Last updated on April 1, 2014
Pacific Rim – Pacific Rim is a giant bowl of monster madness, summer blockbuster style. Guillermo del Toro’s team take the fun parts of Godzilla movies – namely, that large creatures or robots fight each other in a huge metropolis – while injecting standard action hero tropes into a huge nostalgic hodge-podge. For me, at least.
I’m unsure why this sort of film appeals to my adult mind. Frankly, Godzilla films weren’t ever good films in the sense of story-telling. Seriously, convince me that 1991’s Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah makes any logical sense at all, and I’ll give you a cookie. The whole enterprise works towards that single extended sequence where guys in rubber suits designed like a ten year old’s imagination bash each other in the most unrealistic way possible. Yet, for whatever reason, we like big robots and giant monsters fighting in unrealistic ways destroying things. Or, at least, the success of Transformers would make that apparent enough. The Transformers series, in my opinion, just isn’t the same; there’s a sense of scale lacking from them that Godzilla always had in spades, even with the lack of visual fidelity.
By comparison to that blockbuster, Pacific Rim shows much more respect and heart to its inspirations and predecessors. It isn’t willing to show any of it as just an action showcase, or make its insane plot any less serious than the care it deserves. Somehow, the audience must accept that robots named Jaegers like Gipsy Danger and Crimson Typhoon would be real giant robot names gifted by nations around the world. It expects us to believe an inter-dimensional portal would allow aliens to invade planet Earth. It also expects us to believe that, in six years hence, the combination of the world’s greatest scientific minds would develop a fleet of giant robots that require connecting two people’s minds together. All of this is a completely arbitrary setup for the bliss of $195 million dollar visuals and a pretty predictable plot.
And yet, the whole film works. The actual plot details don’t feel like mere throwaways. The characters do fall into standards archetypes (the reluctant hero, the psychologically scarred heroine, the general, the scientists, etc), but their paths fold and weave in unexpected ways. One of the biggest surprises comes in the lack of a romantic subplot. Thank God! I was honestly expecting Xenogears flashbacks at a point, but Pacific Rim keeps it lighthearted and friendship-oriented. I liked all the characters, and I actually wanted them to survive and/or win. Considering how predictable the whole plot is, that’s a pretty deft feat. I lost myself in THAT kind of story, and I’m happy to say it succeeds on that level. Having Ron Perlman and Charlie Day appear, for me, is a huge bonus on top of it!
The action, of course, remains the primary reason for actually seeing it. I am slightly disappointed in the monsters designs – frankly, they’re a little boring, but they function well enough and in a way consistent with the narrative. Regardless, the choreography follow the clear visual cues of Japanese monster films rather than Michael Bay’s free-floating Transformers camera, meaning you can see everything. It looks glorious. The sound design makes every impact, every delayed fall, and every surprise attack arrive with the kind of punch and verve you’d expect. I especially like the hang-time whenever a giant gets thrown in the air silently while you wait for the inevitable crash. Brilliant stuff! del Toro knows how giant combat works.
Often, Pacific Rim evokes a sense of wonder at the scale and the crazy detail of nearly everything. This is a world like ours, but not really; the suburb built out of the remains of a giant monster should attest that things feels different. If you’ve seen Hellboy or Pan’s Labyrinth, it certainty shares a similar sense of melancholy and darkness along with lighthearted adventure. Apparently, the civilian actually evacuate before most of the fighting even occurs, so we can watch the death match between giant things happen with peace of mind (Oh del Toro, you pacifist you!). You’re supposed to enjoy the stuff happening, not think of the toll of war. And heck, if you can’t let go and just enjoy this, then I seriously question your ability to enjoy many things at all. Having high standards never really improved my life; it’s all about your perception, not the things per se.
I could go on all day, but in sum: I would watch a sequel. The film did not do that well at the box office domestically, unfortunately, so it may be a while yet before we see anything of the sort. While “bombing” in the United States, Pacific Rim outdid expectations overseas. None of this surprises me – an untested franchise with a very foreign style without the recognition of some 1980s toyline will definitely fail on some level unless it appeals to everyone.
Pacific Rim does not appeal to everything, nor does it try; I appreciate the single-minded focus, yet I am aware that a good film does not always translate into a profitable one. Given that it lost to Grown-Ups 2 and Despicable Me 2, two sequels with established brands and established stars, that makes a lot of sense. Charles Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, and Idris Elba aren’t exactly the stars that sell high-budget films these days; even if Marvel/DC films cast lesser names, they still survive based on decades of comic book branding. Pacific Rim had a lot of issues right from the beginning, and it did respectably amidst that starting stumble (financially speaking).
It’s also number one on my List of films featuring powered exoskeletons, so there’s that.
