Pacific Rim | Little White Lies

Pacif­ic Rim

11 Jul 2013 / Released: 12 Jul 2013

Woman in metallic blue and black armoured bodysuit standing in futuristic sci-fi environment.
Woman in metallic blue and black armoured bodysuit standing in futuristic sci-fi environment.
3

Anticipation.

“Tracking” (whatever that is) has apparently been worrying the nabobs on this one.

4

Enjoyment.

Rich, romantic and always politically motivated. This is a model blockbuster.

4

In Retrospect.

Great in and of itself, but also in terms of showing up a lot of similarly-inclined destructo-porn movies.

Guiller­mo del Toro’s epic homage to clas­sic-era mon­ster movies is a tri­umph of con­sum­mate design and old school romanticism.

Guiller­mo del Toro’s rous­ing response to the 2011 Tōhoku earth­quake and sub­se­quent Fukushi­ma Dai­ichi nuclear dis­as­ter involves over­sized rep­til­ian day-glo hell-beasts tear­ing apart major world cap­i­tals like they’re engaged in some unfor­tu­nate met­ro­pol­i­tan trol­ley dash. Unlike the large major­i­ty of sil­ver screen alien life­forms, these mon­sters – dubbed Kai­jus by Earth’s with­ered pop­u­lous – are fer­til­is­ing under­neath the ocean bed and ris­ing up, each one big­ger and stronger than the last and at expo­nen­tial­ly short­er inter­vals, to wreak their appar­ent­ly motive­less project of total destruction.

Thank­ful­ly, good ol’ Ger­man engi­neer­ing is here save the day, and a pha­lanx of nuclear-pow­ered, steam­punk bat­tle robots are pro­duced as a life­line for the plan­et. These machines are named Jaegers, and they can only be oper­at­ed by two human pilots whose minds are cross-hatched to bear the psy­cho­log­i­cal load. Sib­ling and par­ent-child con­fig­u­ra­tions prove the most com­pat­i­ble, though del Toro – the old roman­tic – adopts this device as a cat­a­lyst for a love sto­ry. All of this is explained in the space of about four min­utes in a mas­ter­ful piece of intro­duc­to­ry montage.

Del Toro hint­ed at Pacif­ic Rim’s epic-scale may­hem dur­ing a sequence in Hell­boy II in which Ron Perlman’s noir-styled dev­il defend­er took on a giant (and irate) squid in the mid­dle of a busy boule­vard. He hint­ed that he had the chops to mar­shal these kind of grand dig­i­tal bouts and grap­ple with the intri­cate chore­og­ra­phy it takes to make an audi­ence under­stand and enjoy them. He nev­er hint­ed, though, that he had it in him to pro­duce action sequences so majes­tic and grace­ful, a rock-’em, sock-’em urban bal­let with a tril­lion-dol­lar fallout.

Unlike the Trans­form­ers movies in which the geog­ra­phy and basic log­ic of the met­al-on-met­al pugilism fell between the cracks of the ADD edit­ing and cam­era move­ments which mim­ic­ked a par­tic­u­lar­ly fran­tic hum­ming­bird, del Toro has total faith in his images. He lets them do the heavy lift­ing, not the tech­nique. He has fun, too, trans­port­ing us with­in a mat­ter of frames between the macro to the micro, from a dev­as­tat­ed city bat­tle­ground to a flock of rest­ing seag­ulls being prod­ded from their perch by the hulk­ing boot of a skid­ding Jaeger. We also take a brief time out from a Hong Kong tear-up to fol­low a Jaeger’s fist through an office block, right up to a minia­ture homage to Sir Isaac Newton.

As you’d except from this lit­er­ary fab­u­list and ardent cinephile, the design of the film is quite breath­tak­ing, and the sim­plic­i­ty of the nar­ra­tive feels like it could’ve been ripped from the clas­si­cal era. On its most basic lev­el, Pacif­ic Rim oper­ates as a lit­er­al and the­mat­ic paean to Ishirō Honda’s 1954 orig­i­nal-and-best Godzil­la, as much a cau­tion­ary tale about the mis­use of nuclear mate­ri­als (“water’s flood­ing into the reac­tor core!” screams one unfor­tu­nate (Russ­ian!) Jaeger pilot pri­or to death) as it is a tru­ly won­drous piece of high-ten­sion com­ic book hokum.

The film is also in thrall to the won­ders of tech­nol­o­gy, specif­i­cal­ly the clever fusion of the ana­logue and the dig­i­tal and its world-cre­at­ing, world-sav­ing and world-destroy­ing capa­bil­i­ties. From the heavy pro­lif­er­a­tion of pis­tons, fly­wheels and giant whirring cogs (all del Toro sta­ples) in its ear­ly expo­si­tion scenes to its over­all affir­ma­tion that human engi­neer­ing can be used to achieve against-the-odds mar­vels, the film is that rare thing: a block­buster in which all traces of cyn­i­cism and snark have been expunged in favour of a doe-eyed sin­cer­i­ty which roots the film – sure­ly as its direc­tor intend­ed – deep into the clas­si­cal era.

And don’t be put off by the film’s dearth of movie stars”. Char­lie Hun­nam and Rinko Kikuchi make for a charm­ing cen­tral pair­ing, both men­tal­ly-dam­aged Jaeger pilots whose thirst for revenge threat­ens to cloud their respon­si­bil­i­ty to save the plan­et, and their bur­geon­ing love for one anoth­er. Del Toro is also a mas­ter of trag­ic hard­men, and he comes up trumps again with Idris Elba’s East­wood-like leader of the Earth’s defence, des­per­ate to get out into the field but ham­pered by an afflic­tion from his glo­ry days. The per­for­mances a big and broad, maybe even clunky to the eye not cov­ered with auteurist spec­ta­cles. But the actors are clear­ly self-aware, work­ing per­fect­ly with­in the con­text of this sto­ry and del Toro’s own frame­work of lit­er­ary ref­er­ences and old school archetypes.

One prob­lem with Pacif­ic Rim, and it’s a prob­lem endem­ic with stu­dio dis­as­ter movies tai­lored to appeal to broad and mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional audi­ences, is that cities are razed and the screen death toll bare­ly ris­es into dou­ble fig­ures. On the evi­dence of a film like Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro is clear­ly not a direc­tor averse to stuff­ing and mount­ing the bloody cadav­ers of those affect­ed by vio­lent social unrest, so what’s his motive behind Pacif­ic Rim’s large­ly blood­less coup? Per­haps these kind of films are only eco­nom­i­cal­ly viable with the taboo of mass death hand­i­ly swept under the car­pet. In this con­sumerist age, it’s the build­ings that we’re sup­posed to care about, their anni­hi­la­tion stand­ing in for a human body count.

Sure, there are a cou­ple of plot holes in the set-up and the mechan­ics of the Kaiju’s lair are improb­a­bly com­plex, but this is such a visu­al and sen­su­al treat that you’d be churl­ish to dwell on these very minor defects. Pacif­ic Rim is eas­i­ly del Toro’s most main­stream offer­ing to date, but it may also be his most ful­ly sat­is­fy­ing, with all of his eso­teric tics and con­cerns safe­ly stowed away in the siz­able head of his hulk­ing mecha-gods.

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