PACIFIC RIM

As the scale of anything increases, so too does the risk.

If it’s an organized campaign against a common concern, it runs the risk of feeling disorganized and unfocused if there isn’t a clear goal. Just the same, if it’s a sprawling story on a mass scale about a collective coming-together, it can easily succumb to bloat if it doesn’t know the difference between spectacle and bombast. In all cases, the centre cannot hold without a clear understanding of what one wants to do.

To achieve anything on a large scale, it all comes down to a singular vision.

Sometime in earth’s future, a fault line opens up in the Pacific Ocean. This fault line – called “the chasm” – is in fact some sort of alien porthole and has allowed gigantic monsters called Kaiju to invade earth and cause mass destruction around the Pacific rim.

As Kaiju continue to arrive, mankind looks for a defence. For that, massive robots are designed, built and named Jaegers. These machines are so intense and elaborate that they cannot be piloted by one person.

One pilot that has a certain degree of notoriety is Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam). While co-piloting his Jaeger “The Gypsy Danger”, the Kaiju he had engaged gave the machine a sever smackdown. The ensuing battle took the life of Raleigh’s co-pilot (also his brother), but in order to get the Jaeger to safety, Raleigh had to pilot the Jaeger himself…becoming one of the very few pilots on record to do so. Disillusioned with being a pilot, Raleigh retreats to Alaska where he works construction on a massive wall to keep the Kaiju at bay.

As the Kaiju attacks intensify, Raleigh is enlisted back into the pilot corp by Stacker Penetcost (Idris Elba). In Hong Kong, Stacker is mounting a massive offensive, which includes a restored Gypsy Danger. He’s hopeful that Raleigh can help train the pilots and even get back in the cockpit himself if needed. Helping the men oversee the mission is Stacker’s protegé Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi). Mako knows everything there is to know about both Kaiju and Jaegers, and desperately wants to get in on the action herself – much to Stacker’s chagrin.

As the mission plans continue, and the Kaiju threat continues to increase, our attention is also turned towards Stacker’s two lead scientists: Dr. Hermann Gottlieb and Dr. Newton Geizler (Burn Gorman and Charlie Day). The two have been researching Kaiju at a feverish pace in the hopes of understand what they are, what they want, and how they might be beaten. They approach the problem from different sides: Gottleib from the mathematical, Geizler from the biological. They don’t agree on much, except that they often disagree.

While all of these mismatched personalities argue over the best solution to this very large problem, more Kaiju begin to appear on the horizon.

Strangest thing: Despite there being several cracks in PACIFIC RIM’s armour, one can’t help but feel nothing but joy towards it.

It’s framing story is nothing new – heck, it’s been told in all sorts of different ways going back as far as the 1930’s. It’s characters and dialogue are cliché and predictable. Few of its characters make a deep impression. Its effects don’t do anything particularly groundbreaking, and its 3-D elements feel tacked on…and yet, I’m ready to go back and pay full-pop for another ticket to see it right now. For that, I give credit somewhere unexpected: Guillermo del Toro. I can already tell that point seems strange, so allow me to explain.

We’re in an age where many of our blockbusters feel like they are directed by committee. For starters, ninety percent of our big-ticket offerings are based on existing properties…be they TV shows, toys, comic books, characters from yesteryear, or previous films. Once a property is hoisted as The Next Big Thing, the studio that owns it builds its own dream team from the poster image on back. Few of any one artist’s flourishes or tropes are present in the finished McFilm; instead it feels like something neat achieved with the least resistance to the lowest bidder. That’s where PACIFIC RIM and del Toro’s influence feel different.

For starters, there’s a clear desire to go back to the sorts of stories we used to see in B Theatres and on TV late at night. These stories have villains that are formidable and awe-inspiring, they bring on feelings of great fear and danger, and require a united effort and a small degree of luck on the part of the heroes. They are the sort of films del Toro knows backwards and forwards; so much so that he is able to draw from them for his own story and not make it feel like a blatant retread.

No monologue feels forced. No fight goes on too long. No joke is driven into the ground. There is a great amount of attention paid to pacing, momentum, tone, and scale – none of which could have been achieved without a singular vision. It comes from del Toro keeping a firm hand on the tiller and knowing the difference between thrilling and bombardment. He puts the right actors in the right roles and gives them the right lines to say. He even knows well enough to spare us an entire film’s worth of origin story, instead of which, he gives us a five-minute intro that’s nothing but back story. As he does these things, he allows us all to become 13-years-old again and recapture the feeling we got when we first saw this sort of thriller.

The film achieves that by achieving the only thing our thirteen-year-old selves wanted in a film; it comes laced with a great deal of fun.

We laugh when Charlie Day and Burn Gorman bicker. We pump our fists when Idris Elba gives his motivational speech. We shake our heads in amusement at the weasliness of Ron Pearlman’s contraband gangster. And we sit slack-jawed as gigantic robots and gigantic monsters kick the crap out of each other in ways Michael Bay can’t achieve on his best day.

I once had someone say to me that a person shouldn’t be thanked for “merely doing their job”. While I understand the sentiment, I disagree. The fact is that a lot of people in the world today don’t have the first clue how to do their job, they just do something they think os good enough and wait for someone to call “bullshit”. So sure, on the surface, Guillermo del Toro and everyone involved with PACIFIC RIM are meeting the expected criteria and “doing their job”. However that undercuts one key point – and it’s the point that makes this movie such an absolute joy when so many like it feel like a chore.

Everybody involved with this film that is “just doing their job”? They’re really bloody good at their job.

Matineescore: ★ ★ ★ ★ out of ★ ★ ★ ★
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