Pacific Rim review

              Director Guillermo Del Toro is one of the good guys. He’s also one of the only living filmmakers who manages to pull together a wide appreciation from the farthest reaches of movie fandom; from Criterion collecting art snobs who love his Spanish language, gothic fantasies (“Pan’s Labyrinth” , “The Devil’s Backbone), to teenage comic book nerds(“Blade II” , “Hellboy”), all the way down to the basement dwelling, gore-geeks (“Mimic”, “Cronos”).  Whether he’s working for a studio or bringing to life his own ideas, he is an undisputed visionary and master of realizing cinematic environments all his own.   

                 After a long break of working on scripts in development hell--starting early production on last year’s “The Hobbit", only to quit and hand the reigns back to Peter Jackson—and producing other director’s films such as“Mama” and “The Orphanage”, Del Toro is finally back in the saddle with “Pacific Rim”.

                In the near future a portal opens up at various points along the ocean’s Pacific Rim, unearthing giant, city demolishing monsters, known as the Kaiju. After years of losing government armory trying to take down these creatures, the military develops a new specialized weapon called Jaegers—giant mech robots, manned by two soldiers who are psychically linked with both the machine and each other. 

                Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam plays Raliegh Becket, a young soldier who loses his brother in a vicious battle with a newer breed of larger, stronger Kaiju. After years of working construction, his commanding officer (Idris Elba) brings him back, in a last ditch effort to save the world, using the steadily failing Jaegar program. There he meets Mako Mori (Rinco Kikuchi) a revenge driven Japanese officer who is trying to work her way up the ranks. Between the battles, we also meet two Kaiju research scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) who are working toward mind-melding with the creatures to better understand their weaknesses and their origins.

                While this might not be Guillermo’s most heavy hearted or thoughtful genre picture, it is certainly one that is significantly more amiable and light on its feet.  The robots are big, the monsters are big, and the action is huge—as was the smile left on my face.

                Unlike the shrill and mean-spirited “Transformers” trilogy, this film knows how to do massive, toy-room-meets-war-room action scenes without stabbing your eyes out or lobotomizing you with hour long, incomprehensible set-pieces. Del Toro backs the camera far enough away from the fights to let you get an idea of how the opponents physically relate to each other and wisely he spaces those scenes between moments of well-earned humor. What lacks in “Pacific Rim” is a sense of depth or meaning in all of its dorky fun, and the screenplay sports some stiff dialogue that makes “Avatar” look like Shakespeare. 

                Traditionally, Del Toro loves his monsters as much as he loves his human characters and the relationships that he creates between them are always at the core of his storytelling. Though Charlie Hunnam never really inspires much interest as a lead, in just one flashback scene with Rinco Kikuchi, the movie reminds us how well this director understands the fear and vulnerability of children—a good scene that unfortunately stands out a bit too much amidst all of the silliness around it.

                 With the Chinese/Japanese setting and the creative design of both the mechs and monsters, this is clearly supposed to be a love letter to Asian creature features like “Gozilla” and “Gamara”, as well as, cyberpunk anime such as “Gundam” and “Neon Genesis Evangelion”. However, in all of this excited genre mash-up, most of human characters are underwritten and/or underacted. But if you accept this movie for what it is—a well-made, well-paced, big budget drive-in movie—then it will reward the child in your heart.

               

  Grade: B -

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2013