Pacific Rim

Guillermo del Toro – 2013 – USA

Whether he intended it or not, with Pacific Rim Guillermo del Toro articulates, point for point, nearly every reason why the similar Transformers movies of Michael Bay were so gratingly annoying, predictable and unsatisfying.  The same age, Bay is like the popular jock in high school while del Toro is the lonely bookworm.  As a result, Bay’s films are obnoxiously loud, blurry and vapid, while del Toro’s are moody, majestic and visionary.  Bay makes eye candy, while del Toro makes (what he calls) “eye protein.”  Pacific Rim is del Toro’s homage to the kaiju movies of Japan’s Toho studio from the 50s and 60s; the “rubber suit” monster movies as they are sometimes disparagingly called.  The kaiju in this film are an alien race sent through a dimensional breach located at the bottom of the ocean.  To fight them, gigantic robots called jaegers are built and manned by pairs of pilots.  How exactly the humans know that all future kaijus that swim through the breach are going to be same general size as the jaegers is just one of many questions that you’re better off not wasting time wondering about.  Del Toro sweeps you along so quickly in this fully realized world that there isn’t time to address such things anyway.  There are tons of clichés; the hot-shot cut down to size and learning how to cooperate with others, the need to exorcise childhood demons, the need to redeem oneself for past mistakes that cost lives, and so on.  But these are handily outweighed by del Toro’s non-cynical treatment of his characters and situations.  A major pleasure in the film for me was the complete absence of major stars.  It’s such a relief when a director of del Toro’s stature insists that celebrities not distract us from a good story.  He has often done this, as when he demanded that Ron Perlman play the lead in his Hellboy movies or no one.  Moves like that prove that stars are no guarantee of box office at all.  Pacific Rim would be nowhere near as appealing if it had been tailored to suit Tom Cruise, Matt Damon or George Clooney.  The film doesn’t blow you away with ideas or originality, but it feels like exactly as much fun as del Toro wanted it to be; and that’s a hard enough thing to accomplish these days.  One minor critique I could make is that I think it’s a weakness of the film that the kaiju are so anonymous and disposable.  The major charm of the original Toho monsters like Godzilla, Rodan and Mothra was the fact that they seemed to have personalities and could be villainous or heroic depending on the context.  In those movies, you rooted for Godzilla to trample as many buildings as possible, but here you’re basically impressed with a creature’s design just long enough to see it get killed.  I appreciated that the film is humbly dedicated to Ishiro Honda and Ray Harryhausen.  Honda directed almost all of the kaiju films, and Harryhausen’s obsession with vast contrasts in scale is a clear influence on del Toro.  Honda’s original Gojira and Harryhausen’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, (both from 1954 and both featuring a great beast rising from the sea to wreak havoc), are the great-grandfathers of Pacific Rim and the film is made more rewarding than typical summer blockbuster fare by del Toro’s tangible love for such movies.