Review: ‘Pacific Rim’

This is how it is done, at least when it comes to the big budget summer blockbusters that come out weekly every year, the new bloated staples of modern American entertainment. Just as big and loud and sometimes even just as dumb, “Pacific Rim” still manages to stand tall over most other big budget movies of this ilk. It’s fun, playful, and takes old ideas and makes them seem new and wonderful, and while this thing won’t be for everyone, it will still delight many people who take pleasure in watching giant monsters fighting giant human-operated robots in magnificent battles both above and below the ocean.

Guillermo del Toro has made his name making above-average (and sometimes downright great) genre movies. He’ll take something like a ghost story (“The Devil’s Backbone“) or a fairy tale (“Pan’s Labyrinth“) or vampires (“Cronos“) and he’ll push the genre and try to make something as respectful as possible in regards to the tropes and conventions of these types of films, and it is obvious when his love of these things comes shining through in the care and attention paid to every aspect of his movies.

So his version of a kaiju movie is no different. In the grand tradition of the thirty or so “Godzilla” movies that have been made since the 1950s, along with the numerous rip-offs and homages to the giant monster movie genre spawned by the original “Gojira” (unless of course you count the original “King Kong,” what with the rampaging through Manhattan and eating people and all), “Pacific Rim” is set in a world in which humanity has become beset by regular attacks from gigantic 200-foot tall monsters, arising out of the ocean, laying waste to entire cities. And in a fantastic opening montage that explains this world and the point the world is at with this battle against monsters, it is explained that humans created 200-foot tall human-operated robots to fight these monsters and kill them before they can destroy more cities. And apparently this worked for a little while. At least until the monsters started evolving and also preposterously getting bigger and then humanity found itself on the ropes, facing extinction straight in the face. This is where the movie really picks up, and this is our story, mankind’s apparent last stand against the kaiju.

Ridiculous? Yup. Ridiculously awesome? You betcha.

You see, Guillermo del Toro knows that simply showing giant robots fighting giant monsters will be cool, but there has to be more than that. And they definitely tried to tell a good story with interesting characters between all of the huge battle scenes, and this stuff works for the most part, which in turn gives the action scenes meaning and purpose. The stakes are as clear as it gets in this movie – the monsters are winning the overall war (because that’s what it turned into), and unless something drastic is done and soon, mankind will be extinct. And when they show some big plans failing and the monsters continuing to win, you can feel the dejection and hopelessness that the people feel, the impending doom that is the inevitable kaiju attack that will wipe out your city. So the set up is very clear and the deck is stacked against our protagonists, making us want to pull for them even more.

Now as for the characters themselves, they try to give some of a little development, but some of it comes too little too late, like when one character is told by a superior that he has daddy issues (which we’ve seen no real evidence of before this moment), and then that person with daddy issues literally turns around to have a tearful moment with his father. And then there is the awesome Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba, “Thor“), who initially fulfills the very simple role of stoic leader, but slowly takes center stage as the compass of this story, revealing some good backstory that helps bring his current story full circle.

But really the leads of the movie are two characters, robot operator and battler of kaijus Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam, Children of Men) and robot operator wannabe Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi, Babel, The Brothers Bloom), as they both have huge kaiju-related tragedies in their lives that they struggle to deal with on a day to day basis, and the movie’s concepts of “drifting” and “neural handshakes,” which involves sharing memories, thoughts and feelings with fellow robot operators, makes these tragedies and the pilots mental states extremely important to the success of their overall mission.

So at least with these two characters pretty well defined (albeit not too deeply) and with Stacker Pentecost being so awesome, and then a bunch of reliable actors breathing life into stereotypical yet still well done archetypal characters like the Nerdy Scientists (Charlie Day, Burn Gorman), Criminal Opportunists (Ron Perlman) and Headquarter Operators (Clifton Collins, Jr.), “Pacific Rim” becomes more than just three or four huge action scenes strung together with boring scenes that no one cares about. Instead of the typical, overly long, bloated, nonsensical movies usually made with this kind of budget and released at this time of year, we actually have a relatively simple story presented very well and with the glee and fun of a filmmaker who both loves what he’s doing and knows exactly how to do it.

Anyone who blindly deconstructs this movie as “scenes from Godzilla, scenes from Avatar, scenes from movie X, scenes from movie Y” is missing the point. ALL MOVIES are cribbed from other movies that have come before it, so that’s not what matters. Guillermo del Toro may have taken elements from other movies to make his own monster movie, but by golly what he came up with is more entertaining than all of those different movies combined. There are moments in “Pacific Rim” like you’ve never seen before, and this thing gets downright thrilling at times, so if you like any sort of big-budgeted summer popcorn movies, this is the one you have to see, because you will definitely do yourself a massive disservice when you skip this in theaters and end up watching it on your tablets or smart phones – a movie this colossal should be viewed on screens as big as possible. So do it.