What Lies Beneath Pacific Rim

So: Pacific Rim. If you haven't seen it--see it. It is a movie that promises giant robots punching giant monsters, and by God it delivers giant robots punching giant monsters. I can't remember the last time I walked into a film that was so cathartic, so full of in-your-face spectacle. It makes me pine, in fact, for a world in which our most pressing problems can be solved by punching things. Well, I suppose we do live in such a world, but there is always the problem of being charged with assault immediately thereafter. So it's not a particularly practicable method of problem solving.

For a summer movie built around giant robots punching things, though, Pacific Rim has surprising thematic depth. The main themes running through the film are family, unity, and coming together--witness the nature of the jaeger pilot teams, the manner in which the jaegers' mission is fulfilled, and the things that are necessary in order to do that. Behind those, though, there's a pretty strong environmental message--really, the kaiju are a pretty blunt metaphor for climate change.

Consider it: powerful forces erupt from out of sight, emerge onto land and devastate cities. The countries of the world cooperate at first and take active measures--the jaegers--to beat back the threat, but as the tide begins to turn, the sense of unified resolve splinters and the leaders choose instead to build giant walls to protect the land from the threat of the ocean; walls that may or may not be finished in time, and which may or may not actually protect the millions of ordinary people on the coasts immediately behind them, while the rich and powerful flee to "safe zones" inland. Remind you of any projections? The kaiju themselves are almost as forces of nature within the movie itself; consider that a powerful kaiju is a Category 4, the same way we categorize a devastating hurricane, and the opening narration explicitly draws that comparison ("in a jaeger, you can fight the hurricane").

That's why I have such a problem with part of the film's climax. If you've seen it, you may already know what I mean. If you haven't, wait until you've seen it to read the rest of this, unless you don't care about knowing what's to come.

Here's a good spoiler break--created by the Jaeger Designer.

So, it's the end of the movie, and Gipsy Danger and Striker Eureka are marching across the bottom of the ocean to deliver a nuclear weapon to the Breach, the dimensional portal through which the kaiju are invading Earth, and thereby seal it. Things go wrong, because of course they do, this is a movie for hell's sake. The weapon is unusable, and the hero pilot of Gipsy Danger must seal the Breach by self-destructing the jaeger's own nuclear reactor.

Oyyy. To put it simply: NUCLEAR REACTORS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. You can't turn a nuclear reactor into a nuclear bomb any more than you can turn a 1989 Geo Metro into a fuel-air explosive.

This is a regrettably widespread misapprehension, because some goddamn writers don't make an effort to actually understand how things work--but, hey, I get you. You might be saying, "in a movie about giant robots punching giant monsters, you're getting angry over something like this?" Yes, I am. Things like kaiju and jaegers are impossible; you're not going to have 300-foot monsters in reality, and the idea of building 300-foot battle robots with modern technology is purely ridiculous. I can, however, suspend my disbelief on that point--jaegers and kaiju are the very core of the movie. Since they do not, and cannot, really exist I can forgive a lot of spectacle about their capabilities.

Nuclear reactors, however, do exist, and it is not very hard to treat them accurately. Pacific Rim is already asking a hell of a lot from me to suspend disbelief over jaegers, kaiju, a giant wall built around the entire Pacific Ocean... asking enough, really. It does not get a free pass on mischaracterizing something that actually exists.

There's more to it than that, though--a rather pernicious "more," the way I see it. It's the illusion-of-truth effect; people are more willing to believe something they've encountered before. Now, Pacific Rim isn't making any kind of statement here--the reason the whole "nuclear meltdown self-destruct" thing was used was because it's a simple kludge for the writer and it's direct. The problem, however, is that it generates another little data point fluttering around and waiting to attach to something. It's another piece of "something that I heard somewhere" that nuclear reactors explode.

The kicker is that the way I see it, this runs at cross-purposes with Pacific Rim's environmental themes. What was true in the 1970s is true in the 2010s; when it comes to electrical generation, for most of the world there are only three choices: nuclear, natural gas, or coal. Not everyone has geothermal vents of dammable waterfalls, after all, and while renewables are admirable targets to shoot for, they're still far away from being able to support the brunt of demand themselves. While natural gas has a comparatively low CO2 emission rate, the fracking necessary to get it is causing earthquakes hither and yon, and the pollution from coal-burning plants kills hundreds of thousands worldwide every year when everything is working normally.

But you don't see Greenpeace standing in front of the bulldozers that the Germans are using to build those dozen new coal plants that are replacing all of its nuclear plants, because it doesn't fit with the common environmental ideology that nuclear is the worst of all things. No, you just see well-meaning movies that unintentionally shore up the foundation that makes that kind of ideology possible.

Nevertheless: Pacific Rim is fucking awesome. Go see it.

Imperfect Recall

I'll always look back fondly on the 1990 Total Recall movie, if for no other reason than it was originally something I shouldn't have had. I was just a lad of ten or so, and nevertheless my mom allowed me to watch the hand-labelled VHS tape of it we recorded off some station or another, and I did--again and again. It was one of my first tickets into the world of grown-ups, one of the first hints of what was beyond the everyday, and despite its technical errors--Mars is not in a vacuum, and real-time two-way communication between Earth and Mars is impossible, just to give two--it'll always hold a special place for me.

As for the 2012 Total Recall movie? Less so. I went and saw it last night, and to be honest it's the sort of thing that would prompt a visit to Rekall for some synthetic memories to replace it. Once again, in the new Total Recall we have a purportedly "science fiction" movie written by people who are not science fiction writers debasing the concept of science fiction on the silver screen.

If you haven't seen it yet, the plot hits all the same points as the 1990 movie, although not quite in the same order. The biggest difference is that Mars isn't in the picture; the setting is Earth, after global chemical warfare has rendered most of the planet uninhabitable, save for a chunk of Europe ruled by the United Federation of Britain as well as Australia, referred to in dialog exclusively as "the Colony" and in signs as "New Asia," for some reason. These two bastions of civilization are connected by the one of the most over-engineered transit systems I've ever encountered: the Fall, a gravity train that falls through a tunnel dug from one side of the world to the other.

Incidentally, this is where one of the 2012's films first errors appears. The British side of the Fall is established to be in the center of London. On the opposite side of the world, you'll find... the Pacific Ocean, a few hundred kilometers southeast of New Zealand. This took me thirty seconds to find and verify. I don't know what excuse the scriptwriters have. But it's hardly the most ridiculous aspect of building your movie around the idea of a tunnel through the world without it actually being about the tunnel through the world.

Mars: because you've got to get your ass somewhere.

The Fall, to me, is a good representative of just what's wrong with this movie. It's not so much a movie as it is a flurry of individual elements--elements like the Fall, the three-breasted woman, the skycar chases, the no-go zones left over from chemical warfare, and so on--and while some of those elements can be compelling on their own merits, when assembled they do not form a coherent whole. They do not make sense. For instance, why is the three-breasted woman even there? Outside the story, it's so they could have that connection to the original movie and have a callback to put into the trailer, but in-story? There's no reason. In the 1990 movie, it was simple enough--she'd been mutated by radiation that the cheap domes didn't stop. There's no reason given in the 2012 movie. She's just presented to us, and we're supposed to accept it.

It's the same deal with the Fall, and though the scriptwriters may not have realized it, the thing compromises the entire movie for me. Since there's no Mars here and no alien reactor, the motivation of our big bad Cohaagen has been changed to invading the Colony with his army of robots to provide living space to the overpopulated Federation, and the Fall is his troop transport. Think about it, though--this elevator just happens to connect what we are explicitly told are the only two centers of civilization left on Earth. How believable do you think it is that the war would bypass them? No, given the evidence presented to me in the movie itself, I have to conclude that the Fall was specifically built to link the UFB and the Colony.

Except that if that's the case, there's one big problem. This is a tunnel that is more than twelve thousand kilometers long, that goes through the center of Earth. Even a movie as ridiculous as The Core knew to add some technobabble explaining how its terranauts could survive the fantastic pressures down there. In Total Recall, there's nothing. Nothing except the scriptwriters' silent request that I actually suspend my disbelief over this shit. To put it simply, it's unbelievable. I cannot believe that a civilization with the technical know-how, resources, and manpower to build a gravity train would be troubled by overpopulation. Think of how expensive the maintenance alone would be for a setup like that. Sure, maybe for some reason they can't get rid of the lingering chemical contamination in the no-go zones--chemicals which can effectively be protected against with a simple face mask, even though actual chemical weapons like VX and sarin are absorbed through the skin--it would literally be cheaper to colonize Mars.

Don't even get me started on the garden-variety plot holes. To me, the new Total Recall movie is a failure--spectacular, in that it's a hell of a thing to look at, but it fails as a story. As a movie, it's like the Calvin and Hobbes comic with tyrannosaurs in F-14s: "this is so cool!" versus "this is so stupid."

Journey to the Center of Disbelief

When you're creating something set in a world other than our own, be it the future or a wholly fictional place, there's always a temptation to throw in something big, something stunning, something utterly foreign to underline that the audience isn't in Kansas anymore. It can be the way the starships look, the in-your-face unreality of magic spells being tossed around, or just landscapes of such epic scales that it seems impossible you'd be able to find them in reality, like in the Lord of the Rings movies.

Yet, it's also possible to get carried away with this sort of thing; to take hold of an idea and charge toward the end zone without stopping to think about it, to allow the ooh-ah majesty of your chosen Big Dumb Object to take a prime role in whatever you're putting together, regardless of whether or not it actually makes sense. That, unfortunately, is one of the impressions I'm getting from the preliminary reports I've seen about the new Total Recall movie - and I can only hope that those reports are, in some way, incomplete or misrepresenting the movie's Big Dumb Object. The 1990 film had the Martian reactor, but since nobody will be getting their asses to Mars in 2012, something new had to be brought in to replace it - something that, for me, goes beyond "god damn, that is awesome" to "god damn, what were they thinking?"

Something like this.

"The lynchpin of Wiseman's action movie," wrote Meredith Woerner on io9, "is The China Fall. A massive elevator that takes thousands of people from one side of the Earth to the other. Through the center of the Earth."

This was pretty much my reaction.

This idea isn't original to the movie. It's called a gravity train, and the idea - as many ideas are, in a vacuum - is simple: you dig a straight tunnel through a planet and drop in a capsule. Gravity will accelerate the capsule until the midpoint, and as it climbs out the other side gravity will work against it until it arrives at the other end with zero velocity. In this regard, it works just like a constant-thrust spaceflight except with no thrust at all. On paper, it's a hell of a transportation system; the only fuel that would be required would be for whatever has to catch the cab on the other end, though you'd need systems in place to take care of atmospheric friction; otherwise, you'd run the risk of a bad catch resulting in a capsule trapped in the center of the shaft.

However, as anyone who's seen The Core may know, the innards of Earth aren't that simple. In particular, there's a certain thing called pressure; even The Core didn't ignore this, which is why the craft's unobtanium hull was so vital there. In the inner core of Earth, a section that you'd need to pass through in order to make a functioning gravity train, the pressure is more than three million times what it is at sea level, and so hot that even an Arwing might not be able to take it - over nine thousand degrees Fahrenheit. There's something else you might be familiar with that has the same kind of temperature - the surface of the sun.

I'll admit the concept is not impossible - just horrendously difficult and hideously expensive. If you're going to bring something like this in, though, you can't just do it piecemeal: the techniques and materials needed to build a tunnel through the world would of necessity find far wider applications in general society. If you've got enough unobtainium to build a twelve thousand kilometer-long tunnel through the planet in any kind of believable time frame, you've by necessity also got enough unobtanium to do whatever the hell you want with it. Buildings should be made out of this. Imagine active volcanoes plugged with unobtanium tubes that, upon eruptions, feed the ash and lava and what have you into huge storage tanks, rather than have it spat into the sky.

I have difficulty suspending my disbelief in regard to the notion that the people behind the new Total Recall seriously considered these issues... and consequently, I don't think I'm going to have an easy time accepting this movie. An ancient alien reactor on Mars? It's out there, but I can get behind it. A tunnel through the world? ...Let me get back to you on that.

Getting the Details Right

It's easy for me to end up putting a stop to a story project before it's even, officially, begun - because I get bogged down in details. Not just figuring out the details of the setting, the plot, and so on, but trying to find something, anything, to shut up that part of my brain that thinks the antagonists must be omniscient barring sufficient explanation. I like to think that I've come up with progress on that front more recently, but in the past, the way I tended to deal with that was to think more and more about the background in that specific lens, looking for justifications for why the bad guys didn't have the drop on the heroes from second one.

That sort of process breeds a lot of details - some relevant, some not particularly so. One indicator of an author's experience is how well they're able to submerge details of the world beneath the story, iceberg-like; to convey the impression of a world that's much grander, much more complex, than solely that which appears on the page. Getting them correct and consistent in the context of the story can support the suspension of disbelief greatly.

I feel it's even more important in the visual media. There, creators define what the audience sees, and don't always have the luxury of drawing things with broad brushstrokes so that the viewer can fill in the gaps. The fact of the matter is, television and film productions frequently go to great lengths to get the background details correct. This is something that comes up fairly frequently in Vancouver, considering how much stuff is filmed here. Just last night, in fact, Granville Station was partially remade into one of the six 50th Street Stations on the New York City Subway - at least, the signage seemed to be correct. I'm not sure how much a 1980s-era SkyTrain station looks like anything on the New York City Subway today, unless it's set in the future or something.

This being Vancouver, that wasn't even the first film set I'd wandered into this week. A few days ago, Granville Street was shut down between Dunsmuir and Pender for another shoot - this one for the TV series Fairly Legal, in which a part of the street was transformed into San Francisco... a shocking departure from what Vancouver's done in the past, I know. It was small, but done well; it seemed like it could pass for Market Street, with California-plated cars and a big San Francisco advertising pillar, though I don't know if San Francisco gets hit with autumn to the same extent that Vancouver does. It was all pretty cool.

It wasn't until I was reviewing the photos at full size that I noticed a bit where they seemed to have slipped up. Part of the set dressing included the installation of two newspaper boxes - one for the fictional San Francisco Bulletin, and the other for the decidedly non-fictional San Francisco Chronicle. I can't see what's in the Bulletin box, but the Chronicle box has a pretty obvious copy of... USA Today.

Check it out yourself.

It seems like a rather odd choice to make. I mean, they've gone to all the trouble of getting accurate cars, accurate signage, accurate newspaper boxes and advertisements and so on, but this one newspaper is left in there to break the illusion. Twenty years ago it'd have been irrelevant, of course, but with modern high-definition televisions, something like this would be noticed by someone if it appeared on screen.

I suppose I just wonder why they would go to what seems to be great lengths, otherwise, only to leave that USA Today in there.