'Pacific Rim' Movie Review

Pacific Rim Movie Review:

 Every Little Boys’ Dream Come True

BY IAN TAN

After a number of successful films (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy 1 & 2, Blade II), and after dropping out from the ‘Hobbit’ movies, acclaimed director Guillermo Del Toro shows his mettle with his robot vs. monster extravaganza ‘Pacific Rim’. As seen from the above movie titles, Del Toro is no stranger to versatility, having made an Awards celebrated film like ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ as well as blockbuster popcorn-flicks ‘Hellboy’ 1 and 2. Basically, this guy seems to be able to please any audience, be it critics or regular movie-goers, and his visual talents definitely add to the positive response. The question is, has Guillermo Del Toro struck gold yet again with his latest blockbuster effort ‘Pacific Rim’?

For the most part, the answer is yes. Despite a string of films ‘Pacific Rim’ can allegedly be compared to (Transformers, Godzilla), it is able to very well stand its ground and be as an awesome blockbuster in its own right. Sure the concept is a familiar one, and sure it’s cheesy and cartoony, but hey, most blockbusters are too.

This movie is practically Del Toro’s love letter to robot and monster movies in general anyway. And all movies of this kind would fail without proper execution (Could you imagine what the ‘Transformers’ films would look like if they were boxes like in the cartoon series?), and with Del Toro behind the camera, this movie achieves (visual) wonders. The same cannot be said about him as one of the writers of the film though.

The concept for ‘Pacific Rim’ is simple and clear-cut: giant monsters erupt from the depths of the Earth and pretty much destroy everything. This causes us humans to intervene by gathering our resources to produce robot Jaegers (‘hunter’ in German) suited to fight against the Kaiju (Japanese for ‘monster’). Some humans are thrown into the mix for the sake of the movie having a script, but who wants to see humans and their problems when you’ve got skyscraper robots battling it out with skyscraper monsters?

Fortunately, as much as we would love this movie to do without humans, they aren’t much of a bother like they are in many films of its kind (*coughs* Transformers) and are actually more ‘human’. Finally, a robot-featuring- humans movie with humans that act like humans! The characters in this movie, in my opinion, are well developed and are generally interesting people with some emotional baggage to make this movie more than the usual action blockbuster. They actually really serve the story. With that being said, there are two scientist characters played by Charlie Day and Burn Gorman respectively that could have been a little more toned down and less jittery and hyper. Charlie Hunnam makes for an okay lead, delivering just a satisfactory performance as Raleigh, which is a bit of a disappointment as he is the main character we are supposed to be rooting for. Rinko Kikuchi on the other hand, plays her role with more gravitas and believability as Mako. Heck, she should be the main character. They both share good chemistry, fortunately, as it was something I worried would have been a big problem of this movie. Idris Elba once again delivers a good performance as Stacker Pentecost, the leader of the Jaeger program who I feel has the most interesting character arc of all the characters. There are also several other supporting characters that do a good job with the humanity aspect of the film, most notably a Jaeger team with father-son issues played by Max Martini and Rob Kazinsky. As interesting and well developed as these supporting characters may be, they sort of under weigh the central character arcs/focus of Raleigh and Mako.

Human characters aside, the Jaegers and Kaiju are the true stars of this film and boy, do they wreck some havoc in this movie. The visuals for this movie are stunning; in my opinion the best we’ve seen all year, not to mention the biggest. They’re HUGE; gargantuan in fact. The amazing CGI work coupled with a loud, unforgiving sound mix make this movie excel in every technical way possible. The Kaiju are truly beastly and powerful creatures, destroying things like how a baby does with toy cars. The texture of their skin, their neon blue veins, every bit of detail is paid so much attention to in this movie it makes you wonder how hard, or how long the filmmakers took to design just one creature. The Jaegers, although not as techy and complex as Transformers or Iron Man’s armor, are still realistically animated and make every classic ‘80s Japanese Mecha/Gundam/ Transformers/ Voltron You-Name-It fan’s dreams come true. One nit-pick about the film that I have though, are that the fight sequences, although animated to perfection, do seem rather repetitive and sort of lack the striking creativity some might hope to expect to be implemented in such an action film (e.g. the action Transformers: Dark of The Moon, The Avengers).

For the ultimate ‘Pacific Rim’ experience, you’ve got to see it in IMAX. Those who are expecting a 3D experience like that of ‘Transformers 3’ or ‘Man of Steel’ might be slightly underwhelmed as ‘Pacific Rim’ makes use of subtle 3D to enhance the space and feel of environments more than to force things out the screen and into-your-face. But the IMAX experience nonetheless elevates the scale and scope of the film and really gives audiences the feel of how gargantuan the Jaegers and Kaiju are. And the sound for this film is just as big as the film’s creatures are: loud, explosive and ear shattering, which works well with the overall size of this film.

Overall, Pacific Rim is a big, epic blockbuster with entertainment value as huge as their Jaegers and Kaiju and is able to steer well away from generic summer blockbuster territory by not only sporting spectacular visuals, but also having a warm ,human heart at its centre.

7.9 out of 10 stars