Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Pacific Rim aims to be
escapist entertainment that provides big thrills and just enough sympathetic
character hooks to get the audience invested.
I give the movie credit for not solely relying on the giant robots fighting
giant monsters appeal, but you should understand they had me at giant robots
fighting giant monsters. When done with
high production values, who could ask for more on a hot summer weekend? And the trailers for this movie have been
viewed in my family probably thirty times in anticipation.
So I
mentioned high production values, and this film certainly has that in
spades. I’m a fan of movies by Guillermo
Del Toro (Blade II, Hellboy I & II, and Pan’s Labyrinth). He has a uniquely identifiable visual style that
translates well between big time Hollywood pictures and smaller, more
simplistic horror genre fare. The effects are so good in this movie that you never
get a sense of “green screen” and the fake feeling that comes with it. This guy is an artist and his favorite canvas
is the surreal. He loves toying with
visually interesting monsters and things that could exist if our world were
opened up to other dimensions. His
imagination is all over the screen and it sucks you in. If you aren’t entranced by it, then I guess
that’s fair. But I would question anyone
who says it’s not creative and bold.
Del Toro
has created a vision of our world’s end at the hand of monsters entering
through a portal that opens on the ocean floor.
After a quick catch-up at the opening of the movie that chronicles the devastation,
he brings us directly into the action and the final days of a government
program that constructs huge robots and assigns pilots to take them out and
beat down the monsters attacking our world.
Each robot requires two pilots who guide the vessel in a way that
recalls Avatar. The robots are called
Jaegars (German for hunters) and the monsters are called Kaiju (Japanese for
monsters).
We meet our
hero early on, played by Charlie Hunnam of the FX TV show Sons of Anarchy. As an
actor, he’s a bit rough around the edges and I didn’t see anything that really
sets him apart, but he was average enough.
The commander of the whole show, known as Marshall, is played by Idris
Elba, a British actor who really holds the screen and brings the right level of
dramatic weight and machismo to the role.
You get the feeling you could have a very intelligent conversation with
this guy, but he’s also world weary tough enough to make you understand you don’t
want to get in his way. Rinko Kikuchi
also stars as an emotionally scarred lady who has talent to become a Jaeger
pilot, but a certain history with the monsters.
The rest of the film is populated by actors that match their parts and
Charlie Day shines as a rag-tag scientist researching the brain activity of the
monsters. He’s reliable comic relief.
I haven’t
said enough about the action. There are
funny little things in films like this.
Apparently you know it’s the end of the world because the sun never
shines and it rains all the time…like through the whole movie. Having said that, you’d be hard pressed to
find cooler visuals and more stylized fight scenes than when the Jaegars go up against
the Kaiju. The word I left the theater
with was “incredible”. I stand by it.
For my
money, Pacific Rim was exactly what I wanted and possibly even more so. Robots fought monsters. Civilization took its last stand. One robot even pulled out a huge, mechanical
sword. How much more can you ask for? Well, how about this? My son marveled at what he was watching as
much as I did. He talked to my wife and
I through the “cool” parts of the movie and came alive with smiles. After the movie he asked us repeatedly what
our favorite monster and robots were. It doesn’t get any better than that.
