I am getting old, and I am worried about my suspension of disbelief. When I was younger my suspension of disbelief was in fine form – I remember watching the original Star Wars as a boy and barely wondering why massive super-tech star ships bothered with dogfighting (later Iain M. Banks showed me otherwise), later as a young man I nodded and smiled happily as the Matrix told me that the only solution to a power shortage was to link up a million human minds to a huge virtual world policed by insurance salesmen. These were happy halcyon days of delusion.
We love the very young because they are full of dreams, and we love the very old because they are full of experience. But in-between, somewhere, there must be a tipping point. A fulcrum where what has passed starts to weigh more heavily than what is to come. Watching Pacific Rim, Guillermo Del Torro’s Kaiju vs. Jaegers Summer epic, I felt this uncertain balance in me, and I realised that the first casuality as I began to tip was going to be my suspension of disbelief.
Pacific Rim is massive, roiling, and epic – it does not pull its punches. Hell, it literally puts rockets on its elbows when it punches. Giant monsters are crawling out of the oceanic depths, the apocalypse is nigh! I am with you Guillermo, I buy the monsters – super-natural leviathans from another dimension, why not! San Francisco is levelled. Yes, yes, Guillermo. It was probably going to fall into the sea anyway – I believe you. Humanity must respond!
And there’s the problem. Because humanity doesn’t respond with any of the massive stockpile of existing weapons and vehicles (at least not once they’ve had a chance to think it through), they don’t even respond with nuclear weapons (not even itty bitty ones). No, they respond by building colossally expensive giant robots. With pilots. That punch.
I tried. I promise I tried. It’s got lots of action. The characters are one-dimensional but they scurry about between the ankles of the shark-titans and squid-giants and talk a lot about their feelings, which is a lot more than you’d expect from a blockbuster. But I just couldn’t do it. My suspension of disbelief failed.
I am embarrassed. This has never happened to me before. Perhaps we should try again later :-(
Giant robots are military suicide, ruinously expensive and stupidly ineffective compared to, say, tomahawk missiles. A massive wall made of iron girders will be next to useless against something weighing tens of thousands of tons. Four Chinooks could never lift that weight. Massive alien titans do not chase little girls (and if they did they would damn well catch them). Nuclear reactors do not meltdown like a supernova. Fighting hand-to-hand is madness in an age of projectile and energy weapons. Leave the radio on, or better, leave the pilots at home, AND BUILD BIGGER BLOODY ROBOTS.
Stop. Stop it. Scrap all that. I am arguing against the science in a Summer blockbuster starring giant robots and alien monsters. This may be what the Internet is for, but it’s not helping. It’s not even healthy.
The real question is: why could I not suspend my disbelief?
Normally it is lack of internal consistency that gets to me. You can have aliens or vampires, superheroes or spaceships, I don’t care, but you better establish a consistent set of rules and stick to them. Looper was praised as an interesting time-travel action flick, but I hated it because they had two separate ideas about how time travel worked and flipped between them as the story required. The director can say it makes sense in a ‘story type way’ all he likes. But it doesn’t. It’s just lazy.
But Pacific Rim is logically consistent. Consistently mental, utterly implausible, but consistent.
I think it is in the oddest part of the film that we can find an answer. The two comedy scientists, who ape and clown around the Jaeger base, and jar terribly with all the grim realism and stoicism around them. When they first appeared I was taken aback, and thought that they did not fit the tone of the rest of the film. But I was wrong. They are the tone – it’s the rest of the film that’s wrong.
Pacific Rim is a cartoon. A casual flippant adventure yarn for Saturday mornings. A kids show (and a pretty fun one). The problem, the reason my disbelief failed, is that it tries too hard to be something more.
It is inconsistent, but not logically. The inconsistency is aesthetic. Silly vs. Serious. Like mixing water and oil.
Perhaps Guillermo could have patched the problems. A scene at the beginning where an aid rushes into the Oval Office and cries “Mr President, we’ve lost all the tomahawks! The General swears he put them down somewhere, but no-one’s seen them since that whole business in Iraq”, and Obama stands and declares with halting sincerity: “Then we must build Robots!” But then I’m not convinced I would have bought that either. He doesn’t seem the robot type.
My suspension of disbelief failed. But you know what Guillermo? I have nothing to be ashamed of. Because I know the truth.
It’s not me. It’s you.