What do PACIFIC RIM’s towering,
robotic warriors and my opinion about this, the latest film by
Guillermo del Toro (PAN’S LABYRINTH, HELLBOY), have
in common? Both are of two minds! But seriously, folks.
PACIFIC RIM is a joyful, kinetic, unmissable toboggan run
through genre Babylon. But whether it’s smarter than it oughta or
dumber than it coulda will depend on how lithe or lumbering you fancy
your sci-fi.
Del Toro’s first directorial effort
since 2008’s HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY, PACIFIC RIM
is only occasionally brilliant, but relentlessly entertaining and
visually epic, nonetheless, pitting 300-foot-tall amphibious
monstrosities (Kaiju) against towering, human-piloted mechs (Jaeger)
in stunning rock ‘em, sock ‘em death matches. In a
cinematic climate dense with all-too-familiar genre origin stories,
RIM won me over immediately by breezing through half a film’s worth
of by-the-numbers exposition in a terse five-minute burst – the
Kaiju attacked from an undersea portal called the breach, we built
Jaegers (German for “hunter,” the film helpfully offers) to fight
them, everything was working out awesome, but now – uh-oh – too
many Kaiju!
Immediately after a whirlwind tour of
our monster-haunted future, we meet Jaeger co-pilots Raleigh (Sons of
Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam) and Yancy Becket (Diego Klattenhoff),
their battle-hardened leader, Major Stacker Pentecost (PROMETHEUS’
Idris Elba), and their massive mech, Gipsy Danger, which, like
all Jaegers, is piloted through a neural network that (for sci-fi
jibber jabber reasons) requires two human brains to “drift”
together as one. The film’s first battle doesn’t go as
planned, and, as multiple Jaegers fall, the program is discontinued
in favor of a coastal wall. this leaves Pentecost with only one base
(Hong Kong’s Shatterdome), four jacked-up Jaegers and a rag-tag
hero team, including Raleigh’s untested new co-pilot Mako Mori
(BABEL’s Rinko Kikuchi) and two geeky Kaiju researchers: the
manic, sarcastic Newton Geizler (It’s Always Sunny in
Philadelphia’s Charlie Day) and stuffy Hermann Gottlieb
(Torchwood’s Burn Gorman)
A typical problem with movies featuring
large-scale action scenes performed by CG day players is the sheer
disorder of calamitous combat and Ritalin-eligible editing - light
and noise that inarguably signal destruction is happening, but
without any traceable narrative course. PACIFIC RIM
executes large-scale digital action marvelously. We feel the
incomprehensible weight of every mech, the gruesome mass of every
monster. Early battle scenes deftly establish the mechanics of Jaeger
combat, and the ballistic arsenal each possesses.
The Kaiju are beautifully designed and
meticulously rendered atrocities - towering collisions of Toho and
Lovecraft rendered in scales and chitin and neon ichor. When the
two come together, each with signature moves and distinctive
strategies, we can follow every punch. More akin to the brutal poetry
of classic boxing than the chaotic violence of MMA fighting – to
the lumbering, polymer-draped rumbles of so many thrillas with
Godzilla than the noisome clatter of Deceptacons – it’s a
steel-bending, bone-crunching ballet of gargantuans.
It’s a good thing the battle scenes,
which dominate the film, are bolstered by a thrilling sense of weight
because much the character work is simply leaden. While del Toro and
co-writer Travis Beacham (CLASH OF THE TITANS [2010]) do
enough to make characters distinct from each other (even if it means
something as cartoonish as the brutalistic haircuts on two Russian
bruisers, or as idiosyncratic as the Vaudevillian limp and out-sized
stodginess that dog Herr Gottlieb), even the two leads don’t have
much to offer besides ab-swaddled baditude and store-bought
motivations.
The imperiled future Earth that
surrounds the heroes is a fascinating one, but also not without its
issues. Post-Kaiju Hong Kong is a wonderland of fantasy set design.
Steampunk smuggler king Hannibal Chau (HELLBOY’s Ron
Perlman) presides over a bustling black-market Kaiju organ-smuggling
business. A bundle of ornate bars and shops is stacked crowded into
the empty spaces between the chalky monoliths of an abandoned Kaiju
ribcage. Feeble municipal shelters pack herds of the frightened into
crude cement bunkers. The little time we spend in the world
outside Jaeger brawls and the Shatterdome is magical, with sets
almost as gorgeous and detailed as HELLBOY II’s unmatchable
troll market. It has me at odds: that we don’t get to spend a bit
more time exploring the tumultuous civilian world is a marked
disappointment; that we get to spend any time there at all is an
indescribable delight.
Likewise, high-flown science
fiction concept “the drift” – the place where Jaeger pilots’
minds meet, forming a collective consciousness as they interface with
the circuitry - is rife with possibilities. The film uses it to
largely utilitarian purpose – it affords the filmmakers a readymade
device through which to show and not tell, spicing up traditional
flashback while simultaneously kicking the plot forward. It
works fine (I can’t deny the giddy kick I felt when Geizler
proposes an ingenious reappropriation of drift technology), but It
also feels like a missed opportunity to develop the cardboard
protagonists. Sure, we witness Mako’s most defining memory… but
why not her darkest fantasy, her most improbable dream, her truest
fear, or her pettiest resentments. It would have been compelling to
witness co-pilots as they experienced and accepted the darkest, most
private cloisters of each other’s psyches, rather than just the
most convenient character beats.
But then, that's not really why you go to these 3-D action flicks. During the screening I attended, a small boy sitting behind me explained the movie thusly: “It’s Godzilla versus Voltron.” He didn’t say it with disappointment or a pop culture-weary sigh. He said it with pure, unmitigated joy. All gripes aside, it’s this sort of cinematic elation – the awe of the ‘bot, the cringe at the beast, and the glee as the 50-ton knuckles connect – that PACIFIC RIM successfully and repeatedly elicits. (3 out of 4 stars)
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