Pacific Rim is a total blast. It's the summer movie of the summer, a frivolous and fast-paced absurdity in a season of serious, bloated action-epics that are more endured than enjoyed. This is a movie that loves its monsters, its machines, and the people who scurry at their feet, trying their damnedest to "cancel tha apocalypse." Instead of the monsters being a traditional alien invasion, these creatures (called "kaiju") arrive one by one, every few months, emerging from a hyper-dimensional rift in the Pacific Ocean. They're dumb, they're slow, but they're nearly indestructible, and each one is tougher and sharper (and sharper) than the last. These beasts are so fearsome and destructive that they're measured by "category," like hurricanes.
Man's response? Create the "Jaegers." Enormous mech-warrior robots controlled by two pilots (one assigned to each hemisphere of the robot's "brain"). It's a gloriously ridiculous solution, and it's even ridiculouser after you see a four-armed Jaeger named "Crimson Typhoon" shake its head clear after a kaiju knockout.
Or after a Jaeger named "Gipsy Danger" grabs onto an ocean liner and holds it like a baseball bat... and does the exact thing a robot holding a boat like a baseball bat should do.
The "giant monster" movie has seen a slight revival in recent years, albeit in very different forms. Cloverfield, Monsters, and especially The Host were all strong efforts to bridge the Japanese man-in-suit genre with improved effects and more serious human dimensions, and Monsters director Gareth Edwards is currently producing a Godzilla reboot. While those films reached for deeper meanings and contemporary parallels, Pacific Rim goes in the opposite direction. Sure, there are bits that nod sternly toward global ties and the futility of building border walls, but most of the film is about rejoicing in the sheer pleasure of seeing a giant robot squash a monster's head between two shipping containers.
The most interesting part of the human story, which follows a Hail Mary plan by the Jaeger pilots to close the kaijus' ocean rift, comes from the idea of two pilots controlling the Jaegers. To control such an enormous piece of equipment, they have to link their minds together. This leads to a sharing of consciousness and memories called "the Drift." When ace pilot Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam) fuses with his new co-pilot Mako (Rinko Kikuchi, the film's real star), he witnesses a buried trauma: a childhood memory of a crab-like kaiju that decimated her city and made her an orphan. We see her as the only girl in a city of millions, the monster moving toward her with the slow insistence of a tidal wave.
Pacific Rim was co-written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, who's maybe my favorite genre director today. He's the man who brought Hellboy to the screen and created dark fables like The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth. While he doesn't produce his best material with this film, he displays his usual affinity for off-balance, unique art design. The monsters in this film are all of the grey, gargantuan, screeching variety, but each one is unique, an alien inversion of something distantly familiar to us. There's the crab kaiju, the sea serpent kaiju, the hammerhead. One tremendous moment shows a monster unfurl an up-to-then unseen pair of bat-wings and bellow at the night sky.
The film's best moments are undoubtedly in the middle hour, which is jam-packed with monster-vs.-mech battles and the growing relationship between Raleigh and Mako. Once the film moves to its climactic stand-off, however, Pacific Rim gets into more predictable territory, playing too much like the plot of Independence Day. The alien beasts even carry similar motivations. In a film that intends to honor to old-school monster movies, recalling something so contemporary and vanilla dampens the mood and mutes the impact the climax tries to generate. There's even a rally-the-troops speech that evokes Bill Pullman's infamous "not today, aliens!" speech.
Luckily, this film's speech is more knowingly chewed up and spit out by the brilliant British actor Idris Elba, and he, along with many of the actors, find a way to bring out the film's genuine - if archetype-heavy - human dimension. Along with the growing connection between Raleigh and Mako, the viewer gets an endearing pair of squabbling scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) and a memorable father-son team. I would've liked to see more about how the Drift works, and how these different teams pool their minds to defeat the "monstahs at our door." If this film leads to a sequel (and it damn well better), perhaps that idea can get explored in more detail. For the time being, Pacific Rim will have to settle for being a deeply silly and deeply satisfying movie about robots punching monsters in the face.
RATING: B+
NOTE: I saw this film in 2D, because I hate 3D, and I've heard alternating views on how effective the film's extra dimension is, including the claim that it becomes tougher to see what's happening during some of the darker battles. On the other hand, del Toro says he grew to love the 3D he was forced to implement. Maybe that's reason enough to try it out, or maybe Guillermo is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
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