As part of my slow-movie-week posts, I'm continuing my rambling about movies I'm looking forward to seeing, and having "previewed" Zack Snyder's Man of Steel I will now discuss one of the movies I have been most eagerly anticipating this year, along with Star Trek: Into Darkness: Guillermo del Toro's giant-robots-vs.-giant-monsters epic Pacific Rim.
I find it strange that, even though I grew up in the 80s and loved collecting Transformers toys and watching their cartoons, I did not rush out to see their first-ever live-action movie back in 2007, and in fact I have only seen one of the three Transformers movies in the theater. I would certainly not say it has because I have "grown up" because though I may be pushing forty I love my pop culture as much as the next fanboy.
Rather, I would argue that, other than the notion of giant, living robots from outer space doing battle on Earth, the movies had very little in common with the cartoons I grew up adoring. The first film was basically an orgy of computer-generated imagery and little else, and its story, characterization and dialogue quite frankly made some of the Saturday morning cartoons look Shakespearean in comparison. To add insult to injury, it even threw toilet humor into the mix. Ultimately, for all of the explosions and destruction that take place in these movies, the real casualty of these movies, for me, was any sense of humanity in them, and any sense of consequence. Nothing that happened in these films felt like it mattered because the characters received next to no development. The fact that they swapped one bimbo who can't act (Megan Fox) for another (Rosie Huntington-Whitely) as Shia LeBeouf's leading lady speaks volumes about how much they care about the human element of the film.
I hold out hope, however, for the upcoming Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro's upcoming big-budget love letter to old Japanese serials or movies starring Godzilla and other kaiju (giant monsters) as well as those starring giant robots.
From the trailers, at least, there is some indication of a world in peril where humans, as the pilots of giant robots called Jaegers, are front and center, rather than just collateral damage in a CG-slugfest. Of course, the fact that del Toro, director of the multi-awarded Pan's Labyrinth and a certified pop-culture junkie as evidenced by his work on two Hellboy films and Blade II is at the helm suggests that this movie may have more than a little substance to go along with the style that's been put on display so far. Sure, it's not necessarily an "original" piece of work in that many aspects of it have been done before. Hollywood has churned out a long line of disaster movies from Earthquake to 2012, they've done giant robots, with the aforementioned Transformers movies as Exhibits "A" through "C," and they've done giant monster movies too, from the ill-fated Godzilla remake to the more recent Cloverfield. The difference is that I'm fairly sure that nothing of this scope has ever been attempted by a major Hollywood studio, and that this is the first time viewers will see the full force of Hollywood's current technology brought to the table in order to realize these fantastical concepts.
I also know that Del Toro's participation is not a guarantee of this film's quality, no matter how spectacular the trailers may have been, but it is nonetheless hugely comforting to know that this time, the CG wizards of ILM will be guided by someone whose films have both brains and heart to go along with the action.
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