Pacific Rim is the Citizen Kane of robot monster movies. I’m referring, naturally, to the original cut of Citizen Kane, not the butchered, robot-free studio cut that most of us saw in film class. Making Rosebud a sled instead of a robot companion deprives Kane of both pathos and narrative coherence. Anyway. This film is, of course, a remake of the 1965 Orson Welles Japanese production, The Pacific Rim. The 2013 version of Pacific Rim is perhaps the deepest and most ambitious robot monster movie since Woody Allen’s 1982 Robots of Manhattan, and perhaps the most innovative cinematic take on robots and monsters since Francois Truffaut’s ground-breaking masterpiece, Les Robots Dangereux. Continue reading
Pacific Rim
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There are two times a year where Hollywood really rolls out their Big Tentpole Franchise Movies: summer and the holidays. This summer, we’ve already seen Iron Man 3, The Great Gatsby, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Hangover Part III, Fast and Furious 6, and Man of Steel. We still have World War Z, The Lone Ranger, and The Wolverine.
For those of you keeping score at home, that’s comic-book movie sequel, book adaptation, sequel to a reboot of a 60s TV show, REALLY unnecessary sequel, another sequel, comic-book movie reboot, another book adaptation, another TV adaptation, and another comic-book movie sequel. Continue reading