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By Sean Molloy
Curtain up, “We always thought that alien life would come from the stars…” proclaims Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) at the beginning of Pacific Rim. With one opening line the movie is set up to go anywhere and do anything. This is the element that Pacific Rim does so well. It takes a premise, a premise that I never expected to work and succeeds across all facets. That all of course is just fancy words for giant freaking robots (Jaeger) fighting giant freaking aliens (Kaiju).
If anyone has seen the posters and ad campaigns for Pacific Rim the tagline is “go big or go extinct.” This movie is big, reallllllly big. In fact, the audience quickly realizes that the bigger the sequence the better the film works. It’s when the human/emotion elements come into play that Pacific Rim slightly stumbles. But it’s okay that it can stumble knowing that there are enormous fight sequences just around the corner.
Guillermo Del Toro, director of such “small” movies such as “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Hellboy” seems to be a kid in a candy store working here. It’s his love of the giant monster movies that makes Pacific Rim such a joy. We feel like we’re in his head the entire time. Should we have a Jaeger pick up an oil tanker and use it as a sword? Yep. Should we make a Kaiju look like a 40-story crab? Sure. The world is open to anything without feeling utterly ridiculous. Having written the script also, Del Toro provides a shockingly rich back-story to his universe. Black market dealers, different levels of scientific understanding and military ideals are all put into play within the two-hour run time. None of it feeling rushed or unneeded.
Pacific Rim truly taps into any memory of watching cartoons on Saturday mornings when we all were kids. The movie taps into this emotion and gives no room to do anything but to grin at the screen. Wailing guitar tracks while the Jaegers boot up for destruction is just flat out fun. Who could ever complain about something like that?
The cast is exceptional but the three standouts are Idris Elba as Stacker Pentacost, Charlie Day as Dr. Newton Geizler and newcomer Rinko Kikuchi as Mako Mori. Elba gives the kind of swagger and bravado needed for a military leader, this guy could seriously read the phone book and he’d be brilliant. Charlie Day though pulls off the eccentric scientist to a “T,” providing some comedic relief but mostly giving the story a different glimpse of the meaning of these monsters. Kikuchi is mainly paired with Hunnam on screen, giving his dominant male lead some tenderness to contrast, which is needed at times.
My problems with Pacific Rim are few. Like I said at the beginning of the review, the human element is the main problem. There are so many fantastic action sequences that when the movie slows down for emotion, it just doesn’t pull at the heart strings the way normal movies can. Whether that be a script, pace, or acting problems….it’s hard to tell.
The bottom line is this though; Pacific Rim is big, bold, entertaining and is exactly the reason the summer movie season exists. Guillermo Del Toro is at the top of his game here and his passion for the source material comes through in spades. Again, it’s giant robots fighting giant aliens. What more could you ask for?
Grade: A-
