That old timey science fiction

     I was really excited for the film Pacific Rim.  I’d seen the trailers and promo art for quite a few months and knew it’d be pretty awesome. I really enjoyed the First Hellboy film and plus I’m a sucker for giant monsters fighting robots.  The movie also had something that has been lacking a bit from the cinema lately, it wasn’t based on any other property or a sequel.  Now I understand that Godzilla has tread this water before, but still sort of new and unique.

     What really got me going was that Pacific Rim actually did what the best science fiction does, it uses some crazy fictional story to reflect what is going on in society.  The old 60’s Star Trek was really good at this.  They would deal with issues of war, communism, and race but do it with space cowboys and aliens.  I felt the same thing was going on in del Toro’s movie.  People came together to fight a common enemy.

     My friends know me as a liberal, tree hugging dude.  I do care for the environment and I like it when folks get a long.  So my idea going into Pacific Rim was “Oh yeah!! the whole world comes together and forgets its differences to build giant robots to fight giant monsters.”  Freaking sweet.  When you watch it though, I think you could take any of today’s big issues and swap out monster with that issue.  Think of mankind coming together to face the threat of global climate change.  Humanity coming together to deal with world poverty or cancer or any other type of sickness.  It’s awesome to have pop culture using itself as a mirror for what we could be.  You also don’t need a giant robot but, if you do have one it’s is pretty cool.