I’m not reinventing the wheel here but with all the reviews of Pacific Rim out on the web, and there are many of them (good, bad and downright ugly), I haven’t yet read a single one that has rung true to me. There’s a whole whack of them dealing with how little story and character development there is, and then there’s the other half that say you don’t need any of that because what’s wrong with just good ol’ fashioned Giant Robots vs. Giant Monsters?
Well I guess both points of view are equally valid, but to break down a movie like Pacific Rim, or actually any movie, to elements as simple as that is to overlook a lot of good stuff.
We, this community, mostly hail from a generation where teenagers with ‘attitude’ could be called upon to defend the world from witches living on the moon, a generation where killing a monster would only make it grow taller than a skyscraper and force us to combine a lot of disparate robotic animals to create giant sword-wielding robots. We watched Gundams fight each other and Kaiju terrorize Japan. What this says about Japan’s international marketing skills is irrelevant. We grew up watching these things and playing with their action-figure analogs, imagining what it would be like to pilot giant robots or burn a city to ashes with our nuclear breath.
Guillermo Del Toro is essentially giving us his interpretation of that. He’s doing it and also providing an environment that simulates realism for the giant robots and kaiju to play in. Now I said simulate and I meant it; he is eschewing the fantasy aspect of this genre and imposing it on a world that is conceivably similar to our own. In this way, we’re privy to the street level view of those battles we used to watch courtesy of Bandai. We get to see the damage and panic that would actually ensue and that’s the appeal of this film. As children we said yes to Megazords and Godzilla and his cronies destroying an entire city, yes to complete disregard for excessive property damage and loss of human life. Now that we’re all grown up (or very close to it) Del Toro asks us if we feel the same way.
When monsters took to the city in Power Rangers, was there any actual importance to their presence and subsequent dispatch? There was nary a news report to be found!
Pacific Rim offers the post-apocalyptic consequences of such an alien incursion and mankind’s effort to repress it. No teens with attitude here.
Then we’re introduced to characters in this world, people who pilot and maintain the Jaegers and an underground effort to fight the Kaiju. These people aren’t jigsaw puzzles of human complexity; they’re asked to fight giant monsters and don’t have time philosophize about it.
They do what they need to do and so does Pacific Rim. It shows us why we love Giant Robots and Kaiju and then gives us an extremely updated perspective of that world.
That being said, many of us feel it’s necessary for a movie to do well at the box-office because the financial success legitimizes our own enjoyment of it: it tells us that the vast majority of movie-goers liked it which in turn leads us to compare our own views with theirs.
Sometimes though, a movie falls by the way-side. Either there isn’t an existing interest behind the property or that property goes up against cinematic heavy-weights like Grown-Ups 2 and is subsequently crushed.
I’m happy to say I don’t care. I liked it and so did a lot of people just like me. Maybe it will become a cult film and we can all say we loved it when it wasn’t so cool. It was a brilliant piece of action and a nostalgic thrill ride.
If you haven’t yet seen it, shield yourself from the scathing fire-beams of angry reviewers and give it a chance. Maybe you’ll like it. Some of the worst criticism out there is about how it’s basically just some kid’s cartoon on acid. Well that sounds great to me.
Because having absolutely no knowledge or prior experience doing what real film-makers do gives me the unalienable right to openly judge them based on ranking and in keeping with the always useful star/thumb/tomato systems for those who don’t want a long read, I’ll give this movie 83.5 stars out of a possible 103.5. For anyone keeping track, that’s roughly 80%, 8/10, two thumbs or a shiny tomato.
