PACIFIC RIM
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Genre: Kaiju
THE MOVIE
Monsters are to Guillermo Del Toro's movies as neurotic New Yorkers are to Woody Allen's movies. Del Toro has a wonderful and deep appreciation monsters and has featured them in his movies like Mimic, Pan's Labyrinth, and Hellboy. Pacific Rim is his tribute to Japanese kaiju cinema as well as the subgenre of anime that deals with giant robots and mechas. It has been alternately described as the smartest dumb movie ever made and the dumbest smart movie ever made.
In terms of its visual story-telling, it is a pretty sophisticated movie. Its use of color as a framework for supporting the narrative is very satisfying and despite the fact that a major city is trashed in the third act, Pacific Rim never falls into the kind of dreary disaster porn that we see in movies like Man of Steel or Transformers: Dark of the Moon. In comparison to those movies, the disaster is always visually interesting, fun, and even beautiful.
I'm also convinced that this movie is really a metaphor for our future attempts to battle Climate Change and it's accompanying natural disasters. This may become more obvious when we are living in a world in which the effects of the changing climate are unignorable and in which nations are devoting large portions of their resources into large-scale industrial and technological solutions-a world not unlike the on in Del Toro's movie. Right now, we are experiencing an increase in extreme weather such as hurricanes, which are given categories. like the Kaiju in Pacific Rim. This gives the movie a satisfying subtext that the best kaiju movies have.
For its visual and metaphorical sophistication, Pacific Rim's more conventional narrative never quite overcomes the weaknesses of the kaiju genre: there are plenty of flat characters, weak performances, and the story overstays its welcome by about twenty five minutes. Those nitpicks aside, Pacific Rim really is a very fun movie and a love letter to kaiju fans who often have to wait a very long time between movies, and even longer between quality movies.
Pacific Rim was actually made in the wreckage of a couple of other Del Toro projects. For a while, he was to have directed The Hobbit but when that movie experienced a long production delay he moved on to an adaption of H. P. Lovecraft's At The Mountain of Madness, which fell through due to the difficulty of producing the kind of hardcore R-rated big budget horror movie that Del Toro wanted to make. Thus, Pacific Rim was Del Toro's first directorial effort in six years.
Interestingly, Pacific Rim is one of those movies that, while it made a lot of money at the box office-particularly the foreign and Chinese box office-it really struggled to find an audience in the United States. It is part of a larger trend of recent big-budget movies such as Star Trek Into Darkness and Amazing Spider-Man movies that have noticeably underperformed in the American market. With that said, its sequel was officially announced as of this writing and will be coming in 2017.
Pacific Rim is set in the near future during a time in which giant alien creatures have emerged from a giant portal at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and have attacked cities around the Pacific Ocean. In a zippy montage at the beginning of the movie, we learn that mankind has constructed giant robots to battle these creatures as an alternative to the destruction and environmental damage caused by nuking them. These Jaegers are deployed to take down the kaiju as they come through and at the beginning of the movie have been highly successful.
We are soon introduced to Raleigh and his brother who pilot the Jaeger known as Gypsy Danger out of Alaska. The movie's conceit is that it is necessary for two pilots to form a kind of electronic mind meld to be able to pilot one of these robots. This is kind of an interesting idea but not one that is really explored in the movie to any extent. Thus the two pilots are strapped into what looks like a futuristic elliptical machine where they synchronize their movements in order to control the Jaeger.
During a battle in which they engage a kaiju against orders, Gypsy Danger is almost destroyed and Raleigh's brother is killed. The movie picks up some time later as Raleigh has has left the program and is doing odd construction jobs on a giant anti-kaiju wall being built along the coast. At this point, many of the Jaegers have been destroyed and the program is winding down to a last stand at the "Shatterdome"outside of Hong Kong.
We learn that Gyspy Danger has been rebuilt and as one of the few remaining pilots, Raleigh is recruited by the Marshall Stacker Pentecost, played by Idris Elba who wears one of cinema's most authoritative mustaches. I'm convinced that part of the problem with the movie has to do with the actor who plays Raleigh as well as the way that the character is written. We see very little of what must be survivor's guilt or PTSD after having lost his brother. For most of the movie he comes off as flat and mushmouthed. Therefore the fact that much of the movie is revolving around finding him a partner to control Gypsy Danger is a bit of a bore because he lacks chemistry.
Eventually Gypsy Danger makes it out to battle a waive of kaiju that attack the city and Raleigh and his partner redeem themselves, which would have been a great end to the movie but Pacific Rim gets sidetracked with a subplot about the origins and motivations of the kaiju as discovered by a goofy scientist and a plot to close the portal at the bottom of the ocean. Unfortunately, the movie tacks on a rather visually uninteresting underwater battle when it really would have been a better movie just to have ended after the really rocking Honk Kong battle. Not every movie needs to be two hours long, Pacific Rim might have been a truly brisk, kick-ass movie at an hour and forty-five minutes but instead wears out its welcome in its last act.
THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS
Pacific Rim features an assortment of Jaegers and Kaiju. The Jaegers are quite varied and mostly very cool, although the star mecha, Gypsy Danger is a bit on the boring side, design-wise. However there are quite a few really cool mechas in supporting roles like the sleek and sexy Australian Jaeger Striker Eureka, who has a very cool Anime look. Also very cool is the Chinese Jaeger, Crimson Typhon who looks a bit like a G1 Transformer.
The Kaiju don't come off nearly as well. Like Tim Burton, Del Toro is a director with an unmistakeable visual style and certain motifs pop up again and again in his films and creature design. The Kaiju in Pacific Rim are very much evident of the directors visual aesthetic with their recurring shark-y appearance and neon highlights. This is especially true of the final underwater battle which features multiple hammerhead-looking Kaiju which are barely distinguishable from one other.
Although, smartly, Del Toro saves his two best Kaiju for the climactic Hong Kong battle, Leatherback and Otachi. Leatherback is a giant gorilla-like brute who has the ability to generate EMP pulses. He reminds me a bit of Orga from Godzilla 2000. He has a strong design in that he has a lot of weird alien features but his terrestrial analogue is pretty obvious and you can look at him and kind of see what he is about.
Otachi is perhaps the Pacific Rim Kaiju with the most classic Japanese kaiju appearance with echoes of both the Japanese Godzilla, the 1998 American Godzilla, Varan, and Rodan. Otachi also has a cool reveal of a set of wings hidden in her forearms and she is the movie's only flying kaiju. I say "she" because she actually gives birth in a scene the movie probably could have done without.
HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
Pacific Rim is widely available on Bluray and DVD.
MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE
The Hong Kong battle is some of the best kaiju action ever put to screen.
There are also a number of wonderful small moments in the movie that I really love, such as when Gypsy Danger gently steps over a bridge to avoid destroying it, a moment that was particularly fun after the wholesale destruction and collateral damage at the end of Man of Steel, which was released a couple of weeks prior.
SEE ALSO:
Godzilla Against MechaGodzilla (2003)
Like Pacific Rim this Millennium-era Godzilla movie is also very focused on a mecha and its pilots and their interpersonal relationships as they try to take down Godzilla.
TRAILER
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Patrick Garone
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