Del Toro is known for straddling Spanish-language arthouse fantasy cinema ( The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth) and off-Hollywood edgy comics material (the Hellboy films, Blade II), as well as for his attachment to more unmade, cult-friendly projects than any other filmmaker of his generation (he comes to this after the collapse of his big-budget H.P. Guillermo del Toro is a far better filmmaker than others who have essayed large-scale 3D devastation, such as Michael Bay in the Transformers films and Zack Snyder in Sucker Punch and Man of Steel. There’s no denying that Pacific Rim delivers the awesome.
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However, Japan has been spinning variations on this premise for decades, whether in live-action movies pitting famous monsters against mecha-doppelgangers (1967’s King Kong Escapes, 1974’s Godzilla vs MechaGodzilla), in which at least initially the flesh-and-blood monsters were the goodies and the metal imitations controlled by wicked aliens or earthly villains, or in anime series like Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-96). This might be fresh to Western audiences, though Stuart Gordon’s Robot Jox (1990) also featured piloted anthropomorphic combatants (not strictly robots but ‘mechas’), and the Iron Man movies have familiarised multiplexes with the notion of an armoured battle suit. The planet’s defence forces prove valiantly unable to cope – leading to the creation of giant, humanoid-shaped fighting machines. In a cinema season where the laws of physics take a vacation ( Fast & Furious 6), where everyone’s mad for the apocalypse - from the Biblical to the zombie-induced - Pacific Rim is the maddest of all.In a long narrated prologue, Pacific Rim gives a precis of what might have been an entire series of films, in which coastal cities around the Pacific are attacked by huge monster specimens, or ‘Kaiju’. There’s a light, humorous feel to Pacific Rim because the science is silly and logic takes a flying leap. None of which subtracts anything from the stupid, over-the-top popcorn-picture fun of it all.ĭel Toro’s robots have weight and mass, and their epic, Hong Kong-smashing fights with the four- and six-legged, clawed and horned monsters are visually coherent, unlike the messy blur of the Transformers movies. What’s the point of the mind melding if the teams are still yelling commands and punching buttons as they fight? Mind-melding should mean they think and act on reflex, turning on the robot’s elbow rockets to give power to the punches in an instant. The leads are bland, and the cast doesn’t so much perform as show up and give us tastes of patented shtick that we expect - Elba has his Henry V speech, the Bobcat-voiced Day kvetches, the grumpy Ron ( Hellboy) Perlman (as an underworld purveyor of kaiju body parts) growls.ĭumb movies like this don’t invite much analysis.
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And program director Stacker Pentecost (Elba) says “That’s not going to happen.”Īny movie that recycles the line “Don’t get cocky, kid,” for starters and progresses to “Fortune favors the brave, dude” isn’t meant to be taken seriously. Rebellious returning ranger Raleigh (Hunnam of TV’s Sons of Anarchy) angles to get martial arts mama Mako (Rinko Kikuchi of Babel) as his partner.
The pairs of rangers who drive them wear armor that lets them maneuver them - one ranger controls the left side and left brain, the other the right side - through a neural mind-meld process called drifting.Ĭut to years later and the jaeger program is winding down, the wall is being completed but our best scientists (shrieking Charlie Day of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, daft-Brit Burn Gorman of Game of Thrones) don’t think the wall will work. And after realizing battling these monsters is a toxic disaster, the world’s governments teamed up to build gigantic, human-controlled robots called jaegers, after the German word for hunter.
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In the very near future, enormous alien beasts are sneaking into the ocean through a dimensional crack in the ocean floor along the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire.” The Japanese named them “kaiju,” because Godzilla already was taken. That’s where this sci-fi war is fought and that’s where the audience lies - American fanboys and Asian and Australian ones, too. It’s the future of cinema - or the present: a movie cunningly calculated to lure Hollywood’s biggest growth market with just its title - Pacific Rim. With a little Starship Troopers and Independence Day and Hellboy mixed in. That’s what this is, this movie that Guillermo del Toro just HAD to make, and for which he abandoned The Hobbit.ĭude wanted to make a Godzilla movie.
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