Why Hollywood Should Keep Destroying Cities – Sam Adams

In an essay posted Friday at The Dissolve, Tasha Robinson used Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim to counter the objections several critics have raised about the wanton destruction of this summer’s blockbusters: city blocks flattened, heads crushed, all without a drop of blood. As Matt Singer pointed out on this site, the bloodlessness is partly due to the movies’ “PG-13 problem,” but it’s also because these movies collectively, and with increasing ease, draw on the imagery of 9/11: collapsing buildings, skies filled with ash and bits of paper, dazed city-dwellers wandering the streets. Pacific Rim, Robinson writes, is different because it draws from the more distant past, the era of bomb shelters and air-raid sirens that gave birth to the first monster movies. It’s a movie about disaster movies, not disaster itself. “Its solutions to the 9/11 portrayal problem — channel the past, discuss the future — aren’t necessarily a working model for other movies, and those solutions are still more rooted in escapism and cinephilia than in grappling with the potential cost of real disasters,” she writes. “It still takes a toddler’s glee in building things up solely to knock them down in dramatic fashion.”

via Here There Be Monsters: Why Hollywood Should Keep Destroying Cities

Posted by KWB wandering among the borderlands of the Ether.