Psst! Hey… you! Have you ever seen Robot Jox? It looks like Guillermo del Toro has, because Pacific Rim – for all its fancy visual effects and highfalutin production values – has the exact same sense of nerdy bravado and low-rent 1980s genre movie credibility. This is a movie that, rather like the audiences watching it, can’t quite seem to believe that it even exists. I suspect it’s because the filmmakers think they’re getting away with something that Pacific Rim wastes no time getting to all the good stuff, cramming every scene with plot, characters, ideas, action and comedy until there’s nothing left to feel but exhausted.
This is the “good” kind of exhausted, mind you. This is hot, sweaty after-sex exhaustion that comes from a job well done, or at least that felt really good. Pacific Rim may not be a perfect movie but it’s mostly cool as hell and it plays great when you watch it, and will probably play even better on your second and third sit down. Travis Beacham’s sci-fi screenplay has more going on than the typical summer blockbuster, and his co-writer Guillermo del Toro directs the film with a colorful forwardness that keeps most of the details feeling like background noise until you stop and realize just how important all that minutiae really was.
The plot goes like this: Aliens attacked the Earth, but they didn’t come from Outer Space. They came from an interdimensional rift at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, which shot out giant monsters called Kaiju, which tore apart the coastline. To combat this menace, humanity banded together and built giant robots called – for no explicitly stated reason – Jaegers. (Maybe they’re the bomb?) Jaeger pilots are celebrity heroes, and everything seemed pretty cool until the Kaiju attacks escalated and mankind’s future went from reasonably certain to totally doubtful.
The plot also goes like this: Years later, the Jaeger program has been disbanded in favor of a giant wall across the coastlines, so a hardnosed (and mysteriously bloody nosed) military man played by Idris Elba bands the last few Jaegers together for one last ditch assault on the interdimensional rift. However, since the Jaegers require two pilots, he has to recruit a wounded young hero played by Charlie Hunnam, who quit the program back when his co-pilot – and brother – died in an earlier Kaiju attack. Now he’ll have to synch up his brain with a motivated but equally damaged young recruit played by Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi to save the world and punch monsters with robot fists, which is really cool and is kind of the point of all of this elaborate backstory.
Exclusive Interview: Rinko Kikuchi prepares you for Pacific Rim at San Diego Comic Con 2012.
Yes, that’s a lot of exposition just to get the fights going, but Pacific Rim does its best to keep the plot moving even though more than half the film feels like a set-up for a more focused sequel, in which all these ideas could just be accepted and the characters could behave more like human beings than broad caricatures. That happens to lot to genre films: Bryan Singer’s X-Men spent the whole movie introducing the concept of mutants, freeing X2 to actually tell a decent story within that world. That would be more of a problem here if Pacific Rim wasn’t so tightly condensed into high-octane Jaeger/Kaiju brutality, and cast with some highly animated thespians who, for the most part, know how to sell this material without making it all seem too ridiculous.
If nothing else, it’s refreshing to see a big budget action movie that’s more interested in ideas than pandering set pieces, and that somehow manages to make those set pieces sing nevertheless. The centerfold of this orgiastic geek out is an attack on Hong Kong that seems to take up a third of the movie, and features multiple monsters and multiple robots wailing away at each other in one memorable duke out after another. It’s not plausible – we waved bye-bye to that back in the first few minutes – but it’s a wonderful display of action figure creativity, the kind that was previously remanded to children’s bedroom carpets and some of the more colorful anime spectaculars.
It’s still animated, of course. Stuart Gordon’s Robot Jox, the last halfway decent western attempt to bring this kind of sci-fi fantasy to life in live-action (minus the monsters, of course), used stop-motion for its giant robots, making them feel to this day still remarkably real. The gigantic creatures and contraptions in Pacific Rim are now created by computer, and slightly faker as a consequence, but there’s enough attention paid to detail – in particular, filming them like they were actual actors in a location, not just all-purpose playthings – to keep all the crazier elements of Pacific Rim feeling mostly plausible against the backdrop of impressive practical sets. One of those locations is called “The Shatterdome” by the way. Someone on the production is still giggling about that. I’m betting that their eleven-year-old came up with it. “Shatterdome,” I tell you. Yeesh.
Pacific Rim is a little too rushed to feel like a great movie. An occasional break with the large supporting cast to let them actually feel something that isn’t an important plot point would have done wonders for the pacing and our dramatic involvement, but it’s that very breathlessness that makes the movie feel so special. This is go for broke, we may have only one shot at this filmmaking, stuffed with scenes and characters and concepts that deserve to be in a movie but rarely if ever get the chance. American action movies haven’t felt this exhilarating since The Matrix – another film that’s as awesome as it is overstuffed and clunky – and that sense of pure inspiration will probably get you past all the many scenes that feel unnecessarily concise, like they were just obstacles in the way of future coolness.
Pacific Rim does the job it set out to do, by making this level of madness feel like a real movie. Now if only it played like a really, really good movie we’d totally be getting somewhere. As it stands, it’s more exciting than it is brilliant, but damn if that’s not some form of compliment in and of itself.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
