Since it's a Robot

One of my hobbies is watching movie trailers.  That way I don’t need to see the movie, because oops!  Ninety percent of the time they spoil the movie in the two minute and thirty second teaser. 

The other day I saw the trailer for Pacific Rim and I have to say I was sort of surprised.  I used to watch a great deal of anime, so mecha anime has been one of my past times.  Granted, I haven’t really kept up on my anime fetish due to my increasingly limited amount of time that I can devote to that sort of thing … and these days I’d rather watch a Korean drama … But that is entirely beside the point.  Just because I haven’t seen anything lately doesn’t mean that I’m not familiar with the greatest mecha anime of all time – Evangelion.

And when I think of monsters coming up from a dimensional portal in the Pacific Ocean to kill us all and a whole slew of guys in suits moving their legs to get the legs of the mech to move … I think, “Couldn’t they get the rights to Evangelion?  And if they couldn’t get the rights to Evangelion, then why did they even bother?”

Am I wrong in my outrage that action movies these days focus so hard on special effects that they sort of overlook another important element of storytelling – a plot?  Personally, I blame Alfred Hitchcock and Daphne du Maurier.  Why them?  Because of The Birds that’s why.  In The Birds (1963), the main idea of the plot is to get a mama’s boy’s mother to accept another woman in her son’s life.  I know – you thought it was about birds.  Yes, in the midst of this – there are insane birds that kill people.  Then, we can blame Jaws while we’re at it.  I know, you thought Jaws was about a killer shark.  No, it’s about a guy who’s scared of water who learns not to be after he kills a man-eating great white shark.  Well, even though I have a place in my heart for both those films (they’re classics), I prefer something with a little more thought put into it. 

I remember watching a review for V for Vendetta where they talked about how it was an action film and yet it was not (p.s. that movie had the best ally scenario I have ever seen).  The point is I don’t need to have every moment of a film be jam-packed with action scene after action scene.  You can have car chases, mafia hits, skydiving, and robots as big as the Empire State Building without compromising plot.  Evangelion proves that.

Well, you don’t have to take my word for it.  Surely, the Rotten Tomato score will speak for itself when Pacific Rim scores somewhere between a five and a six.