Rulebook Casefile: Morally Descending in The Avengers and Pacific Rim

Finally: All-Too-Common Flaw #13! 

To a startling degree, Pacific Rim has the exact same ending as The Avengers, and I don’t just mean that they nuke their enemies to death:

• There’s a glowing tear in our reality and aliens from another dimension are pouring through it to attack American cities, but our robot-suited hero realizes that he has can reuse a nuclear weapon which was originally intended for another purpose, dive into the breach, and nuke it closed, killing himself in the process...but instead, he manages to unconsciously fall back through the breach right before the nuke goes off, killing the bad guys and sealing the breach forever, which he finds out about after he’s revived by his teammates. Yay!

The shocking thing is that one movie came out more than a year after the other. Surely, they saw Avengers and said, “uh oh, guys, should we change ours?”, and then said, “Nah, who cares?”

But over and above the shocking similarity, let’s take a minute to acknowledge how morally miserable both of these movies are. I think that Buck Turgidson was a script consultant on each one.

Once again, the Charlie Day storyline hints at a much better movie. Day is mind-melding with the monsters...What if he communicated to the ones on the other side the truth about their suicide missions and inspired them to rise up against their masters? How awesome would that have been, to have the robots and the monsters team up at the end to go back through the breach and kick some ass?

Morally ascending is not only more uplifting than morally descending, it’s also a whole lot less boring.

Next week: five posts complaining about the end credits of Pacific Rim! Just kidding! I’m done! Yes, this was a long time to spend on (mostly) just one movie, but I felt it spoke to so many wider issues that plague modern movies.  

Instead, tomorrow we’ll have a BIG piece that I’ve been promising for a LONG time…