I also keep thinking I'm over Pacific Rim but it seems to be sticking!

And that's a really good point about media borrowing narratives they then don't explore fully. I feel similarly about supernatural stuff that goes 'supernatural creatures = social metaphor' but then their plot developments where they use these creatures end up saying really sketchy things. And when I read Earth Girl I thought that ended up really poorly handling disability even though its central message was about ableism being bad.