Reviews: Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim is the most fun I’ve had at the movies since The Avengers. It is one of those rare films that knows exactly what it’s supposed to do and is committed to doing it. There’s nothing deep or important about it; it’s just a story about giant monsters fighting giant robots, and that’s enough.

The story: in the near future, a rift opens deep in the Pacific ocean, bringing forth gigantic creatures dubbed kaiju, who begin ravaging cities along the Pacific coast. In response, humanity creates enormous machines called Jaegers (German for ‘hunter’), piloted by two humans via a mind-melding technique called “drifting.” At first the Jaegers are successful enough that people stop taking the kaiju seriously, but then new and more powerful kaiju begin appearing and the Jaegers suddenly become outclassed, causing the world governments to abandon the program and pour their resources into a giant wall project. The story proper begins when Marshall Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) recruits retired Jaeger pilot Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam) to join a last-ditch effort to end the kaiju threat once and for all.

After a seemingly endless series of grim, self-important blockbusters all trying to be as ‘realistic’ and serious as possible (Man of Steel, Iron Man 3, etc.), Pacific Rim is unabashedly out to entertain. Director Guillermo Del Toro knows perfectly well that no one goes to a movie about giant robots fighting monsters expecting a serious, thoughtful drama about, I don’t know, environmental stewardship, or the military-industrial complex, or race relations, or what have you. They go because they want to see monsters and robots beating the snot out of each other! Del Toro delivers on that promise with a number of epic showdowns, the most notable being a two-on-three battle in Hong Kong featuring such conceits as a Jaeger picking up shipping crates to use as brass-knuckles and swinging a huge ship like a baseball bat, and a kaiju suddenly unveiling wings and flying into the stratosphere. The action is frenetic and occasionally brutal, but all done with a fairly light touch. Despite the PG-13 rating, this might be the most kid-friendly action film of the year; there’s no sex or nudity and very little swearing. Besides, I think all but very young children (especially boys) will love it; it’s the kind of movie that was made for them, which is something we don’t see very often these days.

Mixed in with the spectacular action are a number of very entertaining jokes (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman as the comic-relief scientists are a scream) and some surprisingly old-fashioned heroism. For instance, at one point Raleigh’s jerk-jock rival, Chuck (Robert Kazinsky) crudely insults him and his female co-pilot, Mako (Rinko Kikuchi). Raleigh responds by beating the ever-loving crap out of the guy to force him to apologize to her (remember that scene in Man of Steel that I complained so much about? This is how that scene should have played out!). Yeah, most heroes would beat up the arrogant jock, but how many would do it to make him apologize for insulting a woman? That’s the kind of hero I can really root for! It reminded me of Douglass Fairbanks’s The Mark of Zorro from all the way back in 1922. How many blockbusters remind you of Douglass Fairbanks?

There’re also some nice father-son moments between Chuck and his more pleasant and honorable father, Hercules (Max Martini, and yes, that is his character’s real name), and even an early scene with an unnamed father and his son beach-combing in Alaska conveys a sense of the unassuming masculinity that is so often lacking in today’s films.

There’s even a charmingly understated love-story. Since the pilots share minds and memories, Raleigh and Mako can’t help but grow close to each other. Refreshingly, however, with the fate of the world at stake, they stay focused on the mission and only occasionally address their growing attachment to one another. This also pays off in a few delightful moments, as when Mako catches sight of a shirtless Raleigh through his open door, closes her own in embarrassment…and keeps watching him through the peephole.

In short, Pacific Rim has pretty much everything you might want from a summer blockbuster. That doesn’t mean that it’s perfect, however. In particular, the characters are (with one exception) all pretty flat and unremarkable. They’re pleasant company, but they’re pretty much just types: the hero, the female sidekick, the mentor, the rival, the nerds, etc. You can pretty much predict exactly what’s going to happen to each of them from the moment you meet them. This may have been a conscious choice (let’s face it; sometimes you just want unremarkable ‘type’ characters), but it limits the film nonetheless.

Similarly, the movie takes the time to establish four separate Jaeger crews and set them up as uniquely powerful and talented warriors…and then wipes out two of them in quick succession. I was unpleasantly reminded of a similar dynamic in Alien vs. Predator, where the three Predators were reduced to one within about five minutes of their encountering the Aliens. It’s not as big a problem here (since we’re supposed to understand how dangerous the kaiju have become), but it is kind of annoying.

Pacific Rim reminded me at times of two films I particularly love: Independence Day and The Avengers, but in both cases I’d say it suffers from the comparison. Independence Day, for instance, did a much better job of suggesting a world-wide crisis bringing many disparate people together in a desperate bid for survival. There we had the President, a Marine, a crop-duster, and a cable repairman among the leads. Here we pretty much just have a group of soldiers, some of whom come from different countries, but all of whom have more or less the same goal and background. And, honestly, Charlie Day, Rinko Kikuchi, and even Idris Elba just can’t compete charisma wise with Jeff Goldblum, Will Smith, and Bill Pullman (that, and Pullman got a much better rousing, climactic speech than Elba, whose big speech left me kind of cold).

The Avengers, meanwhile, benefited from a large cast of established characters, all played by immensely charismatic actors reading dialogue from one of the wittiest writers in Hollywood. This meant that the scenes of them just hanging out and bickering were as much fun as the scenes of them fighting an alien invasion. The human scenes in Pacific Rim are pleasant and entertaining enough, but it knows better than to trust them too long without a monster-robot fight.

The monsters themselves, while cool, just didn’t grab me. Maybe I’m spoiled from all the vivid, character-rich kaiju of the Godzilla and Gamera films, but none of these kaiju made much of a lasting impression. The one that comes closest is a giant, acid-spitting bat-creature named Otachi, but she just can’t match the raw power of, say, Gyaos (whom she most closely resembles). In the end the heroes are confronted with a ‘Category Five’ kaiju; the biggest on record. But even it fails to do more than mildly impress, partly because we hardly even get a good look at it.

Anyway, such are the notable flaws I found in Pacific Rim, but none of them amount to anything like a serious problem. It’s not as good as The Avengers or Independence Day, but it is in the same spirit and you might say a worthy companion to both. It’s just good, clean, old-fashioned fun. You remember ‘fun’? That thing that summer action movies were supposed to be before they got all edgy and relevant?

On that subject I should mention the one character I alluded to above who stood out as the most memorable of the cast: a black-market trader called Hannibal Chau (Del Toro veteran Ron Perlman), who is so hammy, so over-the-top badass that he very nearly steals the show. And in a show about monsters fighting robots, that’s saying something. I like Perlman in pretty much anything, and here he’s an absolute scream from the moment he appears to his final (post-credits) bow.

I once read a review of the Ultraman series saying that it was “about as much fun as you’re likely to have legally…and even among illegal pleasures, it rates pretty high.” That’s pretty much what Pacific Rim is like. This is definitely one of the most satisfying film experiences I’ve had this year (at the moment I’d say only Monsters University rivals it): the kind of wonderful, wholehearted movie that comes from a talented group of filmmakers just kicking back and having fun with a subject they love.

Final Rating: 4/5. Not perfect, but the most fun you’ll have this summer, guaranteed.