Caught "Pacific Rim" the other night with a friend of mine.  Loved the fabulous fusing of mecha anime with kaiju monster movies of the golden age into a pretty sharp "mostly" live action feature.
Some impressions I took away from the film, I later texted to another friend who couldn't make it:
"I will never look at sushi the same way...I want Ron Perlman's shoes...'Today we are cancelling the apocalypse'...Australians are obsessed with soccer even at the end of the world...Mako Mori can hold an umbrella with thunderheads of unexpressed emotion...I want Marshall on my softball team...Mad Scientists trippin'."

I thought Guillermo Del Toro did a pretty good job of establishing the subtle sub-context of all nations pooling their resources together to combat global threats like climate change, the energy crisis, pandemics and the like.  Now you may say, "Subtle!  When the monsters were identified with the same kind of rating systems usually associated with tornadoes and hurricanes? 'This is a category 5 kaiju.  The first one we have ever seen.'"

Well yes, some of it was less subtle than others.  However the same night I caught "The Day the Earth Stood Still" on late night television.  The Keanu Reeves version that is all about a doomsday clock set in motion by benevolent alien  overlords of the surrounding galaxy who have decided the human race and all they have created must be wiped out to save planet earth.

So in comparison, subtler than a souffle.  In "The Day the Earth Stood Still", the underlying text is voiced first by John Cleese when his character says essentially that when the human race is absolutely up against the wall that's when their capacity for change shines through.  This message is echoed for the rest of the movie until Keanu Reeves decides to take pity on the lowly Earthicans and stop GORT from completing its nano-rampage.


I think Gypsy Danger should just haul off and punch GORT.

Yes, the human race has a remarkable capacity for coming up with last minute technological patches to fix the holes in the infrastructure of our world.  Unfortunately, these last minute patches are usually poorly tested and come with at least one or two new problems with which we hadn't had to content before the fix was made.  Every new leap forward usually sets us back somewhere else.

So for subtext messages I far prefer the idea of pooling all our best minds and all our best resources together to come up with long standing and well thought out solutions to our global problems.  This seems like a more positive message than waiting until the absolute last moment and hoping that the Universe will give us one more chance; like out in space, or on another planet.  Also a better solution than building a big wall.