Beasts from the Deep

Why do so many monsters ply the deep waters of the Pacific? The Pacific has been a breeding ground for all kinds of fictional beasts bearing apocalyptic significance, from Moby Dick to Godzilla. This article analyzes three sci-fi movies from the early 2010s—Peter Berg’s Battleship (2012), Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013), and Gareth Edwards’s remake of Godzilla (2014)—to argue that the films’ aquatic antagonists operate as allegories for the hopes and anxieties surrounding the emergence of transpacific networks and alliances designed to secure and stabilize the region for free trade in the twenty-first century. I further argue that the monsters’ intimate connection to the ocean environment gestures toward the peoples and ecologies of the Pacific Ocean and its islands, whose histories and materialities are largely evacuated in many contemporary discourses of the transpacific. Borrowing from ecocritical and indigenous critiques of settler colonial futurity, I conclude by speculating about ways that concepts of intersubjectivity and relationality might engage with the neoliberal architectures that are simultaneously deployed and destroyed by these beasts from the deep.