question the necessity of having her go the whole movie wearing that weird spray tan. Seriously, that was distracting). Josh Hutcherson as Peta doesn't have very much to do other than look earnest, although his "if it wasn't for the baby" moment brings down the house. Liam Helmsworth as Gale gets a bit more character development this time around, but it's Willow Shields' Prim that comes off as the most changed since the first film, a more confident and assertive character, inspired by her sister's sacrifice. Woody Harrelson's Haymitch was far and away the single worst element of the first film, and director Lawrence must agree with me, because Harrelson's mugging for the camera is scaled way back. If they can find some way of writing him out of the Mockingjay films all together, I'll be one happy camper.

Catching Fire does everything the first film attempted to do, but does it all much, much better. On top of that it raises the stakes, introduces more characters and makes them distinct and memorable. It is a more emotional and intimate film, and at the same time the spectacle surpasses what has gone before. This film has backbone and bite. Some have compared this to The Empire Strikes Back, but that's a superficial comparison because 1) they're both "bridge" films and 2) both end in cliffhangers with a beloved character in the hands of the enemy. These are two very different films, with very different goals and intentions. Such comparisons do a disservice to both. Catching Fire isn't a truly great film, at least by my standards. It shouldn't earn Best Picture nominations from the Academy Awards, although there may be some individual awards in store for the cast and crew. But that's not damning with faint praise. Catching Fire is a very good movie, and I recommend it for anyone who wants a little substance to go along with their popcorn entertainment this holiday season.

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Kaiju Theater: Pacific Rim

I'm a fan of giant monster movies from way back. A number of writer-types I hang out with during science fiction conventions fell in love with the form having first seen King Kong, but for me, Godzilla was my gateway drug of choice. The Saturday afternoons of my childhood were filled with hours upon hours of watching the "Creature Feature" on one of the Houston television stations, along with Friday evening's themed "Movie of the week" which often featured giant monsters going at it. This is how I first got exposed to King Kong, Godzilla, Gamera, Ray Harryhausen's work, THEM!, The Land that Time Forgot and the like. I also took in a steady diet of Ultraman, Battle of the Planets and a variety of anime, so when a movie such as Pacific Rim comes along, I am pretty much their target audience.

I am happy to report that Pacific Rim is a whole heck of a lot of fun. Guillermo del Toro is a magnificent director, and while this film isn't nearly as intimate as most of his other work, it still boasts a depth and character to it that is wholly lacking in other films of this sort. Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori (played by Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi) are both characters reeling from personal loss who need to overcome that trauma to help save the world. Mori in particular is an ass-kicking powerhouse occasionally crippled by her inner demons, and easily the most charismatic character in the movie. The commander of the Jaegers, Stacker Pentecost (played by Idris Elba) chews pretty much every piece of scenery around him, but remains fun to watch. Only Ron Perlman's black market Kaiju parts-dealer Hannibal Chau is too over-the-top for my taste, but given that Pacific Rim is very much a live-action anime, his character type is immediately recognizable and is appropriate for the role. Pacific Rim manages to be a smartly-written film whilst simultaneously embracing pretty much all the conventions of giant robots vs. giant monster films. That sounds weird, I know. There's rubber science galore in this film, but it's generally consistent and well-defined, enabling the willing suspension of disbelief.

I took my entire family to see this, including The Wife, Monkey Girl (14), Fairy Girl (12) and Bug (7). Monkey Girl loved it, picking up on all the anime references (and in truth, this movie is very much like a live-action anime with all the neon colors and over-the-top characters). The Wife mocked the cliches, although she seemed to enjoy it for the spectacle. Fairy Girl thought it was "Okay." Bug, the youngest, enjoyed the giant monster battles quite a bit, although his attention flagged during the human-centric buildup to the final mission. Historically, for me at any rate, the characters are always the weakest link during giant monster movies, filling time between the big monster smack-downs by sleepwalking through meaningless sub-plots. Pacific Rim does a much better job than most of tying the main characters' actions together with the big battles to make everything that happens relevant and engaging. De Toro doesn't radically alter the formula or reinvent or deconstruct the form. He takes the existing conventions and simply does them very well.

The story (if you don't already know) is set in the near future. Giant Kaiju monsters emerge from a dimensional rift on the Pacific Ocean seafloor and begin destroying coastal cities. It takes days of constant battle for conventional weapons to kill these monsters, so the Jaeger program--giant combat robots (otherwise known as mechs)--is launched to better combat the Kaiju threat. For five years, the Jaegers successfully intercept and destroy Kaiju, but abruptly the monsters start coming more frequently and get larger and more powerful. Jaegers begin to lose. Eventually, Kaiju are destroying Jaegers faster than replacements can be built. After seven years of battling the more powerful Kaiju, only four Jaegers out of a total of 51 remain, and the program is scuttled in favor of building a giant wall around the Pacific to keep the Kaiju from threatening population centers. Guess how well that works out?

Quite a few reviews have lavished praise on the special effects of the film, and while that's often a way of damning with faint praise--the implications being that the rest of the film doesn't hold up--in this case the attention to detail adds a great deal to the film. The Jaegers show significantly diverse personalities for giant robots, reflections, no doubt, of their human pilots within. My biggest disappointment came from the fact that (Spoiler Alert!) the Chinese Jaeger, "Crimson Typhoon," and the Russian Jaeger, "Cherno Alpha," both met with pretty abrupt defeats despite coming off as the most badass of the surviving Jaegers. Cherno Alpha is a Mark I Jaeger, the oldest and most primitive, and has a magnificently industrial, blunt-force-trauma design to it. Crimson Typhoon, by contrast, is a spectacular three-armed Mark 4 Jaeger piloted by triplets. It has rotating blades for hands, and looks like an insane martial arts nightmare. The two surviving Jaegers--following the battle for Hong Kong--are "Gipsy Danger," a recovered and rebuilt Mark III model formerly based in Alaska (and the Jaeger of our viewpoint characters), and "Striker Eureka," an Australian Jaeger and the only Mark V model built prior to the discontinuation of the Jaeger program. Both of these Jaegers are fun, but their designs are too sleek, too clean (despite significant wear and tear). They're both cut from the same cloth, aesthetically-speaking, whereas the Russian and Chinese Jaegers were much more distinct even when standing still. Yes, I wanted more on the other Jaegers and their crews--who were introduced only long enough to be killed off. But that's a flaw this film shares with many others.

As for the Kaiju... well, they were okay. I'm not sure any rise to iconic status, although all are more interesting than the pasty, gaunt monster from Cloverfield. Despite insistence that the designers took pains to avoid paying homage to any historical Kaiju from old Japanese monster movies, one in particular--Knifehead, pictured bottom left--is for all the world a hard-core update of Guiron, a knife-headed monster that battled the flying turtle Gamera in 1969's Attack of the Monsters. On the other hand, Otachi and Leatherback, two Kaiju that attack Hong Kong, are physically similar enough in broad strokes that I had a great deal of trouble telling them apart during the battle. Part of it comes from the color schemes used--Leatherback has an EMP generator that flashes bright, neon blue, while Otachi spits a like-colored acid from a glowing sack in her throat. Both are big and bulky, and while one has hidden wings a long tail, it's hard to tell during the mayhen of battle that these creatures don't share all of these attributes. That's part of the problem with the battle scenes taking place at night and (often) in the ocean: For practical reasons, it's easier to animate a convincing giant monster in these conditions, as the darkness and water obscures much of it's body. The downside is that much of the monster is obscured, making it much more difficult to get a clear visual identification. The Kaiju shown during the day are mostly seen through stock footage or news broadcasts, and not engaged in battle. Likewise, during the final battle of the film, the two Category 4 Kaiju--Scunner and Raiju--both swim around so quickly in poorly-lit conditions it is difficult to tell that they are distinct types, and not duplicates of each other. The third Kaiju in the battle, Category 5 Slattern, is more easily distinguished by its immense size and three tails.

The finale of the film is probably the most disappointing aspect of the whole shebang. After the excitement of the battle for Hong Kong (which is a whole lot of fun) the battle at the Rift is a lot more by-the-numbers. Remember in The Avengers, how Iron Man closed the dimensional portal and destroyed the invading army bent on conquering the world? Well guess what? That's exactly the same as what happens here, a parallel made all the more striking by the fact that the Jaeger Gipsy Danger is essentially the Iron Man armor scaled up really big. Apart from that, the general thrust is one we've seen time and again dating back to Star Wars and probably before.

Despite the film's shortcomings, Pacific Rim is a whole lot of fun and infinitely better than the bombastic Transformers movies. It doesn't transcend or transform the genre, but accomplishes all the goals it sets for itself. I left the movie theater happy and buoyant, unlike Man of Steel, which left me overwhelmed and numb (and later, angry). There's not a lot else to be said for it. If you like action spectacles, if you watch the animes Mobile Suite Gundam or Neon Genesis Evangelion, if the names Godzilla or Gamera or King Kong make you smile, then this is a movie you're probably going to like. Is it Star Wars for a new generation, as some have breathlessly hyped? Hardly. But it's a good movie, one that's likely to take in more than $400 million worldwide even if it only grosses $100 million in the U.S. and is thus declared a "flop." This is a film that's going to sell lots of DVDs to those who missed it in the theaters, and grow in popularity over the coming years. It's good, solid entertainment that doesn't talk down to the audience, and for those of us who've been consistently disappointed by offerings in this genre (Godzilla 1998, I'm looking at you!) Pacific Rim goes a long way toward righting those wrongs.

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