Review: PACIFIC RIM

PACIFIC RIM  (SCI-FI/FANTASY/ACTION)
Three Stars out of Four
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kukuchi, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman, Ron Perlman
PG-13 for sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence throughout, and brief language.
Verdict:  Although vastly more intelligent, creative and entertaining than any TRANSFORMERS movie, PACIFIC RIM is still a disappointingly weaker addition to Del Toro's directed features, overwhelmed by blunt traumatic bombast and more mechanical than a lot of his previous work.  On the other hand, it is a film that can be summed up as giant robots fighting with giant monsters...
You May Like PACIFIC RIM if you enjoyed:
HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY
GODZILLA (1954)
PROMETHEUS 

To both its credit and its detriment, PACIFIC RIM can easily enough be described as giant robots vs. giant monsters.  The action is truly spectacular at times, but there are particular moments where the movie edges closely to actually being great, but then becoming distracted by its own frenetic nature.  It's a pretty good movie, but it does have a particular audience, and those outside may feel a bit shortchanged.  It lacks the fully formed heart of most of Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro's movies.
The film opens with a great deal of exposition, necessary to introduce a world of new and complicated technologies and natural events, given with great efficiency in a constrained amount of time, via a voiceover by the film's main character, Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam).  A short few years into the future, a rift occurs at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, opening another dimension through which enormous reptilian beasts referred to as "Kaiju" (Japanese for "giant/strange beast") enter our world, wreaking devastating mayhem on human cities and costing millions of human lives in the counterattacks.  To defend against the Kaiju, which appear periodically, one at a time, the nations of the world pooled their resources to manufacture colossal robotic vehicles called "Jaegers" (German for "hunter"), operated by two pilots at a time in close combat.  Becket is one such Jaeger pilot, teamed up with his brother, but when a Kaiju battle kills Becket's brother, he retires to a transient life.  Over time though, the Kaiju have become increasingly powerful, and only a few Jaegers remain, the rest destroyed in battle.  In a last-ditch effort, the Pan Pacific Defense Corps bring Becket back into the Jaeger cockpit, on a high-stakes mission to seal the portal through which the Kaiju have been emerging. 

The standard (such as it is) for giant robot movies is Michael Bay's TRANSFORMERS franchise, and a lot of people have written PACIFIC RIM off as a TRANSFORMERS knock-off, which is a hugely unjust assumption on multiple levels.  PACIFIC RIM is far bigger, smarter, more fun and just overall better than those films, or anything else Bay has made, although that isn't really saying much.  Plus, PACIFIC RIM isn't so much a robot movie as it is a "creature feature," with its mind very much on the monsters and all the gooey grossness and biological mechanicism show-off moments, which makes sense considering that it's a Del Toro movie, and anyone who knows anything about the man can tell you that he's obsessed with monsters.  This has all the trademarks of the genre from the obvious of rampant city destruction, to the more nuanced of gross-out monster births.
Del Toro is a great creator of worlds, and reportedly wrote a 400-page "bible" of the world in Pacific Rim, how it works, what changes there are to society on economic, political and social levels; there's so much detail that the film cannot possibly take time to dwell on it, which is at once unfortunate, but also prudent.  Although the primary substance to this whole affair is "giant robots fighting giant monsters," he also finds plenty of time for the human characters (frankly, the robots and monsters aren't even characters, so whatever), but the film struggles in those areas, because they feel a bit half-baked.  The story is a lot like a formulaic sports movie, with the washed-up (quite literally) has-been legend, the antagonistic hotshot, the unproven supertalent, the seasoned sage (a couple of those actually) and a few fillers, who have to learn to work together for the good of all.  This would be fine and everything, except that these characters rarely made a strong connection for myself, especially Hunnam as the male lead, who isn't actually "wooden," but lacks the charisma and emotional depth that would be desirable.  Academy Award-nominee Rinko Kakuchi (BABEL), on the other hand, as Mako Mori, a rookie pilot who teams up with Becket, gives the best performance in the film, though she does have an advantage from the script.  Her's is the most emotionally-realized character of the film, and she just has a naturally charming presence.  Idris Elba, as Marshal Stacker Pentacost, is the hard-boiled commander of the whole operation, and while he conveys an effective presence of power, his character is a bit too thick-skinned to identify with, even with the emotional revelations that his character provides.

There's also a good few side characters that mainly function as comic relief, but who are skillfully woven into the main action while contributing to the main story and acting as parallel action.  The obvious scene-stealer, both as an actor and as a specifically crafted scene-stealer, is Ron Perlman, a regular collaborator with Del Toro, who plays a sleazy black market dealer specializing dead Kaiju parts (their ground up bones allegedly work as a natural Viagra), named Hannibal Chau (after his favorite historical figure and his favorite restaurant in Brooklyn).  Charlie Day (from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and Burn Gorman (from THE DARK KNIGHT RISES) play an eclectic pair of quibbling scientists who study the Kaiju, and while Day is sometimes a bit over the top, they work as an appealing pair, especially Gorman, who plays the crotchety, cane-wielding numbers man.
The action set-pieces are probably the best of the summer, in a summer that's been surprisingly disappointing on that front and others, with the sensibility of not so much a pre-teen boy (as has been so heavily suggested), but of what part of that mentality remains after so long, and that being to its benefit because there's a sort of longing and clarity to it.  They aren't so kinetic; it's more like an all-out brawl, with the occasional "surprise move" that different Jaegers and Kaiju are equipped for, although these might have been even better with set-ups and payoffs.  Basically, it's pure badass; a multi-million dollar realization of a "playing with toys" mentality, like the prologue sequence of TOY STORY 3.  There's not a ton of sense to it, but it asks, "What's the most awesome crap we can throw in here?" with out necessarily dwelling on context, and then it goes and does it with gleeful abandon.  There is a bit much in debris and the blunt trauma is a bit numbing at times, but it's mostly sensible and without the ridiculously reckless messiness of MAN OF STEEL.

As a summer popcorn flick, it's pretty damn good, but I can't pretend that I'm not somewhat disappointed on some level or other, because even as ridiculous and goofy as some of Del Toro's previous films have been, I wouldn't have considered them "popcorn flicks" (although I haven't seen BLADE II, so easy).  Del Toro's most recent directed feature was 2008's HELLBOY II, and it was inherently silly, with a main character who is literally a demon (red skin, horns, a tail) and his best friend is a fish-man, and they sing along to Barry Manilow tunes; but it also had thematic heft and a warm-hearted nature, even as little "tooth fairies" swarm people and devour them entirely.  PACIFIC RIM has the general look of a Del Toro film, with visual spectacle, transitional wipes, and frequent collaborator Guillermo Navarro's cinematography, but it's missing the warm fulfillment that interweaves with the gothic darkness, that I've come to expect from one of the best filmmakers working today.