Pacific Rim

Whoa.  It's as if writer/director Guillermo Del Toro woke up one day and said, "I'll make a movie just for Doug."  This isn't the first time this has happened.  Shane Black made Kiss Kiss Bang Bang for me and John Carpenter made me Big Trouble in Little China (which required incredible foresight seeing as I was only 3 years old when he started filming it).

Pacific Rim takes place in the very near future wherein giant monsters periodically crawl out of the ocean to attack the coasts.  In response, humanity has banded together to build several equally large robots to fight the monsters.  What ensues is 2+ hours of pure awesome.

Del Toro has taken two of the coolest (and hokiest) things from old school Japanese movies and made them vaguely realistic.  The first is the kaiju movie (the monsters in the movie are even called kaiju).  Kaiju movies are basically Godzilla movies.  Any film with a city destroying beast falls under the kaiju banner.  Let it be noted that Gamera is the greatest of Japan's kaiju.  The other Japanese movie genre is mecha, which are large robots piloted from the inside (i.e, Power Rangers or the incredible Japanese Spider-Man show).

Pacific Rim wastes no time getting started and never slows down for a second.  The audience is forced to meet the film halfway.  The most important things are quickly explained, but much of the details are left to the viewer to piece together.  It's refreshing that a big, dumb movie about robots punching sea monsters would assume that its audience is not stupid.  I can see how a viewer could feel alienated watching the movie though.  The audience is thrown into this alternate future from the first frame.  If you can't suspend your disbelief at the drop of a hat and get behind the over-the-top premise, you may find yourself wondering what is so great about the film.

In order to achieve its breakneck pace, Pacific Rim engages is a lot of dramatic shorthand.  Clichés are openly embraced and the story is wildly melodramatic.  It's the cast of incredibly talented, lesser-known actors that makes that shorthand feel human.  Only Del Toro regular Ron Perlman plays his part like a caricature (but he makes it work).  Idris Elba is awesome as always (have you guys watched the BBC series Luther?!).  Even Charlie Hunnam (whose terrible, forced American accent gives fellow Englishman Jim Sturgess' a run for its money) is a fine leading man.  But the standout actor in this crew is the movie's sole Academy Award nominee: Rinko Kikuchi.  She's equal parts demure, ambitious, broken, and strong.  It's a performance that instead of feeling all over the place, feels like a fully realized character.  She's fantastic.

And I hate to make early predictions but here it goes: Pacific Rim has the best visual effects I'll probably see all year.  So many summer tentpole films cost $200+ million.  Yet, those films look terrible.  The designs are generic at best and the CGI is cartoony.  Pacific Rim takes its $190 million budget and puts it gloriously up on the screen.  Not only are the computer effects incredibly life-like, but massive sets and props were used to provide much of the movie a tangible feel.  Not matter how good computer effects are, the mind knows that it's fake.  Using practical effects and sets has the benefits of actually being real (again, the mind knows) and giving the computer guys something real on which to base their digital models.

 

The summer cinema season long ago became a breeding ground for sequels and prequels and remakes.  It's so refreshing to have an original concept with a sizable budget get greenlit.  We need new ideas on our cinema screens.  We need more Guillermo Del Toro. 

 

8 out of 10