Stacker Pentecost: Idris Elba
Mako Mori: Rinko Kikuchi
Dr. Newton Geiszler: Charlie Day
Herc Hansen: Max Martini
Chuck Hansen: Robert Kazinsky
Ops Tendo Choi: Clifton Collins Jr.
Gottlieb: Burn Gorman
Hannibal Chau: Ron Perlman
Warner Bros. Pictures
presents a film directed by Guillermo del Toro. Written by Travis Beacham &
del Toro. Running time: 132 min. Rated PG-13 (for sequences of intense sci-fi
action and violence throughout, and brief language).
According to the advertising
department at Warner Bros., “’Pacific Rim’ is this generation’s ‘Star Wars’.”
Why is it that any movie that involves aliens or monsters where all the
characters have individualized nicknames, including the monsters, is invariably
compared to “Star Wars”? This movie is nothing like “Star Wars” in content,
vision, impact, or (hopefully) legacy.
Maybe I’m just getting old,
but it seems to me this movie is nothing more than an excuse to show us giant
monsters and giant robots beating the snot out of each other and destroying
cities with the ease and consideration of a child destroying his Lego sets.
I’m sure it will be a smash hit. What? Are we all twelve?!
The movie involves a future
Earth in which we are invaded by giant monster aliens trying to take over our
planet. They don’t come from space, however, but an inter-dimensional rift
located at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The devastating attacks by these
destructive monsters, who conveniently only enter our world one at a time,
quickly band the world’s countries together to defend against them. While our
conventional weapons prove to be inadequate against the beasts, we quickly
develop a program where giant robots are used to fight them, piloted by two
people because the interface is too much for one pilot to handle.
Instead of showing us these
developments, like a typical alien invasion movie, we are told all this through
voiceover and some fairly incomprehensible montage of monsters destroying
buildings. We are told this by one of the pilots, Raleigh Becket (Charlie
Hunnam, “Sons of Anarchy”), who has the gift of being able to “drift” with
other people’s minds. This is the process that allows two people to operate one
robot body. The filmmakers chose to skip the more interesting elements of this
story, like showing us the early failures and discovery of this drifting
technique, so we can get right to the action of seeing a giant robot smash a
giant monster, and vice versa.
This material almost seems
beneath director Guillermo del Toro, who brought us the visionary and profound
wartime fantasy “Pan’s Labyrinth” and the quirky dark comic book charm of the
“Hellboy” movies. Certainly his ability to imagine wonderfully designed and
interesting monsters helps the material, but his gifts of adding personality to
them and multiple levels of storytelling are disposed of here. His knack for
pacing action and framing incredible CGI fantasy footage are not, however.
The screenplay by del Toro
and Travis Beachum (“Clash of the Titans”) is a near perfect prefabricated
summer blockbuster model. It delivers the maximum impact of action with
characters who boast about honor in crisis, a hero who resists authority
despite the fact that he’s the best at what he does and is making up for a past
mistake, a leader who is tough as nails but also has a secret, and a rival who
can’t see why the hero is so special, leading to internal clashes on the side
of the good.
There’s a woman who also
isn’t given the chance she deserves but is really the only person who can bring
out the best in the hero. This is Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi, “Babel”) whose
first name is uttered so frequently it’s as if the filmmakers offered a bonus
to whichever actor said it the most. It’s a break from tradition that Mako is
Japanese, rather than the preferred shapely all-American girl that Hollywood
generally places in such a role. Perhaps that’s because the recent acceptance
of geek culture in Hollywood has also allowed this movie’s producers to admit
that American males have a bit of an Asian fetish when it comes to women. How
culturally significant it is that she’s the subservient of the two leads.
We’re also given the geek
side to the heroes in the form of two scientists who clash in their opinions of
how to ultimately deal with the alien threat. The German, Gottleib, isn’t given
enough screen time. That’s so we can concentrate more on the comedic approach
by Dr. Newton Geiszler, played by Charlie Day of “It’s Always Sunny in
Philadelphia”, who in proper blockbuster tradition goes by the more childish
name of Newt. Day is pretty good at adding the comic relief into this end-of-mankind
heavy material. He’s helped by del Toro regular, Ron Perlman (“Hellboy”), as an
opportunist who holds a vital piece of material Newt needs to crack his own
technology to stop the alien invasion.
Despite all that plot, this
film plays like some grand version of a Robotech cartoon, where the giants do
battle against one another in a world that is furnished to look inhabited
because of all the cars and skyscrapers populating the landscape. However, it
only ever seems to be peopled in close up to show us crowds screaming for their
lives, while in long shot the giants can devastate the city without seeming to
affect any actual people. It is these types of CGI battle sequences that I find
bore me more as I get older. There are no real stakes at risk here. Buildings
topple with no real consequences as these giant beings pound on each other with
no real lasting effect. I’m sure it will please audiences en masse.
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