Where are all the Asian People in Pacific Rim?

It’s impossible nowadays to miss the clout of Asia within the Hollywood industry.  Recent news is full of reports about the extra four and half minutes featuring local stars and subplots that were added to the current Ironman 3 specifically for the Chinese market, but efforts to appeal to Asian viewers have been a notable aspect of major Hollywood films for some time.  Last year’s reboot of the 1984 anti-Communist actioner Red Dawn, for example, reflected contemporary awareness of Chinese might by both recasting the villains as Chinese and substituting North Korea as the villains in the Chinese release, in canny deference to the commercial power of a billion potential ticket buyers.

Such overt catering by Hollywood to Chinese audiences makes this summer’s action spectacle, Pacific Rim, particularly incongruous.  The fx-extravaganza about gargantuan human-manned robots designed to combat monstrous sea creatures ravaging cities around the Pacific Ocean is a delirious mash-up of plot elements and imagery scavenged from over a half century of world film—Godzilla (1954), Blade Runner (1982), and Transformers (1986, 2007-2010) are just some of the most obvious sources in the movie.  These references are not coincidental: Transformers started as a toy franchise jointly produced by American-Japanese companies; Godzilla is an anti-nuclear postwar fable about Japanese vulnerability that paradoxically left an indelible stamp upon American popular culture; and Blade Runner was designed around the idea that future Los Angeles would resemble contemporary Tokyo and Hong Kong.  Pacific Rim joins these films as the latest version of this long and rich tradition of east-west intercultural cinematic influence.  As its title asserts, Pacific Rim wants to be a blockbuster of the “Pacific Century,” a film for an era when eastern culture and commerce increasingly dictate contemporary trends.

Yet despite this obvious pandering to Asia, it’s astonishing how whitewashed and traditional Pacific Rim remains.  Although the plot emphasizes cooperation through both the global coalition that unites to fight the monsters and in the more unusual idea that a partnership of two warriors are needed to man each war machine, the story’s military commander and all of the most heroically memorable warriors are westerners.  The three Chinese triplets who are said in the film to have been some of the world’s most impressive fighters have no dialogue or close-ups and are rapidly killed, and the Japanese woman who is a major character in the film is the classic orientalist stereotype of a shy, submissive potential love interest.  (See image above: although she participates in the climactic action sequence it is entirely under the guidance of her partner—a white man.)

In his previous films like Hellboy and the critically acclaimed Pan’s Labyrinth, Mexican director Guillermo del Toro has displayed an irreverence and inventiveness that must in some way reflect his perspective as an artist originally working outside of American culture and Hollywood hegemony.  Sadly, this perspective is missing in Pacific Rim.  Fun as that movie is, I’m still waiting for the Red Dawn, Pacific Rim, and Ironman 3 mash-up that shows Asian people as global heroes—or what Asia watchers nowadays tend to call the future when “China saves the world.”