See, the things that made Pacific Rim and Fury Road resonate so much with me, made them so memorable even now in 2018, is because at the core of each movie, they’re about recovery.
It’s not overt or heavy handed. There are some movies that tell you they’re about recovery, are marketed in that way, and they’re always all about trauma and usually for the benefit of a viewer who wants to be on the outside looking in.
The difference is that these are genre movies. Genre movies with kickass soundtracks and cool visuals, but when you peel all that back, you get to the heart of them. That heart is all about learning to trust again, to be close, to be vulnerable.
Mako and Raleigh have both lost a tremendous amount and it’s a loss they have to confront each time they end up drifting. Raleigh’s entire life falls apart once he loses his brother because he can’t open himself up to another person in that same way. He has to carry the knowledge that he could feel that loss again, and so does Mako.
In their first drift, Mako gets lost, trapped in a flashback that Raleigh can’t bring her out of no matter how much he cares about her. But, the thing that ends up saving the day is her facing her past, her trauma on her own terms and allowing herself to trust Raleigh completely, just as he does for her. They both know they could lose each other, but they can move despite that fear.
Fury Road is the same, in a way. Max is terrified, operating only on instinct because his experiences inform the way he interacts with the world. To him, the world is vicious and cruel and he can’t trust anyone else.
On the other hand, Furiosa trusts her crew, they trust her, she knows this and she uses it. She doesn’t trust the institution she works for, she loathes it utterly, but she’s learned that there’s safety in compliance up until the point of taking action. It’s a compliance that disgusts her, but it’s still necessary.
They have both been molded by their experiences and Furiosa gets through to him in a way neither of them expected. It happens at their own pace, and Max ends up trusting her enough to help her without question.
I guess the reason they’ve stuck with me is because sometimes you’re trapped in a memory you never wanted to feel again, but you have to face it to defeat the monsters.
You have to fight back against all the things you know to be true about your world and let yourself trust again so you can try to reshape that world. Sometimes, trying to heal the world around you helps you heal yourself in ways you didn’t even know were possible.
Sometimes you’re 16 and you’re caught somewhere between Max and Furiosa, between terror and righteous fury, and you need the vindication of knowing those who have hurt you are just flesh.
I figured out a simple guide to the alignment chart last night
Lawful: Rules matter more to me than individuals. Chaotic: Individuals matter more to me than rules.
Good: Other people’s well-being is more important than my own. Evil: My own well-being is more important than other people’s.
Neutrals: My opinion of what is more important is determined on a case-by-case basis.
So a Lawful Good character’s guiding moral philosophy might be “I follow the rules because the rules keep people safe, even if they are sometimes inconvenient or harmful to me or other individuals.” A Chaotic Evil character’s guiding moral philosophy would be like “Screw the rules and screw you.”
This is a very succint way of explaining a long post from a few months ago. It is also kind of how it was originally written, and is what I use. No more “Is he chaotic neutral or chaotic evil” questions.
