Monsters, Robots, and a Blockbuster for the Ages

Pacific Rim
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pacific Rim” is the movie “Transformers” would like to be when it grows up, a wet-dream of comic book, science fiction, action, and monster movie tropes a whirl in a melting pot of hysterical blockbuster equilibrium, the kind of heedless, silly gusto that elicits a fevered “Oh hell yes” when the credits roll. There are a number of “Oh hell yes” moments in “Pacific Rim”, actually. Del Toro is the kind of director that can conjure them effectively. Here he has taken a skirmish between monstrous aliens and skyscraper-sized robots and imbued it with a clever wit and a modest humanity. Startling what that little extra can do to a movie like this.

At some point around present time, a bizarre rift appeared along the ocean floor, deep in the Pacific Ocean. Out of the mysterious opening crawled a giant, monstrous creature we first see trudging into San Francisco Bay, through and over the Golden Gate Bridge as though it were unheeded police tape. Fighter jets and guided missiles were hurled relentlessly at the creature, dubbed the Kaiju, and it was finally brought down several days and several hundred miles after it first reached shore. The moment was memorialized, the fallen heroes lionized, and mankind moved on. But a few months later another appeared, and then another, then another, and it became clear that more sophisticated means of defense would be necessary.

Queue the Jaeger Program, an army of enormous robots manufactured by the international community to combat the Kaiju before they could reach our shores and ransack our cities. The Jaegers are controlled by two pilots, rigged in simulator body-suits within the robots’ heads, piloting the machines by thought and body movement. Because the interface of the system is too complicated for a single human mind to manage, two pilots must synchronize their minds, a process called 'drifting', and train themselves to manage and contain each others’ memories while guiding the machines in unison.

This we are told in an opening scene that is as oversized and gloriously bloated – at around twenty-something minutes – as the whole of the film. This early montage and initial battle are awe-inspiring. It’s a gratifyingly tongue-in-cheek moment when, nearly a half hour into the film and following an epic, almost climactic fight sequence, the title page finally appears, Del Toro’s coy method of suggesting that yes, there’s plenty more where that came from.

When the story proper begins, the Jaeger program has been defunded after the Kaiju, in their evolving state, have become too large and too powerful for the robots to combat reliably. The world governments don’t have any better ideas, and control of the Pacific Rim is slipping away. What remains of the Jaeger program have convened in Hong Kong under the command of General Pentacost (Idris Elba), coordinating an underground resistance effort to take the fight to the Kaiju for a change. This involves digging up retired pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), who’d left the program after his co-pilot and brother was killed in battle, and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), a young upstart under Pentacost’s paternal wing.

The rest is effectively fodder for massive-scale action sequences between the Jaegers and Kaiju, though there is some clever comic relief courtesy of a couple manic scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) working with the program. The reason “Pacific Rim” is such a splendid movie is because these action sequences are inventive, beautifully photographed and coherently composed, and because Del Toro brings enough generic humanity to his characters to lend the action just the right touch of emotional weight.

Should we pretend, this is a grand metaphor? That there is a wealth of subtext? I feel like this would be a disservice to Del Toro’s achievement. Sure, this is a movie about trust, and sure, Dr. Geiszler alludes to greenhouse gasses making the planet more enticing to the Kaiju than it otherwise might have been, but indeed it is the headlong, vacuous simplicity of the narrative that makes this such a puritanical entertainment. “Pacific Rim” has satisfied for me a long unfed appetite for good old-fashioned Hollywood blockbuster camp, genuine, original and competent, and on these humble grounds it is one of the best films of the year.