Warner Bros. Pictures
Teamwork saves the world in Guillermo del Toro’s big-budget monster movie Pacific Rim. It’s a sentiment both profound and clichéd, but underneath the industrial firepower of the iron giants that battle sea monsters is a genuine human element.
At least, that’s the theory. This blockbuster provides plenty of spectacle, but the characters who inhabit it are, despite their Shakespearean airs, not vivid enough for you to care beyond the wow factor.
But there is a wow factor. In a near future curiously outfitted with analog flip-number clocks, gigantic monsters called Kaiju threaten the world, alien sea creatures that have arrived not from space but from deep underneath the Earth’s surface.
This will sound familiar to fans of Japanese monster movies. Godzilla, the ur-Kaiju, emerged from a country still reeling from Hiroshima. The 1954 Japanese film, before producers dubbed voices and added Raymond Burr for American audiences, was a stark vision of hopelessness and apocalyptic anxiety. The movie spawned dozens of low-budget monster movies with cheesy effects and gravitas (think of the descending line from Jaws to Sharknado), even inspiring a dance craze.
There is no dancing in Del Toro’s big-budget monster movie. Pacific Rim taps on the kind of anxiety that gave birth to Godzilla: we are our own enemy, founts of monstrous energy that surfaces as colossal parasites destroying the planet from within. The Kaiju multiply and these negative energies, distortions of Mother Nature, leave civilization in near ruins.
Technology—not just technology, but mega-technology—comes to the rescue in the form of giant robots called Jaegers. The mechanics seem silly, like a Nintendo Wii writ large. Early trials had a single pilot maneuvering the massive animatronic puppet. These pioneers returned shaken, with nosebleeds hinting at even greater the inner damage. Then came the two-pilot system, but there’s a hitch. For two people to command this single monstrous structure, they must be “drift-compatible,” mind melding in a way that respected both pilots’ experiences, but coming together as a unit more powerful than its separate parts.
Warner Bros. Pictures
It’s a touching metaphor for human connection, not simply in a romantic sense (the cursory love story is unconvincing even for a summer blockbuster) but as brother-to-brother or father to son. Pacific Rim‘s battles are set in a roiling sea where the dark spray and shifting horizon disorient the viewer in much the way that the GoPro footage in the seafaring documentary Leviathan throws the viewer completely off balance. This is the stage on which humans try to relate to each other and work towards a common goal. It’s hard as hell, but the reward can be like saving the world.
Idris Elba plays Stacker Pentecost, a loaded name if there ever was one. If his name suggests a religious fervor, his dialogue often recalls Henry V, and given that the end of the world is played out in the breech between the deep sea Kaiju and the earth’s surface, I’m glad the screenwriters (del Toro and Travis Beacham) didn’t make Elba order his charges once more unto it.
Elba has gravitas, but I don’t see the passion, and I imagined what Andre Braugher could have made out of this role. But he’s not the problem. Charlie Hunnam plays hero Raleigh Becket, and his voice grates, reminding me at times of a cartoon character’s. His nemesis Chuck Hansen (Robert Kazinsky) looks enough like Hunnam that I did not always know who was who. Is this a deliberate show of the battles we have with ourselves? Mako (Rinko Kikuchi, last seen on American screens in an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood) has a great back-story, but she is supposed to have chemistry with Hunnam, and there isn’t any. If this were an actual Kaiju emergency, the two actors would steer their Jaeger straight into the sea.
Pacific Rim is an effectively loud spectacle, as simple as monsters vs. monsters saving the world. I wish the characters that populated it had the depth to pull all the human resonance out of that potentially powerful setup.
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Pacific Rim
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Written by Guillermo del Toro and Travis Beacham
With Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi
PG-13 for sequences of intense giant-monster-on-massive-war-machine action, and brief language
Opens today at a multiplex near you.
