Man, it’s tough being Pacific Rim.
The giant monsters-versus-giant robots adventure yarn has everything you could ask for in a movie about giant monsters versus giant robots. I expected things to be smashed.
Repeatedly. With bare scratches of story to hold it together.
This is thrill ride time, people. And I got it!
Unfortunately, not enough people out there got it. The movie is a flop in the U.S. market, after making $97 million, not even half of its $190 million production budget. But it’s killing internationally at triple the domestic take, so talks of a sequel are afoot.
I don’t know if Pacific Rim really needs a sequel or to become a blockbuster franchise. I was pretty happy with just one movie, but it could be fun. At the very least, I expected it to be a little bonkers, and it was.
Sometimes, bonkers is all I want.
Not crazy for the sake of crazy, but a movie that sees its goal and just goes for it. If you have a concept that is strange or unconventional, I want to see it carried all the way through. Don’t leave me hanging.
I say this because it’s pretty easy to be a jaded geek these days at the multiplex. The entertainment business has spent years mining all our hobbies and genre favorites. So many stories taken, watered down and reworked for the pursuit of the next blockbuster.
Pacific Rim did go all the way. We had a giant robot walking down the streets of Hong Kong, dragging a freighter ship and beating a giant monster with it like a bat. Charlie Day in a mind meld with a kaiju. Ron Perlman as a technicolor gangster. Russian jaeger pilots right out of Street Fighter II. And Idris Elba believably shouting “we’re canceling the apocalypse!” (It’s right up there with Gerard Butler yelling “tonight we dine in hell!” in 300.)
And this is before we get into how the mind-sharing “drift” setup created intimacy between the main characters without turning it into romance, because this movie did not need a love story. Add deft camera work and CGI that captured the immensity of the conflicts, and I was sold.
Saw it in IMAX 3D, was not disappointed. Bonkers. Done.
Pacific Rim made me think of other times I have seen a movie and got that bonkers feeling. That whatever the filmmakers set out to do, it was done to completion. Even if it was a movie I didn’t like, or saw once and never will again, I know I saw something different and well done.
It doesn’t happen so much for me any more in our geek-genre films, especially now that production – set design, CGI, costuming, digital video – is so slick and accomplished that even a horrible film looks absolutely great.
Remember when bad movies also looked bad?
No more. I think this all turned with Punisher: War Zone (2008), but maybe that’s just when I noticed it.
Mind you, we asked for this. We said we wanted more. And in the past decade, as special effects took even wilder turns, we geeks got invited to the big dance. Hollywood has turned into the age of the geek as the major studios fight to keep their dying business model afloat. X-Men (2000), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and Spider-Man (2002) paved the way to Hollywood taking over Comic-Con.
Now we can’t go one summer without a ton of comic book, sci-fi or fantasy movies. Look at this summer alone: Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness, Epic, After Earth, This Is The End, Man of Steel, World War Z, Pacific Rim, R.I.P.D., Red 2, The Wolverine, The Smurfs 2, 2 Guns, Percy Jackson; Sea of Monsters and Elysium. Kick-Ass 2, The World’s End, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones and Riddick are on the way.
That’s a lot to get through, and a tiny bit of that even sniffs bonkers territory (Iron Man 3, or, as I called it, Lethal Weapon 5). The World’s End, with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost teaming again with Edgar Wright, has the best chance, as it and This Is The End create the best sci-fi comedy horror since Ghostbusters.
But when I think of that bonkers feeling, I have a few other films in the hopper that get me going. It’s less about the quality of the film than the experience I had watching it, whether it was good or not, whether I liked it or not. Here are some of my favorite bonkers geek-genre movies.
Speed Racer (2008)
I know, no one likes this movie but me. But let’s face it, this movie did exactly what it set out to do: it made the cartoon world a real place. Unlike other movies based on cartoons, it did not try to adapt the the cartoon world into our real world, which always feels like some kind of half-done cop-out. (I’m looking at you, Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones, Rocky and Bullwinkle.) It made a real cartoon world, with insane physics and nutso science and even some kung fu.
And in true Wachowski style, they pack a ton of storytelling into small spaces through every cinematic trick they can muster. The opening sequence, shifting between past and present as Speed chases the ghost of his brother’s track record, gets me every time. I don’t care that the end sequence makes me near-epileptic, or that they had to invent about a dozen new colors. It’s crazy, and I love it.
The Fountain (2006)
Oh, Darren Aronofsky. Somehow I have seen all of your films, and I generally like them, but I can watch each one only once. There’s something about watching his films, full of such relentless nihilism and emotional torture, that just beats you down. All his films are about the main character leaping off into The Great Big Nothing, and in graphic novel-inspired The Fountain we get to see Hugh Jackman Wolverine float off into space!
We see Wolverine sorta having sex with a tree! We see Wolverine sexing Rachel Weisz across three time periods, all filmed by her then-husband Aronofsky! We see Wolverine crying, and crying, and crying! Like, big honkin’ closeups of Wolverine-tears falling out of his Wolverine-eyes!
I saw this in the theater with my now-wife and a pair of friends, and it was nearly insufferable. But also crazy brilliant. I never will watch it again, but it haunts me. It may even haunt my Netflix queue.
Dancer in the Dark (2000)
We weren’t getting out of here without mentioning any Lars von Trier. In this movie he combines alt-rock geeks (Bjork! Thom Yorke!) with foreign-film geeks (Catherine Denueve!) with music geeks (musical theater!) with social-justice geeks (the system beats down an immigrant!). Tell me, in what world is this concept supposed to work?
It’s almost bonkers enough that von Trier makes this movie, but it’s truly bonkers because it actually works. The actors are deeply committed to their roles, and the music is devoid of camp. We end up with a potent cocktail that’s humorous, emotionally over-the-top, and thoroughly traumatizing. I saw this with a friend who was dominated into blubbering mess by the end, as von Trier just ladles despair all over everything.
This is another movie I loved but have not seen since it came out. But the sequence for the song “Scatterheart” is just devastating.
RoboCop (1987)
Who the hell combines sci-fi, crime drama, a revenge tale, creepshow death and dismemberment, anti-corporate screed and searing sociopolitical commentary into one film? Paul-effing-Verhoeven, that’s who. All these things, spearheaded by Peter Weller as that haunted robot with a heart, and Kurtwood Smith, pre-Red Foreman, hamming it up all over the screen as the bad guy, that makes the movie so bonkers. Well, maybe less bonkers in our gilded age of 2013 where Detroit actually went bankrupt and the corporate takeover of public services is an ongoing issue.
While Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner are created with creating and writing RoboCop, Verhoeven made this into the awesomeness we know. As evidence, I submit that those guys made the half-bad RoboCop 2 and the notorious RoboCop 3 without Verhoeven. The bonkers was gone.
There are other bonkers, auteur-driven, geek-genre films out there I’m sure would fit this list, but let’s not be here all day. I didn’t even mention the original Oldboy film.
But as the summer spectacle winds down, may we geeks forever search for that bonkers feeling. It’s the feeling that drives us, after all.
Love it, demand it, cherish it. Find your bonkers, and tell everyone when you do. We’ll follow.
