Deep within a summer of frayed edges and missed connections —
Superman destroying Metropolis, Capt. Kirk’s failure to delegate, Iron Man’s panic
attacks, Lone Ranger (‘nuff said) — I really had to sit back and admire Pacific Rim’s overt simplicity: it is a
movie about giant monster-fighting robots, and that is precisely what it delivers.
No detours, no origin stories, no unnecessary exposition. No fat
or gristle, either; just lean strips of robot-carved monster meat. Pacific Rim
knows what it’s about and it goes to great lengths to maintain that steadfast
course. Even the robots have names, like Gypsy Danger and Crimson Typhoon, as
if they’re characters in the film — and they sorta are.
The robots were created after giant skyscraper-sized monsters,
called Kaiju, began bubbling up out of a breach deep in the Pacific
Ocean . The robots are called Jaegers, German for “hunter,” and
they’re controlled by human avatars standing in cockpits inside the robot’s
empty skulls. They control a Jaeger (yay-gurr)
in tandem with another pilot via a “neural handshake” called a drift;
essentially, they’re driving the robot with their linked brains. Two pilots are
required because a single brain would get overloaded and likely explode. And
those crab fishermen thought their job was dangerous.
I’ve explained to you the general idea, but it only does service
to about half the film many charms. The other half is its rich style and deft
tone, touchstones to the dark fantasy realm that usually accompanies director
Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican visionary behind the Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy
movies. Here, once again, he creates a fantastical world with an uneasy
relationship between its tech-savvy humans and its monstrous new residents. It’s
not quite as fascinating as the last Hellboy
movie — with its eyeball wings, talking tumors and giant seed pods — but it
certainly holds its own with its towering Jaegers, the robot jocks who pilot
them with brain-hacked Wii devices, and those lizard-like monsters with their
radioactive-blue blood and basketball-sized scale lice.
If I had to describe the look of the film in a single word, it
would be rivety. Rivets everywhere.
Rivets all up and down the Jaegers, rivets inside the deep caverns that serve
as the Jaeger bases, rivets all up in the giant walls designed to protect
coastal cities from hammerheaded Kaiju. When Bethlehem Steel was liquidated I
know where it all went, to the Warner Bros. lot. The abundance of rivets isn’t
a complaint, just an observation of Rim’s
mechanical gear-punk aesthetic. I liked the look of the film, rivets and all,
although I did find the monster design to be a teensy bit lacking. By the end
of the film, they all started to look alike aside from a monster that could fly
and another with a big rhino horn on its face.
The film stars Charlie Hunnam, that aggro-star from TV’s Sons of Anarchy. He plays Raleigh
Becket, a defeated Jaeger pilot 11 years into the Kaiju invasion. His former
commander, with the command-worthy name of Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba),
calls on Raleigh
to come back to the Jaeger program before its funding is shut down. Raleigh is reluctant to
return because he lost his perfect drift companion, his brother, in a Kaiju
fight many years before. “Die in a Jaeger or die here on the wall … your
choice,” Stacker tells him. Guess where Raleigh
goes next.
Back at Jaeger HQ, we meet more characters, including other
drifters, a brainy analyst with pilot aspirations (Rinko Kikuchi) and two
bumbling scientists with competing theories on the Kaiju’s origins. The
scientists provide the comic relief, especially the spastic Newton (Charlie Day), who has a fanboy
obsession with the Kaiju. It’s not an outright comedy, but there are several
playful sequences that show off the film’s whimsical underbelly, including one
with Newton wandering Hong
Kong slums looking for Hannibal Chau, a black-market dealer in
dead Kaiju organs. “I took my name from my favorite conqueror and my
second-favorite Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn,” Chau tells Newton . The actor playing Hannibal is a joke in itself, one I will let
you discover.
Mostly, though, Pacific Rim is about robots and monsters pummeling
each other into pieces. If that sorta thing interests you then you will be very
pleased with the rock’em-sock’em nature of the fight scenes, which do drag on
and on, but are clever and well choreographed still. The movie does exploit
that troublesome issue I’ve been having with popcorn movies’ incessant overuse
of post-9/11 imagery, including crumbling buildings and civilians fleeing dust
clouds on city streets. Certainly Pacific Rim , which is essentially a tech-heavy Godzilla remake, earns the right to show
these shots more than a movie like Star
Trek Into Darkness, but it’s still a worrisome trend. Del Toro does make a
point to show humans evacuating safely into underground shelters, which leaves
the unpopulated city above free for an alien-robot title bout. So it’s not a
complete killfest in those toppling skyscrapers.
The effects are nifty, the characters are likeable and have
rewarding story payoffs, the action is dizzyingly frantic and well designed,
and director Guillermo del Toro proves yet again that he is a capable
big-budget storyteller. I enjoyed Pacific Rim probably more than I should. But after so many
constipated, overly-complex movies this summer, it makes complete sense that I
find stupendous enjoyment out of this, a movie that knows exactly what it is
and is never embarrassed to admit it.
