Pacific Rim has almost everything you could want out of an action movie, beginning with spectacular special effects. The movie is about a time in the near-future when ravenous, towering monsters called Kaiju- think Godzilla and a few hundred of his closest friends- emerge from an inter-dimensional rift off the coast of Hong Kong to stomp through the great cities of the world. To counter them, the governments of Earth combine forces to create massive mechanical men called Jaegers, fighting robots controlled by human pilots. Pacific Rim cost $190 million to produce, and it’s one of those movies where you can really see the money up on the screen- the battles between the Kaiju and the Jaegers are flashy, weighty, and imaginative. The spectacle of seeing a slithering, 50-story beast throw a gigantic robot into a skyscraper is almost worth the price of admission by itself.
What’s more, Pacific Rim has a director who knows how to use special effects with style. Before helming this summer actioneer, Guillermo Del Toro directed Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), a movie acclaimed for its bold visual style and memorable creature effects. Del Toro shows the same panache here. The Kaiju come in many shapes and sizes- some look like fish, some like apes, some too otherworldly to describe- but all all share a pulsing, translucent menace. You can tell that Del Toro and his team had a blast inventing them. Even the non-battle-royal parts of the movie are fun to look at. Del Toro dreams up a variety of distinct looks for the heroic Jaeger pilots, and he rarely misses an opportunity to fill a frame with some interesting detail, whether it’s a piece of Kaiju brain floating in a bottle or mist escaping from a nearby pipe.
You may have noticed that I have yet to mention much about the movie beyond the visuals. Make no mistake: the presentation is the reason to see this movie. The story, although imaginative in concept, is pretty familiar in execution. It revolves around Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), a storied Jaeger pilot who quit the biz after his co-pilot died fighting a Kaiju off the coast of Alaska. As the Kaiju threat gets worse, Becket’s old commanding officer (Idris Elba) comes to pluck him out of his self-imposed obscurity, since he’s the best at what he does, and it’s time to reassemble the team, and let’s get those sons-a-bitches and save the goddam world!
The plot, in short, should be familiar to anyone who’s seen Top Gun or Independence Day or any movie driven mainly by testosterone and machinery. In fact, the plot is so clichéd, and the performances so broad, that you could make the argument that Del Toro is playing at satire. Hunnam, in particular, is so breathlessly earnest that it’s hard to believe we’re not meant to roll our eyes. Del Toro also has fun by casting the diminutive Rinko Kikuchi as Hunnan’s rookie partner. The two don’t have much romantic chemistry, but Hunnam and Kikuchi make a visually amusing pair, he over six feet of standard-issue American action hero and she a pixie-ish waif.
There are other touches of levity. Charlie Day of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is cast as a jumpy, Kaiju-obsessed scientist who wants to try and understand the Kaiju before beating the life out of them. He travels to a slum of Hong Kong, called The Bone Slums, to question black market types who might be able to hook him up with a fresh Kaiju brain. Day’s manic energy makes a nice contrast to the colossal, city-leveling fights that make up the movie’s core, but the best thing about his adventure are The Bone Slums themselves, which are rain-soaked, lit with piecing neon lights, and built under the massive rib-cage of a felled Kaiju. It’s an imaginative location, and Pacific Rim is an enjoyably imaginative movie in almost every way that matters.
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