Pacific Rim (2013)

Here's a leading question.  Do you remember Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?

More than likely, probably not.  There was Jude Law, right?  It was a steampunk thing?  If you're really canny, you might remember the trivia that it was the first fully greenscreened film.  I remember every nerd ten years ago was so hot to watch it based off the trailer that made it look like some sort of awesome Nazi Robot fighting airplanes unnngh film, but when watching it on opening night it was just so many ppl talking and the Nazi Robots had like 10 whole minutes.  Critics loved it, but I can't remember another big-budget science fiction film that dried up so quickly in the public remembrance.  I sure as hell completely forgot about the film until I watched the first ten minutes of Pacific Rim.  Hearing our bland white man narrator say "back in the day there was the RIM, and then MONSTERS" had me suddenly forced back into the uncomfortable theater seat, my mind decaying as I worried about my freshman year of college and wondered when the fuck Halle Berry was going to show up.

Oh, sure.  Just because there's CGI and big budgets you think there's some sort of

well look that doesn't mean

okay, this is a little unfair.  After all, Sky Captain relied alot on star power to bring people to the theaters, while the only people I recognized in Pacific Rim were the also-ran actors that nerds point at and say "hey, it's that guy!"  Hey, it's Ron Perlman as a steampunk!  Hey, it's Charlie Day being Charlie Kelly!  Hey, it's Idris Elba looking more uncomfortable as the tough but fair military commander than he did when that white girl was trying to suck his dick in Obsessed!  Seriously, I know I often remark on actors looking not too happy to be playing a particular role, but holy shit Ser Elba does not look happy in this movie.  They can't all be Prometheus, champ.  Suck it up.

So Pacific Rim is Guillermo Del Toro's big nerd epic, the culmination of a billion internet shits jizzing over every SUPERMAN VS THE TERMINATOR fan film released on Youtube.  It's Godzillas vs the Megazord, it's an American Neon Genesis Evangelion (though not too American because we need that international box office papuh), it's the celebration of special effects uber alles.  And yes, the effects are really nice, spectacular even, but I'm in an age where spectacular shit is goddamned everywhere and I'd be alot happier with a plot that didn't lurch around like a drunk guy in a kaiju suit.

Much like how Sky Captain tried to blanket itself from criticism with the concept that its inherent problems were because it was supposed to be like a OLD TIMEY RADIO SERIAL, alot of defenders of Pacific Rim have fallen back on the concept that "it's like Voltron maaaaaan, did you get mad at Voltron?"  And of course I didn't, because I was like six years old and didn't understand anything, except that I hated those smug assholes in Voltron and wanted Planet Doom to kill everything.  I understand that, when the robot finally draws out its sword after ineffectually punching the monster, it's not a plot hole, it's a wacky home-age.

But here's the thing.  The vast majority of the film's influences were episodic things.  The plotlines of these shows were distracting loops, where the heroes have to defeat some prime bad, and the series finale (if there even is one, thanks G-Force) is just sort of the final culmination.  Pacific Rim doesn't feel like an episode of an awesome cartoon, it feels like one of those awful edited movie versions of an awesome cartoon.  You know, where the pilot episode and series finale are awkwardly spliced together with random scenes from other episodes, maybe some exclusive scenes of characters catching up the audience with shit that was happening off screen?  These movies were terrible because episodic kid shows aren't designed to have plot arcs that can sustain a two hour running length.  And look, here's Pacific Rim. 

I can't really hate on this movie, but that's mostly due to the fact that, aside from the visuals, they made everything so bland that it's hard to react to anything.  The dialogue is usually merely clunky (there should be a law against people saying "power move"), the only noteworthy moment when Idris Elba is forced on stage to deliver a "final showdown" speech that really demonstrates why people should give more credit to Independence Day.  Characters are pretty much separated by accents, including the sole female character, who was clearly designed to be a strong feminist symbol by having zero identifiable personality traits aside from the fact that she suffered a Trauma and now is going to Get Over It.  

I doubt Pacific Rim will be as forgotten as Sky Captain was, if just for the fact that the Internet has evolved fandom into such a self-serving mess that nothing nerd related will ever be forgotten by shrill idiots.  But everything about that movie is already fading into the pop-culture aether in my mind, and I'm totally okay with that.

The Hive

Remember Blood Monkey?  Probably not, since none of you people apparently ever read it.  ;_;  Well, for a refresher course, it was a terrible movie about a bunch of grad students getting killed by a group of hyper-intelligent chimps so terrifying to behold that the movie didn't show you them until literally the second-to-last minute of the film.  It was the first film in the MANEATER series, a depressingly long list of films about X monster (ranging, according to the wiki, from earthworms to yetis to wryvens) killing people with as little a budget as possible except for having a washed-up celebrity in a supporting (but never starring) role.  So, now we have THE HIVE, about a bunch of ants killing people with as little a budget as possible.  Blood Monkey had F. Murray Abraham  for its marquee star, and for this, we have Tom Wopat.  You know, Luke Duke.

At first, The Hive was looking like basically another ugly, vile deathfest like Blood Monkey.  The opening sequence features a mother and infant in some isolated jungle hut being devoured by army ants.  No, they don't show the baby being eaten, but we see an ant getting ready to sink its mandibles into the crying eye of the baby, before a quick cut and a painful scream. At this point, every indication is that it's gonna be just the same shit as Blood Monkey full of painful deaths of characters we're not necessarily supposed to hate, with a total bummer ending.

WRONG.

I'm not sure if the Syfy network sat on the studio behind the Maneater series to do something less dark and morbid, but to my boredom, they managed to make The Hive into Every Syfy Original in the Past Three Years (tm).  You know the pattern, because whether the subject matter is about killer ants, an evil global warming computer, or zombies, your Syfy Original is going to have certain aspects immutable traits:

1) Some sort of cool science organization.  Think back to all those Originals you watched.  Far more often than not, there is some sort of private organization made up of cool guys that do cool science stuff.  It makes sense, as since every Syfy series is basically the same concept of a bunch of nerds doing cool adventures.  Here, the group is THORAX INDUSTRIES, which seems to be what happens is you mix Terminix with Xe.  They're called down to deal with the ensuing flood of army ants taking over an Philippine island, aided by actual Filipinos who don't actually know language, because the only other explanation for their diction is that the director told the actors to "sound how a racist southerner would imagine you talk."  They also have embarrassing cool science guns that remove the photoshop filters that pass for the encrouching ant armies, and you will see them fire over and over and over again.

if you can imagine, the actual video looks even worse than this.

2) Teeth-gratingly terrible romance.  Here, our romance is between the head of Thorax and some university professor who believes that ants should be studied, not killed!  The screenwriter can't even get this wacky rivalry to work romantically, so after a few scenes of awkward bickering you just get shit like the woman slow-motion walking out of an airport and the guy giving her some cool info and then like "WELL I THINK THE PRICE OF THIS INTEL SHOULD BE A KISS ON THE MOUTH."  Mock Hallmark films all you like, at least the ones I've seen weren't written by robots or 13-year-old boys (functionally the same thing).

3) A total lack of sadistic/gory kills.  Aside from the opening scene, this movie is about as vanilla as a modern horror about killer ants could be.  While I'm glad that there wasn't alot of weird emotional suffering, I was less glad that like four people actually die in this movie, and when they do it's just "ant filter covers person, copy/paste skeleton on top."  While I understand this when the movie is about alien artifact tornadoes, but one generally expects that a movie about killer swarms of ants is going to have more than one grisly death scene (especially when the dvd box is of a bloody screaming woman covered in ants).  I don't want to sound like some creepy gorehound, but designating yourself as the Maneater series usually means having more than one death in the second half of your film.

(Disclaimer: No white women are actually killed in this movie.)

(Also, sure there's lots of good reason they couldn't call this "The Colony," since that's what a group of ants is called you fucking buffoons)

3) Stupid Shoehorned Development versus Misunderstanding Government Dweebs.  Granted, this is more of a hallmark of bad scifi in general, but I've never seen a Syfy original that didn't follow the whole "small incident -> bigger incident attracting notice -> realization of a completely bizarre reason for incidents -> government stooges refusing to believe reason until it is (almost) too late.  Here, we discover that the ants are being controlled by an extraterrestrial intelligence resulting in a BINARY ANT COMPUTER which is basically a bunch of interlocking ant cubes with electricity coming through it, and CGI ant fists.  Eventually, the heroes discover that the ants want the island, but the Filipino governor doesn't want to give in because doing that would ruin the island.  So, his solution is to...nuke the island.  Okay?

So, you might be wondering where Tom Wopat is in this.  Well, he's the second in command in Thorax, but early in the film an ant crawls into his brain, and starts controlling him like Plankton v. Spongebob.  Now, you might think this would lead to some situation where Wopat starts to subtly pave the way for the ants, but instead all the ant seems capable of doing is giving spooky flashbacks to dead bodies and forcing Wopat to mumble in every scene he's in.  I honestly felt bad for the the guy, as at least Abraham in Blood Monkey got a role where he got to act all mad scientist like and wave his arms around.  Wopat's inspiration seems to have been "pretend mental retardation and mug for the camera when you want to convery pain."

At the end, despite the ant still being in his brain, he somehow is firmly in the anti-ant contingent, actually smuggling in some explosive when he, hero, and heroine go to negotiate with the ants.  Then the ants turn into a giant ant (instead of throwing the nuke in the water because they're not that smart after all), heroine throws a pheremone into the ants that termporarily disables them, including the ant in Wopat's brain, though this changes nothing and he explodes.  Despite the explosion being weak enough that the other two are fine hiding behind a rock literally ten feet away, this still somehow forces out the super ant intelligence, which is a giant earwig of pure energy, where it goes into the sky and explodes.   Also, yes, there is a the twist ending where the ant colony is rebuilding itself five minutes later.

The whole ant brain control thing is literally the only interesting part of this film, so of course the writing completely bungles it.  After all, if the ant was controlling his brain, why would it be manipulating him into smuggling the bomb into his own colony?  My only guess was that it  was to derail the peace negotiations or cover the tracks of the other giant ant colony, that doesn't explain why the ants didn't just have him use the nuke at the human's camp, or why the ants seemed totally freaked out by the bomb.  And this is all assuming the subplot was meant to have deep complex connotations, as opposed to it being there for the sake of plot convenience.  

Overall, this movie is somehow worse than Blood Monkey.  While the latter was a complete mess of mean-spirited ball-hiding garbage, its cruelty was at least something to fixate on.  Here, we have a limp-wristed little creature feature with three plots that seem to go nowhere, generic characters that seem to disappear and reappear when the movie demands it, and CGI that, while serviceable, is used so often in the same hackneyed ways that it's the equivalent of those railing deaths from Space Mutiny.

god, why wouldn't you call it the colony...