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GIANT ROBOTS, GIANT MONSTERS, FAST ZOMBIES
I haven’t seen many of this year’s summer blockbusters. Hardly any, in fact. But I have seen these two right here.
Pacific Rim
Guillermo del Toro’s love letter to giant-monster/giant robot films, in which giant monsters start emerging from a portal in the ocean floor and attacking coastal cities. Humanity fights back with giant robots. Said fights are epic.
There’s so much wrong about this film – technological silliness, bad decision making, and acting ranging from standard to hammy – and yet it works so wonderfully. In fact, my only two real complaints are: (1) Hong Kong being made to look like a scene from Blade Runner (again), and (2) too many night fights that make it hard to see what the actual monsters and robots look like. One of the cool things about those old giant-monster films was being able to identify different types of monsters. If you asked me to describe any of the monsters in this film, I couldn’t do it without referring to Cloverfield.
Anyway, yes, it’s basically epic cartoonish monster/robot fights and epic cartoonish destruction woven together with a basic cartoonish storyline and cartoonish science. And it’s a hell of a lot of fun to watch. Which is all anyone really asks of both a summer blockbuster in general and a giant-monster/giant robot film in particular. If you were hoping for a serious film that makes a cartoonish premise realistic and believable, yr going to be disappointed. If you only ever watched those films to see giant robots and monsters smash shit up, this is right up yr street.
World War Z
Between the reports of a zillion rewrites and reshoots, and the fact that the trailers suggested it would be nothing like the book, it seems a lot of the reaction to World War Z has been, “Wow this didn’t suck nearly as much as I thought it would.” Personally, I was unaware of the production issues, but I have read the book, and while I understand the problem of staying faithful to a book intended to read like a UN report, I was a little put off by the CGI zombie swarms.
Anyway, my reaction is similar to the “wow, it didn’t suck after all” category. Some of the zombie chase scenes are quite intense, and WWZ makes a decent attempt to put a global face on the zombie epidemic, even if it falls a little short. On the other hand, it does veer into ludicrousness (the airplane scene in particular), and the ending probably could have used a little more explanation as to why that would work even by pub-science logic.
For all that, it’s a decent film, but one you can’t help thinking could have been so much better and used the WWZ concept as a platform for taking chances, especially with things like AMC’s The Walking Dead raising the bar for the zombie genre. On the other hand, WWZ isn’t really your standard zombie film – there is a noticeable lack of gore compared to other zombie films, which makes a kind of sense in that WWZ plays more like an apocalyptic disaster film than a horror film. (That said, I’m assuming it’s also because the studios wanted a mainstream PG-13 film.) So you should modify yr expectations accordingly.
Ain’t got time to bleed,
This is dF
Pacific Rim
Guillermo del Toro’s love letter to giant-monster/giant robot films, in which giant monsters start emerging from a portal in the ocean floor and attacking coastal cities. Humanity fights back with giant robots. Said fights are epic.
There’s so much wrong about this film – technological silliness, bad decision making, and acting ranging from standard to hammy – and yet it works so wonderfully. In fact, my only two real complaints are: (1) Hong Kong being made to look like a scene from Blade Runner (again), and (2) too many night fights that make it hard to see what the actual monsters and robots look like. One of the cool things about those old giant-monster films was being able to identify different types of monsters. If you asked me to describe any of the monsters in this film, I couldn’t do it without referring to Cloverfield.
Anyway, yes, it’s basically epic cartoonish monster/robot fights and epic cartoonish destruction woven together with a basic cartoonish storyline and cartoonish science. And it’s a hell of a lot of fun to watch. Which is all anyone really asks of both a summer blockbuster in general and a giant-monster/giant robot film in particular. If you were hoping for a serious film that makes a cartoonish premise realistic and believable, yr going to be disappointed. If you only ever watched those films to see giant robots and monsters smash shit up, this is right up yr street.
World War Z
Between the reports of a zillion rewrites and reshoots, and the fact that the trailers suggested it would be nothing like the book, it seems a lot of the reaction to World War Z has been, “Wow this didn’t suck nearly as much as I thought it would.” Personally, I was unaware of the production issues, but I have read the book, and while I understand the problem of staying faithful to a book intended to read like a UN report, I was a little put off by the CGI zombie swarms.
Anyway, my reaction is similar to the “wow, it didn’t suck after all” category. Some of the zombie chase scenes are quite intense, and WWZ makes a decent attempt to put a global face on the zombie epidemic, even if it falls a little short. On the other hand, it does veer into ludicrousness (the airplane scene in particular), and the ending probably could have used a little more explanation as to why that would work even by pub-science logic.
For all that, it’s a decent film, but one you can’t help thinking could have been so much better and used the WWZ concept as a platform for taking chances, especially with things like AMC’s The Walking Dead raising the bar for the zombie genre. On the other hand, WWZ isn’t really your standard zombie film – there is a noticeable lack of gore compared to other zombie films, which makes a kind of sense in that WWZ plays more like an apocalyptic disaster film than a horror film. (That said, I’m assuming it’s also because the studios wanted a mainstream PG-13 film.) So you should modify yr expectations accordingly.
Ain’t got time to bleed,
This is dF