Pacific Rim

[cinaed]

So I went and saw Pacific Rim, a movie I’ve been highly anticipating for a while!

Short, non-spoilery reaction: I enjoyed it immensely, Mako is the best, the special effects were fantastic without being over-the-top, Mako is the BEST, sadly it did suffer from too many dicks on the dance floor (but I figure that’s a caveat that comes with pretty much all movies these days), and I would definitely recommend it.

Longer reaction, spoilery, behind the cut.

While this movie was supposedly about Becket and his healing from the death of his brother, it was also very much Mako’s story. Both Raleigh and Mako are very much survivors who must learn to move on from the past and embrace the future.

Towards the end, Raleigh tells Mako that he’d never thought about the future, too lost in the past and too focused on survival in the present to think about tomorrow or the day after that, and I think Mako has had both a similar and dissimilar problem. She’s been trapped in the past, yes, mourning her dead much as Raleigh has been mourning his brother, but she has been looking towards the future— only the future she could picture was a very limited one. She looked towards the time when she would get into a jaeger and be able to avenge her family and honor the trust that Pentecost has placed in her. I don’t think she ever considered what would happen next, or what she would do if Pentecost wasn’t there to see her succeed.

(God, I want all the Mako and Pentecost backstory. ALL THE BACKSTORY. *makes a note for Yuletide*)

But gosh, Mako. Mako. Who was a scared little girl who grew up smart and clever and quick on her feet, with 51 simulated kills on her record, who is the best of the best, who wants to fight the monsters and put her nightmares to rest but who also respects her father-figure too much to disobey him when he tries to prevent her from becoming the jaeger pilot she deserves to be. (Ugh, I really want to know what her last words to Pentecost were.)

As for the other characters, I— well. See my comment about too many dicks on the dance floor. All of the acting was excellent and most of the characters were engaging, I just— kept looking at the Australian father-son team and wishing they were a mother-daughter team instead. *sighs* Just imagine someone like Cate Blanchett as Hansen and Emilie de Ravin as Chuck….

I also appreciated and enjoyed the diversity of the pilots and the background characters, though I wish the other jaeger pilots would have gotten a bit more screen-time. Also, uh, so the Chinese pilots were triplets, right? So were all three of them in the jaeger when it was destroyed? Or did only two of them die and one of the triplets was left behind? That distracted me a bit because I was thinking about the possibility of the poor triplet losing both siblings and, unlike Mako and Raleigh, not getting a chance to step back into a jaeger and avenge them.

I am certain that fandom will probably ship the two scientists— not going to lie, I did too. They hit my ‘cranky scientists who originally mostly dislike each other but learn to appreciate the other’s brilliance’ sweet spot that I’ve been missing since I shipped Rodney/Radek in my Stargate Atlantis days, heh. I did very much enjoy them as characters, and would also like post-movie fic about them having to deal with having drifted together without having any training, and how Geiszler now knows why Gottlieb needs that cane, and Gottlieb keeps being struck by dumb little memories of Geiszler’s first date or disastrous attempt to drive a car.

I also really appreciated the world-building touches del Toro and Beacham put in— the revelation that the aliens had been to Earth before back in the time of the dinosaurs but left because the world was too inhospitable to their kind, but that our misuse of the planet had pretty much terraformed the planet for them. And then there’s the background news reports of riots as people protest that only the rich are being evacuated to the safe zones, that the people are not being given a voice in how to defend their world. I believe it, especially because if the publichad been given a voice, the jaeger program would not have been in as sorry a state as it ended up being towards the end.

And yes, the movie tells us, the world might have come together to fight against the aliens but that doesn’t mean all problems are solved. Poverty remains. Racism remains. The gap between the poor and the rich remains, and is possibly even increased.

But I think the end message, as Mako and Raleigh embrace on the raft and look to the future, as the scientists and engineers and technicians cheer and embrace each other and know that they helped to keep the jaeger program alive for this exact moment, is that the world is still here.

There’s the promise of living rather than merely surviving, of rebuilding with a better understanding of how people from so many different backgrounds came together to stop the apocalypse.

End essay, ha.

But seriously, I really want fic.

-Mako and Pentecost backstory. All of it. ALL OF IT, from the time he kneels in front of her and tells her that the alien is dead and that she’s safe for the moment (for the moment, because he’s always honest, and he can’t promise her safety forever), all the details of how he raised her, the not-arguments they had over her training to be a jaeger pilot, ALL OF IT.

-Post-movie Mako/Raleigh— how do they deal with learning how to live again when they’re probably the world’s biggest celebrities at the moment? Also dealing with shared memories and all that entails, and Mako dealing with Pentecost’s death.

-Post-movie Gottlieb/Geiszler with the above dealing with dreams and shared memories, and also how they deal with the fame of having helped to take out the aliens.