Movie Review: Pacific Rim

Review: Pacific Rim

From acclaimed producer, director and writer Guillermo del Toro comes another brutally intense fairy tale about what happens when people and (their) monsters try cohabitating a limited geographic area. Pacific Rim is as much a Bayian opus to titanic robots and gargantuan aliens destroying cities as it is a study in decision and consequence, the past and the present, and the monsters, both internal and external, that haunt our every footstep.

In del Toro’s apocalyptic world set almost a decade in the future mankind is besieged by an alien life form that emerged out of a portal deep in the Pacific Ocean. These monsters, called “kaiju,” which is the Japanese word for “monster” or “strange beast,” look like hyper-evolved versions of dinosaurs with spikes and scales and wings (oh my!). Yet there is something strangely earth-like about these creatures despite their having come from an alternate dimension. Maybe that was del Toro’s point, that these kaiju are massive manifestations of our collective sins as a species; after all, you can’t help but notice the various political, social and economic jabs he sprinkles throughout the movie.

Assigned to protect mankind from the alien monster is a division of man-made machine monsters, collectively dubbed the “Jager Program.” The Jager Program is born out of (wait for the jab) the efforts of world leaders uniting and pooling their resources. For a brief moment it feels as if del Toro is chuckling quietly at our current world leaders, perhaps thinking to himself, “My world leaders can unify and create scientific and technological marvels in a matter of months while you guys can’t balance budgets over the course of years.” But the moment is fleeting and soon we find ourselves immersed in watching various jagers and kaiju slug it out across the world before (you guessed it) another plug, this time at how celebrity is the reason why mankind can’t have nice things.

Enter Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), the celebrity of celebrities who was so famous and so mediocre that he single-handedly got the Jager Program decommissioned, even though it takes two drivers to pilot a single Jager. In any case, Becket, under the stern command of Marshall Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba, who is almost as awesome here as he was as Heimdal) and an international handful of pilots form humanity’s last resistance against the alien invaders.

As expected in a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters the action sequences are epic in both scale and experience. That being said, the movie as a whole exceeds just about anything one would expect from a plotline consisting of…well, giant robots fighting giant monsters, except the acting (everyone seemed to think yelling was the default tone of voice) and a few inconsistencies with the “neural handshake” concept; i.e. the process of forming the neural connection to pilot the Jagers was clear but breaking it was sometimes a big no-no and sometimes of no consequence at all. Oh well, you can’t win them all. The important thing is that as a movie del Toro’s Pacific Rim wins the war to join the ranks of this summer’s fresh flicks. 

Overall Rating: 8.6 out of 10