Giant Japanese Robots

As we did an independent study about the influence of various famous science fiction works for our project a while back , I thought it would be interesting to delve into the inspiration for one of the best science fiction movies to come out fairly recently. This movie has enough action for even the most hardcore adrenaline junkie, explosions galore, and most importantly, tons of giant robots. Yep, you guessed it, it's Pacific Rim.

You may have gathered that I'm being sarcastic when I call Pacific Rim one of the best movies to come out in the science fiction genre lately. Although the movie scored an astounding 7/10 on IMDb, it came under harsh criticism for having no plot, and just a stereotypical and underdeveloped story line. I wanted to know what great works were used as inspiration for this $190 million money pit, I was not expecting what I found. I was expecting Godzilla and other monster movies of the sort to be in the mix, but it turns out that the plot was almost a complete ripoff of Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime series from 1995-96. This brought up an extremely philosophical question rarely dared to be addressed by humans: can anime be science fiction?

As crazy as this sounds, I think it can. I mean, Evangelion is about aliens fighting giant robots, which sounds pretty science fiction-esque to me. It also has strong religious references and mixes them in pretty heavily with the aliens and robots. Now I don't know how you can classify this as anything but Science Fiction, so it is in my book. This perfectly illustrated to me just how broad of a genre scifi is.

Doesn't Red Mean Communism?

Red Mars is not a story of creation, but rather a tale of destruction. The story focuses on the journey of 100 colonizers to a new world ready for development, but it is set upon the backdrop of a world wrought with destruction and corruption.

Throughout Red Mars the Earth is painted as an unstable and decaying place. Corporations have taken over the government, causing global corruption. Wars erupt over the scant resources and millions die regularly. This, at least to me, completely overshadows any progress that is attempting to be made on Mars. The corporations even reach to the new frontier that is Mars, and cause violent conflict on the planet. This paints the message that no matter where we try to escape to, corruption and destruction will follow.

To me this seems like a comment on politics also. From a quick scan of his Wikipedia page, it

seems like Robinson isn't too much of a fan of modern capitalism, which is fairly apparent in this

book. The corruption and subsequent destruction we see in the book is a fairly obvious comment on

the flaws of capitalism. Red Mars seems like a comment and warning on an individualistic

government rather than a tale of exploration and new beginnings.