Pacific Rim Review
The movie is about a rift that opens up in the pacific region in the sea and that allows huge monsters from another world the enter and cause massive, city wide devastation. But the human race is not so easily destroyed, the people have developed huge robots to battle the monsters named Jaeger. The Jaegers are too huge to just have one pilot operating them so they rely on two pilots, one for each hemisphere of the brain.
Kaiju is the Japanese word for monster. The Kaiju genre is a genre that I am less well versed in than others. The Kaijus themselves are all very gloriously and imaginatively destined and executed. Del Toro has a true passion for monsters and it shows because all these monsters look great. They all owe, or pay homage to classic Kaijus of the past, with most of them being modeled after earth creatures (giant crab, gorilla, lizard etc.).
The word Jaeger is the German word for hunter. The Jaegers, just like the Kaiju, have a wide difference in their designs and thoughts of how they should operate. The Russian is huge and strong, the Australian is fast and agile etc. They are inspired from anime, most likely Gundam being the main source of influence.
All these giant monsters and robots wouldn't mean much if we didn't have characters to latch onto. Luckily we've got some winners. Charlie Hunnam is Raleigh Becket, a pilot that suffered a server defeat and needs a chance to reclaim his former glory. Rinko Kikuchi as Mako Mori, a girl whose past is linked to the Kaiju and wants battle. Ron Perlman as the leader of the Kaiju black-market. All of them are great actors that bring believability to their roles.
Idris Elba plays the Jaeger general Stacker Pentecost. Elba is a powerhouse of an actor, he commands the screen with a planets worth of gravity and his delivery is even more soul shaking with his magnificent voice. He is a screen legend already and he will live on for a hundred years. A line like "Cancelling the apocalypse!" doesn't really require much effort to make sound cool, but Elba makes is sound one-hundred percent serious and cool as all hell.
Guillermo Del Toro is one of the greatest directors working today. He has his plot and character muscles working at top level. What he does amazingly in this movie is he effectively blends and balances the spectacle of these colossal battles with the smaller character moments. The micro and the macro are interwoven seamlessly in this movie.
What this movie does so incredibly, is its world building. You can really understand how this world works and operates. There is so much thought put into how our world would be affected if there would be giant monsters terrorizing it. There are religious groups that form even a black market, have you ever thought what happens to those huge monster corpses? Well this tells you.
Pacific Rim has a great color scheme with more bronze, reds and greens. Hardly are there ever dull greys that are repeated through the movie this is a world of color. Along with the color you really believe that this world has been lived in. Nothing is perfectly clean, everything has been scratched, faded and/or rusted.
I love how international this movie is. There are all sorts of people from every race, gender to nationality. This isn't a movie where America saves the world, or the British, this is a story where the human race saves the planet.
On surface level this might be considered to be cut from the same thread as the Transformers movies. No. On just the action level this is still so much greater than those movies, why? Because these robots and monsters are huge and you can believe it. Each swig and punch that is delivered has weight and gravity to it. These are creatures that you believe exist in the real world.
There actually was a big effort in the 3D converging of this movie and Del Toro himself said that he was proud of the conversion. So I swayed between seeing it in either 3D or 2D. In the end my better senses took hold and I decided to see the movie in 2D. There might have been some good moments that would have worked for seeing a Kaiju jaws snap in-front of my face or a Jagers fist, but there's no real appeal or need for 3D in this movie. Like most movies this is just fine in 2D.
What I love about this movie is that, in this very cynical time of doom and gloom of the future this movie is saying that we have a future. This movie says that with all our problems that we can face a threat that seeks to destroy us and we can cancel the apocalypse itself.
Rating: 4 stars out of 4
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