Dir. Guillermo Del Toro Rated: PG-13 Run Time: 2 hrs 11 mins
Where can I watch? Amazon Prime ($3.79 Rental)
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim feels like a movie ripped purely from the fantasy of a child in a sandbox mashing its toys together. It’s giant mechs vs. giant monsters, and like the best childhood fantasies, it takes its own silly concept very seriously. I don’t necessarily mean the tone, because, I mean, c’mon, we’re talking about giant mechs vs. giant monsters here. But Pacific Rim’s characters take their role in the defense of Earth seriously, never winking at the camera or taking us out of our own buy-in to the concept by saying, “isn’t this crazy?”. It simply builds its world, executes, heightens, and delivers on the promise of its own crazy premise.
It’s 2020, and humanity has been pushed to the brink of destruction by Kaiju, inter-dimensional giant monsters that have invaded the Earth from a portal (called here “The Breach”) at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. To combat the Kaiju, humanity created Jaegers, giant mechs piloted by two deeply connected humans who must work together to effectively control their massive bodies. Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), a washed-up Jaeger pilot, returns to action for one final push, as humanity prepares to attack The Breach itself.
The world building of Pacific Rim is quite solid, imagining an Earth that has completely given itself over to defense against The Kaiju. Beyond The Jaeger program, humanity has constructed several “Miracle Walls” at strategic areas around the Earth and turned those into population centers. While once hailed as the savior of humanity, The Jaeger program has fallen out of favor as resources become more scarce and funding is diverted to the wall program. We are seeing the Jaeger program in its final 8 months, and there are only 5 Jaegers left in the world, each a representative of a different country. The program is now centered in Hong Kong, and a black market has developed for Kaiju parts harvested from the bodies of the dead beasts.
It feels as though the recent films Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire took some lessons from Pacific Rim in how they depicts their Kaiju fights. As in those movies, the action here is weighty, with prolonged slugfests and wind-ups, suplexes and creative weaponry that respects the size and heft of each respective being. There is a crunch to the combat, with each move landed causing serious damage, with neon-blue blood or sparks and metal chunks spraying off the combatants as they swing buildings, bridges, tankers, or giant swords on to each other’s heads. While I enjoyed the Godzilla/Kong mashup movies, I’ve found that those movies have always struggled more when there are humans on screen. They lack agency and ability, and their only role in the movies (beyond some forced emotional arcs) is to draw their titular characters together again for another fight. Here, every human character featured in Pacific Rim has a direct impact on the fight, whether through piloting the Jaegers, running command of the operation, or researching the Kaiju in order for humanity to gain an advantage. There are no human villains, and there don’t need to be: mankind knows what it’s up against, and anything not related to giant robots fighting the giant monsters is thankfully not worth addressing.
Pacific Rim is a visual feast (especially in 4k HDR) and there is always something to look at. The Hong Kong depicted here is bathed in crimson neon and often rain soaked, leading to colorful fights with thousands of particle effects on screen at once. Beyond that, each Jaeger has its own unique design and abilities, and while we spend the most time with Raleigh’s Gipsy Danger, the others are given a showcase as well, and it’s cool to see the amount of time, care, and philosophy that is put in to each one. There is also driving theme music that plays each time the Jaeger’s are called into combat, and gosh darn if it doesn’t get my blood thumping. Hunnam walks around like the cool guy at your high school, holding the front of his pants the entire time like they are going to fall down, and while the performance is overacted, I would argue that was the assignment here. Everyone is overacting, and the rest of the cast, which includes Idris Alba, Clifton Collins Jr., Charlie Day, Ron Pearlman, and Rinko Kikuchi, give life to this heightened world with heightened performances. Plus, those names! Raleigh Becket, Yancy Becket, Stacker Pendecost, Herc Hansen, Dr. Newton Geizler, Gotlieb, Hannibal Chau; you couldn’t ask for better names for characters in this type of movie if you tried.
Guillermo Del Toro has once again built a world from a crazy idea and executed it to perfection, and executing silly ideas in a way that still gives them weight and stakes is extremely difficult to do. It’s like a game of Operation, where leaning too far one way or another will cause the audience to tune out or check out, especially when a movie’s characters either acknowledge the silliness of the idea, or don’t seem to care enough about what’s happening to make us care. Everyone in Pacific Rim cares a lot about what’s happening, and while the character development on display here is skin deep, you learn all you need to about what makes them tick so that they can hurry up and get back inside the giant robots.