oceans are now battlefields, sure. but do you ever think about to fight monsters we created monsters of our own? what did we mean by that? how can that be extrapolated outward? will the lasting legacy of pacific rim be two umbrellas, double events, or the twin construction of "to fight monsters we created monsters of our own"?
for some time, a romantic era dwelt
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in reply to @folly's post:
to fight monsters (kaiju) we created monsters of our own (mecha)
ergo, mecha are artificial kaiju, great and strange metallic beasts
this is an old idea going all the way back to mechagodzilla
Sure! I suppose i just see more resemblance in mechagodzilla as an artificial kaiju than in the jaeger, but "great and strange metallic beasts" certainly accounts for anthropomorphized metallic constructions as well. Perhaps it's dependent on what you allow for "monster".
I like the idea of judging the cultural legacy of a thing by the memes drawn from it... Pacific Rim is critically important in film history because the "double events" scene became common English shorthand for an event getting more frequent…. Master and Commander was acclaimed among the decadent intelligentsia who rallied around the opening title card and the weevil scene….. historians speculate that Pope wrote "True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd" about "We're the Millers"
anyway, what did they mean by "to fight monsters we created monsters of our own"? to me the word "monster" has mainly to do with being scary and unknowable, and "creating a monster" implies working with forces you don't understand to create something that gets out of your control. but the movie as i recall (though it's been a while) doesn't make much out of the mechs as scary, unknowable forces. So in retrospect it feels like a line that is there mainly to sound cool when it's being said. (unlike "oceans are now battlefields" which is a cool-sounding line that also gets your expectations set for the kind of thing that's going to happen in the story)
this might be my favorite comment that I have ever received. And yes! Exactly as you say — they could easily have made the mechs much more unknowable, much more frightening, given how the neural handshake works? But instead they're almost merely a marvel of humanity, and the line (said in narration near the film's beginning) feels like it is from a separate story than the one we see.