Why Pacific Rim Should Have Been A Comic

Let's talk about Pacific Rim. I love this movie, and the thing that makes it for me is the world-building, the amount of thought that went into how this fictional world and its alternate history timeline would run.

But here is the thing: I missed most of that when I first saw it in theaters. Judging by what I have heard from most people who saw it, even people who loved it right from the start, they missed most of that element when first they saw it.

The question, then, becomes how this could have been avoided. In order to find an answer to that, we have to talk about world-building.

World-building is a bit of a peculiar beast. As I may have mentioned at some point before, world-building is best suited to the novel format because the novel - and, to a large though by no means equal extent, the graphic novel - is one of the very few mediums in which the reader-viewer-consumer-whatever has a great deal of control over the pace at which they read it. 

And so, for example, if you have something requiring a lot of world-building, you are going to be depending a lot on exposition. The most obvious advantage of the novel for this purpose is that you can deliver exposition in narration much more easily than in dialogue because you are already explicitly explaining things to the reader. 

You can't do that in film or theatre because in those formats your text is restricted to dialogue, and it is difficult to find an excuse for one character to explain to another character the kinds of concepts that the explainee really should already understand if they inhabit this fictional world. So there is an inevitable problem faced by films that novels solve just by their nature.

So because novels necessitate narration and description, they are very good at conveying the heavy exposition you need for world-building. The most important thing is still pace. If you read a paragraph in a novel and didn't understand it, you can just quickly cast your eyes back to the beginning of the paragraph without breaking flow, whereas if you miss a crucial line of dialogue in a film, then even if you are fortunate enough to be watching it at home, you still have to go through he rigmarole of pressing the rewind button and taking it far enough back to give it context and then watching it again in hopes that the second time around you will have slightly more idea what is going on. Crucially, this breaks flow. It breaks the ease with which the consumer of the media is able to consume the content. 

You don't have that problem in books or comics because you can very easily go back to something you missed without having to break flow. Which means that not only is it easier to integrate exposition, that exposition is also more easily understood because it can be painlessly repeated at the reader's discretion. 

Again, this all falls under the banner of the reader controlling the pace.The book only continues if you continue reading it, and it continues at your pace, which makes the delivery of exposition that world-building hinges on so much easier.

And that brings be back to Pacific Rim, which in many ways suffers from being a film. The prologue is well-shot and visually dynamic, but has to resort to 5-10 minutes of straight expostion dump in voice-over narration, conveying information that would have been much more easily dispatched in a book or, preferably, a comic - a lot of the world-building is in the design work, after all. 

But a strong indicator of this fact is how much the movie benefits from being watched on DVD, where you can notice more with each repetition, pause it for closer observation, pick through the meticulously constructed visual design. That is to say, if you watch it at the pace at which the movie delivers it, a lot of it will just pass you by because the information is not being delivered at a pace that works for you. 

The movie has to keep a fairly brisk pace, so it ends up whistling by a lot of material that we might have preferred to linger on and that might have enhanced the world-building.

Thus you run into really rather odd situations, like Coyote Tango, which was clearly meticulously designed, and they put out action figures for it, and you look at all the work that went into it and then in the film you only ever really see it in silhouette. You never see the thing in action, and you certainly never see the design in the film itself.

That is really the whole issue in a nutshell. You have this artifact that a lot of work went into, and that is really cool once you have the luxury of getting into the details, but you don't get to appreciate it in the moment because the mandatory pacing of film demands that you pass right by it on the way to the next part of the story.

Thus the film becomes an experience that you can only fully get if you watch it multiple times, creating a passable simulation of the pacing control you would get in a book or comic.