pacific rim – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Typically when I do a book review I will lead with the cover for the book. In this case, the full wraparound is gorgeous enough that I decided to go with that instead. It’s currently my desktop background. I love it that much.

The short version: this book is fucking amazing and you should go buy it right now. Just stop reading and go to Amazon– here, I made it easy for you– or hop in your car and go to your nearest independent bookstore and buy it and get them to order a few more.

The high-concept, “this meets this” elevator pitch for this book is “Pacific Rim meets Handmaid’s Tale,” and for my money that is a tremendously interesting comparison, because I hated Pacific Rim and the absolute last word I would use to describe The Handmaid’s Tale is “awesome,” but it’s still a pretty accurate description. It’s also a very very very loose retelling of the story of the Chinese empress Wu Zetian, only set on an alien planet in a far-flung future and involving giant mechs and a similar sort of mind-meld twin piloting scheme that you saw in Pacific Rim, only it’s necessary that one man and one woman be there to pilot the ship and I really don’t want to spoil a lot on this one because there is a ton of shit in this book that you’re not going to see coming.

I mean, YA is kinda tropey, right? And this starts off feeling a lot like a Chinese-influenced Hunger Games, with our main character being plucked out of poverty and obscurity because of certain Abilities that she happens to have (a thing called “spirit pressure” that may as well be a high midichlorian level, roll with it) and she is sent to pilot a mech with the latest major hotshot.

Oh, I forgot to mention something: piloting mechs frequently leads to the death of the female pilot in the equation, and Zetian’s older sister was previously chosen the same way, and she died while piloting a mech with the same pilot that Zetian schemes to be paired with. So she can kill his ass.

Wu Zetian hates men, guys. She hates men so fucking much. She makes Arya Stark’s obsession with revenge look like a passing fancy. And on top of hating men an awful lot–which, to be clear, is entirely understandable in this world; I haven’t mentioned her bound and shattered feet yet, have I?– she is also kind of an asshole. I have never encountered a character like her in a book before and she is an amazing breath of fresh air even if I think one of the book’s few weaknesses is that she’s kind of inconsistent from time to time about what she wants.

(She’s also, like, seventeen or eighteen, maybe? And a certain inconstancy is not exactly atypical of people that age, so this is a forgivable sin and perhaps simply a reflection of the character’s youth and not a flaw in how she’s written. But I noticed it, so I’m mentioning it.)

Anyway. She’s paired up with this dude who murdered her sister and who she hates, and if you’ve read YA before, you might think this is going to go a certain way, and then it doesn’t, and then something else happens and you think “oh, this is going to be like this,” and then it’s not, and then there’s a love triangle and then you’re absolutely sure it’s going to go like this and it absolutely goddamn does not, and that thought you had earlier where you thought it would be super cool if this happened but no way that will ever happen and then it does.

Okay, that’s kind of obscure. But know this: the worldbuilding is interesting, the characters are awesome, the enemies are evil and personal, the action scenes are great, and the book is entirely fucking unpredictable, and all that adds up to, amazingly, probably not the first book of the year that I think is gonna end up on my top 10 at the end of the year, but certainly the strongest candidate in a while.

In fact, I’ll go this far: the last time I enjoyed the first book in a new series as much as I enjoyed this one? Was Jade City. And I deliberately waited eight hours after finishing the book to let the high wear off before writing this.

Go read it right now.

Can I call something a crushing disappointment if it was exactly what I thought it was going to be? There really should be a word– maybe there is, and I just don’t know it– for something that you don’t want to suck, that you think probably will suck, that then turns out to suck just like you thought it would.

Why, yes, I did see Pacific Rim yesterday, how’d you guess?

As my wife and I were walking out of the theater I suggested that what they had done to make this film was take every bad movie ever and throw it into a blender and that they then somehow managed to make a good movie out of that pureed mess of bad movies. Now, fourteen hours or so later, the good parts of the movie have cooled and the bad parts have come to predominate. My wife, for what it’s worth, normally more of a plothole hound than I am, declared the movie to be exactly what she wanted. I can’t make that claim, just because it would have been so damn easy to make a good movie instead of the stupid movie they made.

It is not that much harder, Hollywood, to write a smart movie than it is to write a dumb one! I promise! You really could have done this!

Here’s the good stuff about Pacific Rim: the monsters and the robots. (Note: I have a weird prejudice against people who use Japanese words when there are English words that suffice perfectly well; the word “kaiju” annoys me enough that I refuse to use “jaeger” either. Monsters and robots. Fuck you.)

Generally whenever the monsters and the robots are on screen and punching each other, good shit is happening, at least until the point later in the movie where one of the robots reveals an ability that really makes you wonder why they were bothering with punching for so long if it’s obviously so ineffective. They never forget how big the monsters or the robots are, the action is stunningly shot (at least insofar as any of it is “shot;” that’s the wrong word for a movie which I assume was composed entirely in a computer) and there is never a point where you can’t figure out what the hell is going on on-screen– I’m looking your way, every other action director working right now. I had initially speculated, prior to seeing the movie, that the fact that every battle appeared to be at night and in the rain was going to be a bad sign and a crutch to make the action murkier; I couldn’t have been more wrong. The movie is gorgeous, crisp; they’ve raised the bar on what you can do with special effects in film.

What was bad: everything, and I mean everything else. The acting is horrifyingly bad, and made worse by the incredibly dumb things the actors have to say and do. Mickey fuckin’ Rooney might suggest that maybe the stereotypes were a bit over the top. The main dude’s brother (he probably had a name) looks enough like his rival (whose name was Iceman, I think) that at first I thought they were supposed to be clones. The science is crap even given that this is a movie about million-foot-tall robots fighting million-foot-tall monsters. The ending is literally exactly the same as the Avengers, which just came out and wasn’t too terribly original when it did. They spend large portions of the movie insisting that certain things are either Impossible or Really, Really Dangerous right up until the point where all the sudden they aren’t anymore– and not in a Ghostbusters “You said crossing the streams was bad” sort of way, but in a “yeah, never mind that, I’m good” sort of way. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Unavoidably, stupidly, painfully bad. All the punching in the world isn’t enough to make up for it, unfortunately. And I really wanted to like this movie.

I hate it when I’m right.