Tag: Monsters

Cool Robots, Bad-Ass Monsters and Disappointment in ‘Pacific Rim’

Pacific Rim movie poster.


Written by Leigh Kolb

Spoilers ahead!

The theme at the core of Pacific Rim is that collaboration and trust lead to success. And while the sweeping visuals of human-team-led robots (Jeagers) fighting with ocean monster-aliens (Kaiju) left me surprisingly entertained and satisfied, the dialogue and plot relied heavily on tired tropes.
Pacific Rim, directed and co-written by Guillermo del Toro, treads lightly around commentary on humans’ environmental abuse of Earth and allowing women in combat roles, but the bulk of the plot relies on trope after trope to support the larger-than-life action sequences between the Jaegers and Kaiju.
Overall, the film works, and it continues to get great reviews; however, it could have worked so much better had the writers tried a little harder to stay away from clichés.
The film takes place just a decade in the future, in a world that’s been rocked and partially destroyed by the Kaiju coming from the depths of the Pacific Ocean and attacking cities. The international government is halting the Jaeger program (which puts two pilots–who must share a “neural handshake” mind-meld–in the driver’s seat of an enormous robot), and the crew has one more opportunity to fight the Kaiju. Marshall Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) leads a crew that includes his hand-picked choice of Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and, eventually, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi).
Stacker Pentecost.
Each of these three characters has an emotional weight–Pentecost feels protective of and responsible for Mori (he rescued and adopted her when her family was killed by the Kaiju), Becket lost his brother to the Kaiju while the two were mentally connected and fighting as co-pilots in a Jaeger, and Mori lost her family to the Kaiju when she was a little girl and has spent her life studying and training to become a pilot–and she’s “one of our brightest,” Pentecost says.
In his leadership position, however, Pentecost is concerned that Mori’s vengeance and difficult memories will impede her abilities to be a pilot, so he limits her career. Becket–who was literally in his brother’s mind when his brother was ripped from their Jaeger and brutally killed–and his memories are of no real concern to Pentecost.
Mako Mori.
While Pentecost’s fatherly feelings of protection and concern are justifiable, Becket is forceful in his desire to have Mori as a co-pilot. Her test numbers are strong and she fights him as an equal, which none of the male candidates could. With trepidation, Pentecost allows Mori to be Becket’s co-pilot.
The larger idea that women are “too emotional” for combat positions has been pervasive throughout the debate of women serving in combat positions (which the American military officially accepted in January 2013). Mori does get caught in her memories in her first major flight simulation with Becket; however, if she’s had hands all around her wringing about that possibility, certainly her anxiety over it would have helped push her over the edge. When anyone is told, over and over again, that she is fragile and emotional–chances are, some of that will be internalized.
Pentecost angrily dismisses her after her memory drift almost causes mass destruction (in fact, she asks to be dismissed, as she “respects” Pentecost, which she tells Becket is different than being “obedient”). Becket–after seeing her memories–tells Pentecost, “You rescued her, you raised her… now you’re holding her back.”
Mori is an equal to Becket.
Mori’s respect/obedience is troubling at times, but overall she is a strong female character. She’s excellent at what she does, and she is persistent at succeeding and meeting her goals. In fact, when Becket gets in a fight when another pilot is disrespectful to Mori, it feels odd and out of place–“nonsensical” and “unnecessary,” as Zev Chevat says at The Mary Sue. Otherwise, Becket is her greatest champion and leads with experience without being condescending.
And while the plot ebbs and flows in regard to its depiction of women (and I use that term broadly–Mori is really the only female character with lines), the film comes close to satisfying my desire for diversity and empowered female roles, but then it quickly regresses into tired tropes.
Becket is happy to see Mori is his co-pilot.
Becket seems to be the protagonist (and I almost thought at the beginning that there would be some interesting commentary on masculinity and military culture–from the monstrous masculine robots to the fact that Becket has to work in a dangerous menial construction job before being reassigned), but Mori is more fully developed, in terms of her memories and motivations. The two share a clear bond, and whether or not it’s a romantic one depends on the viewer (del Toro wasn’t totally sure, either).
At the end (after Pentecost has figured out that they need Mori and he asks her to “protect him”), Becket and Mori travel into the depths of the Pacific to Save Humanity. Once they get there to drop the bomb, their oxygen levels plummet and Becket tells Mori to retreat into a protective pod so he can drop the bomb. “I can finish this alone,” he says, giving her his oxygen.
So he does. His motivations are pure, but it still seems like a letdown to the viewer after all that Mori has accomplished. The final blow that does, indeed, Save Humanity, is dropped by our white male protagonist (the black man has sacrificed himself, and the Asian woman is protected in a little bubble).

 

I would have loved to at least see Mori giving Becket CPR to save him in the aftermath (instead of him just waking up), or something to level the heroism. Her role feels diminished at the end.
Becket and Mori are both heroes, but Becket is the default protagonist.
I don’t need a female protagonist in every film. However, when a film like this focuses on and develops the female lead without giving her the satisfaction of being a clear hero, something feels off. Either more needed to be done with Becket’s emotional baggage, or less with Mori’s. As it stands, the film perpetuated the notion that women’s emotions could be a hindrance in combat, and men’s emotions translate to strength in battle. Stuffing Mori into a pod at the climax of the film is symbolic of trying to shoo women back into their protected spaces so they don’t fly too close to the sun. I don’t think Becket as a character would have approved of that idea, nor would del Toro, probably. But that scene certainly left that taste in the viewer’s mouth–let the white guy finish the job!

I can’t stress enough how entertaining and well-done the visuals of this film are–and again, that’s coming from someone who did not expect to feel exhilarated while watching monsters fight robots. The lightly developed characters and don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it female empowerment, however, left much to be desired. And while the optimistic ending and refreshing lack of American exceptionalism reinforce the idea that everyone–different ethnicities, genders, and races–needs to work together to succeed, the lackluster writing and reliance on tropes still sends the message that women’s emotions can be a hindrance and that they need to be protected.

Mori is instrumental in helping save the world–but she doesn’t get to set off the bomb. She’s not fully treated as a damsel in distress, but she comes too close for comfort. Maybe, just maybe, next time Becket can retreat to the pod while Mori fries the enemy.

In addition to having an almost-not-really female protagonist, Pacific Rim really only caters to the female gaze, in terms of mild sexual objectification. I guess I am simply perpetuating this.

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Horror Week 2011: The Descent

When I first heard of The Descent, around the time of its 2006 theatrical release, it was described to me as “a movie about a bunch of lesbians who go into a cave and there are monsters.”

As it turns out, the entire six-woman cast of characters is ostensibly straight, if their boy talk in the early character-establishing scenes is anything to go by. I suspect my friend saw an all-female cast in a horror movie and assumed there MUST be lesbianism going on, because what’s a horror movie without sex? Or, for a more sexist explanation, chicks doing something interesting together without male supervision reads lesbian.
[Warning: If you are a group of friends in a movie, and you take a picture like this, at least half of you will be killed.]
Regardless, The Descent IS a movie about a bunch of women who go into a cave and there are monsters. What makes it such a brilliant movie is that you can chop the last three words off that plot description and you still have the makings of a terrific scary movie. It’s almost a full hour before the monsters appear, but that doesn’t mean the horror can’t start before the opening titles. After establishing a group of adventuresome female friends, we’re subject to witness the gruesome auto accident that kills main character Sarah’s husband and child. One year later, the friends have reconvened in the Appalachian mountains in the United States for a caving expedition to help a grief-wracked Sarah get her groove back. Only Juno, the alpha dog in the group (who just happened to have been schtupping Sarah’s husband before he was killed) knows that they are actually venturing into an unexplored cave system. In Juno’s mind, this surprise is an even greater gift to Sarah, who will get the honor of naming the cave system, perhaps after her dead daughter. But after a tunnel collapse blocks off their return path, Juno’s surprise means the group has no map and no one on the surface knows where they are.
Being trapped in an unknown cave with limited resources and no hope of outside rescue is in itself a terrifying situation, and The Descent plays it for all it is worth. A seemingly bottomless chasm must be crossed with only half the cams needed. One caver’s hand is sliced open by a ropeline when she saves her friend from plummeting to her death. Another caver follows the illusion of daylight, falls down a hole, and suffers a compound fracture in her leg. I’m already watching about half of the scenes through a finger screen and demanding that we turn the lights back on.
And then, the monsters come. Humanoid creatures with waxy pale skin, unseeing bleached-out eyes, and a tendency to rip people’s throats out and then chomp on their guts. Because the creature design is so simple, The Descent can afford to show them to us without your typical monster-movie restraint. And because the creatures are blind, we’re forced to endure several close-quarters silent standoffs recalling the T-Rex vs. Jeep scene in Jurassic Park. Only this is an R-rated horror movie, so some of those encounters end in stomach-turning gore.
All of this adds up to a horror movie so over-the-top terrifying I can’t believe I was willing to watch it again to write this review. But the gender implications of The Descent are too rich for me to deny, even though the film is sadly bereft of lesbians.
According to the iron-clad authority of Wikipedia, The Descent was originally conceived with a mixed-gender cast, until director Neil Marshall’s business partner “realized that horror films almost never have all-female casts.” But the female cast of The Descent brings more than novelty. I also don’t ascribe to Marshall’s suggestion that the chief advantage of the all-female cast is more naked emotion in a terrifying situation [“The women discuss how they feel about the situation, which the soldiers in Dog Soldiers [Marshall’s previous horror film] would never have done.”] The women of The Descent actually approach their situation with what is, at least to my American eyes, quite the stiff upper lip.
[Sidebar: Wikipedia also notes that Marshall gave the women different accents “to enable the audience to tell the difference between the women,” which is maybe the most depressing thing I’ve ever read. Who needs to bother with characterization when you have ACCENTS?]
I’m not buying the story that the all-female cast was to grab attention (if that were the case, maybe they would have been lesbians) or to allow for deeper exploration of feelings.  I think the all-female cast of The Descent is designed to clue the audience into a particular subtextual layer to this horror story. Because what’s more terrifying than being trapped in a cave with monsters? Women. Women’s bodies.
While a cave setting evokes female reproductive organs almost inherently, the set design here takes this metaphor to extremes. The women descend into the cave through a slit-shaped gash in the earth, and then must crawl head-first through a narrow passageway into the greater cave system, where the true danger of the monsters await.
The monsters, depicted as the products of evolution motivated only by a primal drive for survival, are the perfect elaboration of this cave-as-womb horror metaphor. And as a cherry on top, they rip the guts out of these women.
Wait, the actual cherry on top is our heroine Sarah emerging Apocalypse Now-style from a pool of blood in the cave gallery that functions as the monsters’ killing fields, the signature image from the film.  And the cherry on top of that cherry is that Sarah fights the only female creature in the film while still wading in the pool of blood and kills her by stabbing her in the face with a phallic bone.
After this menstrual baptism, Sarah shifts from a wounded woman paralyzed by grief into terrifying killing machine, fighting off the creatures so gruesomely it seems almost dangerously inefficient (Eye gouging? Really? They can’t even see!) 
After all this, there’s still time for two more twists that rely on the gender of the cast for maximum effectiveness. [SPOILER ALERT, obviously.] First, we have Sarah in Creature Terminator Mode turn her rage against Juno, the only other human survivor, after discovering Juno’s affair with her late husband, by wounding her and leaving her to die at the hands of the creatures. It’s a moment that doesn’t sit quite right with me, in part because it is almost impossible to imagine a similar situation playing out between two male characters. 
Shortly after this betrayal, Sarah escapes from the caves and is able to return to their parked vehicle. As she takes a moment to collect herself, she sees a bloody Juno in the passenger’s seat. In the American theatrical release, the film ends here, but in the original edit and the DVD Director’s Cut there’s an additional minute of footage where we see that Sarah’s entire escape was a hallucination, and she is still in the cave, with no exit in sight. Sarah then hallucinates her daughter sitting with her in the cave with a lit birthday cake, and looks peaceful and accepting as the camera pulls out to reveal the enormity of the cave and the great number of creatures closing in. I prefer this ending, not only because I’m a sucker for bleak endings.  Throughout the film we’re given suggestions that Sarah’s grief is so great it has become a mental illness, including earlier depictions of hallucinations. And as much as I tire of cinema’s endless fascination with mentally ill women, in this case, it feels like a more honest character arc than the idea that fighting for survival and exacting cruel vengeance could snap her out of her grief haze. 
Whether it was done to cash in on these female tropes, to underscore the metaphors to the female anatomy, or just to grab our attention, the all-female cast undeniably serves in The Descent’s favor. And it sure is a nice treat for us horror-flick loving bitches.  
Robin Hitchcock previously reviewed Michael Clayton for Bitch Flicks. You can read more of her movie reviews at her blog HitchDied and plenty more feminist pop culture analysis at her other blog The Double R Diner.