Well, the box office verdict is finally in on Pacific Rim, and it came in third (THIRD!) to the latest painfully unfunny Adam Sandler comedy, and Despicable Me 2. This is a dark day for geeks, because this is Guillermo Del Toro’s long awaited return to movies, and the better films like Pacific Rim perform at the box office, the less we have to suffer through the latest from Adam Sandler.
While the box office pundits gathered all the tracking data, which indeed predicted that Pacific Rim would bomb, but there may also be hope from the female geek spectrum, who have been growing very strong in numbers over the years. (How about that TV commercial with the chick wearing the Boba Fett mask? Cool, no?)
Entertainment Weekly appealed to female geeks with a commentary on Pacific Rim, yet the writer doesn’t seem to understand that girls have liked this stuff for years now. The story begins, “There isn’t much entertainment out there for ladies of the geek persuasion…at least there isn’t much marketed directly to us.”
Still, in spite of its flaws, there’s definitely good looking guys with their shirts off for the laides, and there is a little romance, but you may be expecting too much if you hope there’s a chick flick in the middle of all of this. The name of the game is robots fighting aliens, and insane robotic destruction. This isn’t The Bridges of Madison County.
Writer Maricela Gonzalez ultimately concludes that “regardless of the politics of objectification and gender representation, Pacific Rim is a fun spectacle,” which shows she may be reading too much into all of this. Don’t forget that with Alien, none of the characters in the script were gender specific, and indeed a woman was chosen to play Ripley, but she wasn’t written as either a woman or a man.
