PACIFIC RIM

When hearing the plot and general theme of Pacific Rim, you might be forgiven for thinking that this is some video game adaption.  In fact Pacific Rim is actually a good deal more complicated. Helmed by director  Guillermo Del Toro the film gets its superfluous plot details out of the way in the early scenes.  Humanity is threatened by a monstrous danger and invents giant robots (which can only be operated by two pilots using a psychic link) to deal with it. This might all sound like a Saturday night sci-fi channel movie but here is the ironic thing about Pacific Rim, it’s character driven.  No really, the film which features city sized giant robots is driven by the strength of its characters and their motivations (Michael Bay take note).

It should be remembered of course that despite the subject matter this is the same director who gave us Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy movies.  So this is not a filmmaker who has no experience in mixing exiting visuals with a good solid script and the script is really one of the main strengths of this movie ensuring that the audience does not see the human characters as a useless distraction from their gigantic robotic counterparts.

The added appeal of this film comes when the talking does end and the fighting begins.  Del Toro is not content just to have giant hulks of metal hitting each other.  The robots (called Jagers) each have their own design and visual style making them characters in their own right. The monstrous invaders (Kaiju) have just as much of their own individual visual style which saves the fight scenes from becoming a simple CGI mess.  Visually, the film clearly owes a large (self-acknowledged ) debt to two main sources, one is Japanese monster movies (Godzilla etc.) from which the movie takes the term Kaiju. The second is the giant robot genre of Japanese animation in which large human piloted robots battle with strange (and often implausible) weapons.

The scale of these battle scenes is something seldom seen nowadays. Like the old monster movies they hark back to the fighters towering above entire cities using cranes or boats as clubs to batter each other with. When one of these titans falls they take several city blocks with them.   Rarely has the term blockbuster been more literal! The director also makes the wise decision of using these action scenes sparingly thus ensuring that the audience does not become too accustomed to them nor to their thrill value before the film’s finale.

Pacific Rim does have some old cliches that we have come to expect by now. Much of the plot is rather predictable once you detect the direction in which things are headed. However, It’s the way that the filmmaker gets there that makes this a cut above the usual summer blockbuster fare.

FINAL VERDICT - 8/10 - This is the way summer blockbusters should be made and the way to keep an audience excited without sacrificing story or characters.