So, um - Pacific Rim? (SPOILERS)

[IamLEAM1983]

So. Pacific Rim.

It's fun, action-packed, mostly brainless and very much the work of someone who grew up watching Ultraman or Godzilla flicks. There's even one or two subtle nods to the Sentai genre, in that certain attacks are coordinated by the “drifting” Jaeger pilots through the use of shouted attack names. It's also pretty nerdy in that it features GLaDOS – Ellen McLain – as the voice of the standard Jaeger AI; and a bit silly at times. Del Toro feels the need to slip in odd bits of comedy through the use of the characters of Newton Geiszler, Nathan Gottlieb and Hannibal Chau, and these feels especially forced. Couple that with a few shots where you can tell Del Toro pretty much went “You see that? That's a mechanical fist as big as a Honda Fit that's missing some delicate piece of novelty office art by mere inches. That's funny. Laugh now.” and you get the sense that this is very much a personal baby for Hellboy's second daddy. The problem with personal babies of laureled creators is that nobody is willing to step in and land a cautious ahem, when things go just a mite too far.

Not that it's a bad flick, not at all – it's just not all that memorable. I mean, sure, it's revived the word Kaiju for at least two generations and I'm betting a lot of kids who didn't watch any of the twenty-plus years of all consecutive Power Rangers incarnations will now have something to investigate – but at the end of the day, you watched actors in complicated harnesses swing their fists around and yelling stupid things the Green Ranger would shout before blowing into his dagger-flute-thingy. The rest of the movie is Rock-em-Sock-em Robots duking it out against creatures Lovecraft and Ray Harryhausen would probably approve of. If you don't mind two-plus hours of a director essentially regressing to his five year-old state and going “pew pew pew!” with his million-dollar CGI figurines, it's an awesome ride.

The story's pretty boilerplate as it is. A rift through another dimension opens at the bottom of the Pacific Rim in the relatively near future, allowing ginormous monster-thingies to pour through and immediately start razing cities. Things look grim for a while, then the Jaeger program comes through with its initiative to use giant robots controlled by mind-linked pilots. Things work out alright at first, but the cost-to-results ratio of Jaeger teams is far too high for any one nation to cover. Wars are a thing of the past as we're forced to work together to survive, but our best solution yet is driving us all towards financial ruin. The UN is on the verge of shifting its focus on a pan-Pacific missile battery, so it gives Major Stacker Pentecost (Idris Motherfucking Elba) eight months to prove there's something left in the Jaeger program. After that, they're effectively dismantled.

Unfortunately, the sea-spanning Wall of Life is showing cracks, as the previously impregnable barrier is now being chewed through by bigger, badder and more evolved Kaiju. As quick as you can say “formulaic plot”, the race is on to figure out why they're ramping up their assault.

Naturally, the American star pilot, Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam), has a bit of a checkered past. His co-pilot also happened to be his brother, but a particularly vicious Kaiju bout cost him his life. He's spent the last five years trying to bury his past by working on the now rather futile Alaskan stretch of the Wall of Life, but is called back by Pentecost in order to join a team whose objective is to nuke the Pacific Rim's dimensional portal, potentially closing it for good.

The Nippon half of the team is covered by Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), who's overall design seems to be there to represent the other half of the Giant Mecha culture. Beckett feels like he'd be at home in a grimmer take on Megas XLR or a Mechwarrior television series, while Mori obviously has shades of Neon Genesis Evangelion. She's a bit bubbly around the edges, she has lil' bits of implausibly colored hair – because Anime – and she also has a checkered past.

Gee, Guillermo. I can't possibly think of what could ever happen next...

It's alright, though, because we've got an international cast to fill up! The Chinese are fittingly Chinese and represented by the Basketball Fu-performing Wei Triplets (Charles, Lance and Mark Luu), the Russians are as big, blond and burly as Stereotypical Russians require, and represented by the Kaidonovsky twins, Alexis and Sasha (Robert Maillet and Heather Doerksen) – while the British are British enough to qualify for a Guy Ritchie casting call. Herc and Chuck Hansen are father and son, they raised a bulldog together and Chuck has daddy issues. They're performed by Max Martini and Robert Kazinsky).

The plot is very quick to dispense of any Adult Persons Required exposition, largely waiting on the two-man team of Geiszler and Gottlieb to find ways to sneak exposition in while landing a few stupid Mad Scientist-type gags and potty jokes. One's American and referred to as a “Kaiju groupie”, the other is even more British than the Hansen guys – walking cane, exxagerated Received Pronounciation and frankly castrating concerns about propriety and correct scientific doctrine included, eh what. Pip-pip, cheerio and all that! The weird thing is that guy's actually German. Heh.

The only stand-out in the whole bunch is Elba's Pentecost. Despite being another case of awful Badass McCoolname design, his concerns and motivations are predictable, if a whole lot more textured and fleshed out than anyone else's. He's fittingly badass once he does get to slip into a Jaeger's noggin, and considering how formulaic the whole thing is, I don't think I need to tell you why a strike team's on-site commander would be forced to suit up and fight alongside his troops instead of staying in the war room.

Otherwise, Geiszler's discovered McGuffin motivates his finding Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman, fuck yes), a Kaiju War profiteer who's been selling dehydrated alien baddie testicles to the highest bidder. That gives us a few scenes of glorious scene-munching à la Hellboy, minus the makeup. As you can imagine, you don't drag your best bud and highest-grossing actor out of the mothballs to give him a prominent role, heck no.

Nope. Once again, I'll let you guess what happens to Badass McCoolname Number Two (who, I must admit, has a rather kickass set of capped cowboy boots).

The whole thing is a checklist, honestly. It's a mindless list of all the things we almost hate to love in action movies of this nature, from Die Hard or Independence Day all the way to this. Thankfully, however, it's a checklist that's ticked off with serious aplomb and genuine passion – at least from the director and a few cast members. Hunnam and Gorman feel like the weakest of the bunch, Hunnam's American Everyman attempt feeling as rote and uninspired as Gorman's “English Chap thrown into Ye Olde Prussia” routine. On the flip-side, Elba gives it his all, as usual; Martini's actually tolerable on his lonesome and Kikuchi's surprisingly emotional and easily decipherable for an ESL Japanese speaker.

I'd love to say the main attraction is the Jaeger or Kaiju designs and that you can at least find some bits of gleeful solace in the long CGI shots, but I'd be only half-right. As I've said before, the needed energy is there. You can spot Del Toro-isms practically everywhere in the flick, but these don't save what's ultimately a gallery of samey robots fighting samey creatures with samey lambent maws of Blue Plasma Stuff of Death that Kills.

Oh, wait! That Kaiju flies! Will that matter in any shape or form? Nope, not really. Oh, look! It was pregnant! Will that be referenced at any time at all later? Well, that one bit's going to be somewhat important, but the answer still largely amounts to “No. Not really.”

Overall, I felt like I was babysitting an extremely enthusiastic version of Del Toro who'd have been fresh out of toddlerhood and who would've reached that specific phase in childhood where you feel the need to put stories together in as disjointed a way as you can. You're young, so you don't give a toss about how incoherent your brain farts are – so the end results are Axe Cop-alike yarns of utter absurdity that have no other purpose than to exist; to have been told. That's pretty much Pacific Rim for me.

“And so you have this monster; and he's like ROOOAAARRRR - but then the Jaegers are like BOOM! BAM! CRASH! and SPLASH! into the ocean, and one of the Jaegers gets destroyed so everybody's sad! But it's okay, because the good guys; the good guys, they've got swords in their arms! But the Kaiju, they can adapt because they're smart, so you see one and he's got tentacles and they've got to fight at the bottom of the sea and all the science persons are busy and their computers sound like the lady from the video game I like!”

That's – That's great, Little Guillermo. Really, it is. Your parents told me to put you to bed by eight o' clock, though; and I've got Big Person stuff to do tomorrow. Go brush your teeth, and then it's beddy-byes, okay?

Just – one last thing, alright? I love your crazy mind; I really do. Next time you want to tell me a story, though, less set-pieces and more plot would be kinda nice. Just sayin'.

Like that Mountains of Madness shit you've been working on, supposedly. Screw that kid from recess hall – Scott? Ridley Scott, right? His movie was okay but that, what you're working on? Add some plot, or keep the plot that's already there, and I'll be psyched for sure.

[IamLEAM1983]

This was obviously going to happen. Someone recut the Pacific Rim trailer into something that could have come straight out of the seventies' Toho Studios, complete with snippets from the movie's Japanese dub.

"ERUBO ROKKETU!"



S'awesome.