I feel like you already had ideas about the virtue of media that does not needlessly engage in politics, and you just applied them to Pacific Rim because its politics or moments of political relevance are not obvious or important to you.
This is, as you've mentioned, a film where the day is saved by heroic soldiers and military commanders disobeying direct orders from their governments. The impotence of bureaucrats and the strength of soldiers, as depicted, is a political statement, even if the film doesn't dwell on it. Not only do you choose to dismiss it as you applaud Pacific Rim as a politics-free cultural space, but you choose to justify it as Stacker just wanting to 'stop the bad guys' and 'cancel the apocalypse'. I have seen so many police chiefs and commissioners in the past few months claim similarly in the wake of the BLM protests, portraying themselves as the thin blue line against the apocalypse and justifying any violence they deal out on protesters as what is necessary to stop the bad guys. Apolitically, of course.
It's a specific choice. The Jaeger program didn't *have* to be a rogue operation. The politicians didn't have to pursue a plan that the audience knew would never work. There are dozens of other ways they could have framed the Jaegers as cultural/political underdogs if need be. And, rather than hold Pacific Rim to the choice it made, or question why del Toro made such a choice given the strong anti-fascist thread that runs through most of his work, you dismiss it as a 'whiff'.
If you want to treat Pacific Rim as just robots fighting kaiju, then all power to you. It's not a super deep movie and enjoying it purely on an aesthetic sense is perhaps the right way to go about it. But claiming that it has nothing to say about politics because it's a 'save the world' movie is, at best, cowardice and, at worst, ignorant.
I definitely grew up in a suburban anywhere/nowhere and romanticised the notion of striking out into the world, and "all the great things that might happen and how easy they might be" definitely describes my line of thinking before I went travelling across Asia aged 21 and had a rude awakening about poverty, pollution, ennui that follows you even if you're in another country and (most of all) the fact that you are not the main character in the story of the world and the world is not particularly concerned about your romanticised notions of adventure.
I feel like you already had ideas about the virtue of media that does not needlessly engage in politics, and you just applied them to Pacific Rim because its politics or moments of political relevance are not obvious or important to you.
This is, as you've mentioned, a film where the day is saved by heroic soldiers and military commanders disobeying direct orders from their governments. The impotence of bureaucrats and the strength of soldiers, as depicted, is a political statement, even if the film doesn't dwell on it. Not only do you choose to dismiss it as you applaud Pacific Rim as a politics-free cultural space, but you choose to justify it as Stacker just wanting to 'stop the bad guys' and 'cancel the apocalypse'. I have seen so many police chiefs and commissioners in the past few months claim similarly in the wake of the BLM protests, portraying themselves as the thin blue line against the apocalypse and justifying any violence they deal out on protesters as what is necessary to stop the bad guys. Apolitically, of course.
It's a specific choice. The Jaeger program didn't *have* to be a rogue operation. The politicians didn't have to pursue a plan that the audience knew would never work. There are dozens of other ways they could have framed the Jaegers as cultural/political underdogs if need be. And, rather than hold Pacific Rim to the choice it made, or question why del Toro made such a choice given the strong anti-fascist thread that runs through most of his work, you dismiss it as a 'whiff'.
If you want to treat Pacific Rim as just robots fighting kaiju, then all power to you. It's not a super deep movie and enjoying it purely on an aesthetic sense is perhaps the right way to go about it. But claiming that it has nothing to say about politics because it's a 'save the world' movie is, at best, cowardice and, at worst, ignorant.
I definitely grew up in a suburban anywhere/nowhere and romanticised the notion of striking out into the world, and "all the great things that might happen and how easy they might be" definitely describes my line of thinking before I went travelling across Asia aged 21 and had a rude awakening about poverty, pollution, ennui that follows you even if you're in another country and (most of all) the fact that you are not the main character in the story of the world and the world is not particularly concerned about your romanticised notions of adventure.
Still fun to dream, though.