From Pacific Rim Uprising to Into Breach, and How We Transition from Canon to Subversion
Disclaimer: There will be spoilers in this essay.
Growing up as an anime fan from the Philippines in the 1980s, it was culture shock to learn that the term I identified myself with at the time — otaku — had a different meaning in Japan. I had grown up consuming Western magazines and media, and I did not realize that the Western context for the term — that of an anime/manga fan — had different connotations in Japan — that of an obsessive addict. I share this story because in many ways, Pacific Rim does the same thing with kaiju. They did not, by any means, come up with the term, but the current zeitgeist uses kaiju instead of giant monster — as the former sounds way more impressive than the latter — partially due to its usage in Pacific Rim.
While many hold Pacific Rim to be this Holy Grail, thanks in part to its inclusion of mechas, giant monsters, and more importantly, a cast that (for the most part) attempts to do justice to several people of color. To me, however, it was an attempt by the West to make sense of a Japanese narrative for Western fans — and it was not immune to flaws or criticisms. And that’s not to say there is anything inherently wrong or flawed with the said attempt, but rather, it echoes how Saban adapted the Super Sentai franchise and transformed it into Power Rangers (or how Harmony Gold transformed Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada into Robotech). It is its own creature, influenced but independent from its source material. For example, one of the interesting takes I’ve read regarding Black Panther is how a Kenyan critic interpreted Wakanda as an outsider’s version of Africa and how it is an “African bingo of sorts,” while others embrace this concept of a Pan-African nation.
Pacific Rim, for me, is flawed in ways ways. First, despite its multicultural cast, it clearly flags itself as an American production due to how it centers itself around a white protagonist, Raleigh Becket. Thankfully, characters like Stacker Pentecost and Mako Mori prove to be more interesting. Second, people have rallied around Mako Mori as a compelling, holistic female character, and that’s true for the first half of the movie. Unfortunately, the ending follows the typical Hollywood formula of the heroine falling in love with the hero, and rescued by the latter. Third is how the name of the main mech of the franchise is, quite frankly, racist.
While some will consider Pacific Rim to be the superior of the two films in the franchise, Pacific Rim Uprising actually addresses two of the three problems of the original film. John Boyega as Jake Pentecost is the lead of the movie, period. And while fans of the original film might mourn (or protest) the demise of Mako Mori (who died fighting to the end), we do get other prominent female characters in the film, Liwen Shao and Amara Namani.
Let me digress though about Liwen Shao. For the past few years, Hollywood came to the realization that China is a very lucrative market, perhaps even rivaling the US-centered box office sales. Arguably one could claim they’ve pandered to China, with the inclusion of Chinese actors who play bit roles in movies like Iron Man 3 and Independence Day 2. One could make the argument that Jing Tian’s (who play Liwen Shao) inclusion follows a similar trajectory, but Liwen Shao is one of the more developed and complex characters in the film. And that’s saying a lot considering how several of the other characters in the film aren’t as deep as either Stacker Pentecost or Mako Mori.
It’s also tragic that Pacific Rim: Uprising doesn’t resolve the third problem and perpetuates it.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the sequel and its predecessor is that the former is more focused; it knows it’s an action blockbuster movie, and follows the tropes of that genre. The latter attempted to juggle several genres — and that’s certainly possible, as films like Black Panther have proven it’s possible to do so — and that’s admittedly more difficult to execute. Pacific Rim: Uprising embraces what it means to be a live-action mecha movie, complete with monsters, combining robots, and city-wide destruction.
Which is where the video game Into the Breach comes in. It is a tactical game that borrows a lot of its vocabulary from Pacific Rim — but subverts them for its own context.
The Breach features prominently in Pacific Rim. It’s how the kaiju enter our world. In Into the Breach, it refers to how time travelers (from another dimension?) enter our world and attempt to save it. It also provides a logical in-game rationale for its video game mechanics, repeating similar scenarios over and over again.
Mecha is another term featured prominently in both franchises. Pacific Rim never truly uses the word mecha, and instead opts for Jaeger, but the intent is clear. In Into the Breach, it adopts the Japanese interpretation of the term, which includes not just giant robots, but tanks, jets, ships — simply anything mechanical.
And then there’s Kaiju. Much like how Pacific Rim uses Jaeger, Into the Breach never refers to its giant monsters as Kaiju (even if reviewers and critics do so) and instead uses its in-lore term, the Vek. But for all intents and purposes, they follow similar roles.
I’ve seen several reviewers and critics latch on to one of the moral, existential crisis of the game: when we “abandon” a timeline, are we giving up on the lives of that world? Or by jumping to a different timeline, are we, in fact, creating a new timeline that dooms that world unless we come and save them?
While those types of questions are interesting on a macro scale, to me, what’s more interesting are the personal ethical quandaries. In the game, hitting buildings, whether it’s done by your mech or the Vek, causes human lives to be lost. In a lot of media featuring mecha and kaiju, buildings (and to a certain extent, the humans inside them) are simply collateral damage. But Into the Breach actually delves into that and makes it a game mechanic: your mechs need power, and they receive these power via the buildings around them. It just so happens that these buildings are also inhabited by living people who cheer at your success and are critical of your squad when you fail to save them.
The tension is that in order to save humanity, you have to work for corporations, and their interests, for the most part, doesn’t revolve around saving civilians as much as their own personal agendas. While there are missions wherein you must protect buildings which houses civilians, those feel like the exception. What’s more common are the seemingly self-centered objectives of the corporations, which might include saving decommissioned tanks because they’re relics of the past, or saving robots produced by robot factories, even if the said robots are shooting at your buildings.
At the highest difficulty setting, each round seems more like damage control. Do we give up on the objectives prescribed to us by the corporations (which in turn means less rewards) so that we can prevent buildings from being damaged? Are we prepared to sacrifice a mech and its pilot to prevent a building from getting damaged? Or worse, do we succumb to our rationalization of “for the greater good,” sacrificing a building so that we can take out multiple Vek.
The game never explicitly states this. It’s left for players to ponder this on their own. Pacific Rim’s marketing touted the phrase “To fight monsters, we created monsters,” but this movie never lives up to this promise. In Into the Breach, it never makes this claim, but at times, this feels like the tension it’s wrestling with.
