Something else I’ve been thinking about, wrt Pacific Rim and its resonance with millennials.
It’s a disaster movie, an apocalypse movie, that’s not afraid of technology. Machines, computers, the work of human hands–they’re going to save us all.
This isn’t a story about robots turning on their creators. This is a story where the most intimate connection you can experience with another person, the Drift, exists because somebody built a machine to make it happen.
You get so many apocalypse movies that are a little bit afraid of technology, of robots, of science. Where the too-proud scientists went too far and called disaster down upon us, or humanity tried to play god and created a plague/a weapon/woke something bigger and greater than us.
This is an apocalypse movie where (besides one throwaway line about the atmosphere) the end of the world isn’t our fault. Where the things that humanity strives for, to gain more knowledge, to make us greater, don’t all backfire on us due to hubris, they actually make us greater.
And maybe previous generations are used to being told that the end of the world isn’t their fault, but for us? It’s all cell phones, iPods, computer games, bloggers, they’re ripping society apart at its seams. Movies give us zombie viruses and Skynet and Cylons and culture tells us convenience is bad, it’s greedy, it’s wrong even as we’re inundated with new technology on every side.
This is a movie where humanity didn’t accidentally destroy the world by wanting more. Where technology, the sort of thing our generation grew up loving and using and surrounding ourselves with, the sort of thing that older generations are still a little afraid of, isn’t evil.
We’re not evil, as humans, as people who are curious, who want to invent, who like gadgets and wires and talk to each other through machines. Curiosity-technology-innovation may be dangerous, drifting with a Kaiju may be dangerous, but it saves the world. Giant robots save the world.
Score one for the generation that grew up on the internet.
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