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| Copyright: Warner Bros. Pictures |
If you
desire to do a great injustice to this movie, you should compare it to other
works of its director, Guillermo del Toro. An even bigger injustice would be to
compare Pacific Rim to del Toro’s best film,
the brilliant movie El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth).
But these
movies aren’t comparable, simply because of the fact that they play in
different movie arenas. Del Toro’s latest film was made with only on purpose in
mind – to look stunning on the big screen. Its story is based on the notion that
good giant robots called Jagers, piloted by humans, fight against giant
monsters called Kaijus. These huge, mindless aliens appeared on the bottom of
the Pacific ocean, traveling to Earth through an interdimensional portal. Every
human relationship in this movie is mostly irrelevant; the robots vs. monsters
is the only really important thing, and it requires no additional reason or
explanation.
As a monster
movie should do, this film presents the
fights in great detail and length, keeping the dialogs, plot twists and
everything else that requires any mental processing on an elementary school
level. In Pacific Rim, audience has the liberty to focus all of its energy into
the simple act of seeing, because there is nothing to understand (or miss out
on). It this aspect, del Toro came close to Peter Jackson’s movies – every
second of CGI is flawlessly animated, and the level of details (robot’s armor,
buildings and vehicles that get caught up in the destruction) in every fight is
stunning. In this aspect, I’m sure this film will stand the test of time, at
least during this decade, before it starts to look outdated.
Charlie
Hunnam held his own as the main character, reactivated pilot and unwilling
warrior, Raleigh Becket, although in some scenes his body language (swaggering
walk) reverts to Jax from the TV show
Sons of Anarchy. In spite of that, this role definitely shows he has a lot of
star potential. The supporting cast is even better – veterans like Idris Elba
and Ron Perlman are expectedly steadfast in the shoes of their characters (in
Perlman’s case, those shoes are literally gold-plated), while Charlie Day
provides the comic relief as the ecstatic scientist dr. Newton Geiszler.
In spite of
the fact that the plot is paper thin, I was impressed how the
writers managed to sneak in some environmental ideas about humanity's influence on the phenomenon of climate change. Although it was very subtle and not in any way preachy, it’s
still nice to see that art, even in this simplified form, doesn’t neglect its duty
to raise awareness about the problems we face in real life.
Basically a
prolonged episode of Power Rangers on enormous budget and better script writers
(plus a bit of a "disaster porn" approach), Pacific Rim is everything
that a summer blockbuster should be. In any other iteration, it could have
turned out as an overly ambitious failure or a unintentionally funny and
childish film, but del Toro took all the ingredients and made this movie just
right.
