If you’ve ever wanted to watch someone else play a video
game, or if you’re one of those people who thought Transformers could have used a little more Godzilla, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific
Rim is exactly the movie for you. As
for me, I think I need a little more from a movie.After the government decommissions the giant robot “Jaeger” program, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) seeks out former Jaeger pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) on the eve of the next big kaiju attack. The kaiju, enormous monsters, have been rising from the ocean and attacking coastal cities for years, leaving humanity desperate to turn the tide. As Becket is paired with skilled rookie Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), the kaiju attacks increase in frequency, with multiple monsters rising at once.
Readers know that I’m always a bit uncomfortable dismantling expensive passion projects from behind my keyboard, so I’ll say this about Pacific Rim – it’s entirely unpretentious, inoffensive, and governed by an obvious sense of the creators’ enthusiasm. And as far as big-dumb-loud movies go, Pacific Rim is undoubtedly the most earnest and the most triumphant. The trailers promise big machines punching big monsters, and you get that promise fulfilled to the nth degree; once you surrender to them, the action sequences are fun and imaginative – at least, within the parameters of “How could one CGI thing beat up another?”
So for a film that had to have been storyboarded by playing with action figures and making sh-boom noises, Pacific Rim is about as diverting as the trailers make it out to be. It passes that lower bar of “summer popcorn flick” but in a summer where we’ve seen action films that grapple with important issues alongside stellar beat-’em-up sequences Pacific Rim pales by comparison. Upon leaving the theater, the one adjective that dove to mind was “distanced.” At no point did Pacific Rim convince me to care about what was going on. Instead, it relies on the assumption that the audience already thinks that the premise is cool and, by extension, worthwhile. Yes, the premise is mind-numbingly cool, but the film never convinces the audience to invest in the concept.
For one, you can forget about character development beyond Michael Bay levels of cliché and central casting stock. It’s a shame that the characterization in the film is so poor, because it’s almost a waste of Idris Elba. Elba, an actor so good he convinced fans of The Wire that he wasn’t British, does the best he can with the script, even when lines like “I’m a fixed point” draw attention to the script’s dearth of personality. I don’t begrudge the film its five minutes of introductory exposition; I do, however, shake my head at characters who make Ellen Page’s “exposition queen” in Inception look like Molly Bloom. Charlie Day’s only plot function is to shout science at us, and Kikuchi – who is, like Elba, doing the best she can – actually yells her character’s motivation, even though the script’s already given intelligent audiences that answer. (Hint: she’s an orphan.) Why do we root for the main character? Because he’s the main character, duh (and total first-act trauma, duh). We deserve compelling protagonists, and Hunnam ain’t it. (Sidebar: was Garrett Hedlund busy?)
Then there are the tonal inconsistencies, which make me wonder if this isn’t actually a Michael Bay film signed by Guillermo del Toro in some weird Howard Roark/Peter Keating pact. The introductory montage sets up a grim future for mankind against the kaiju, while the first action sequence plays like a tragic buddy picture. Enter the exposition scientists (Day and Torchwood’s Burn Gorman), a pair comprised of a Justin Hammer knockoff and a grotesque caricature of a foppish snob; as my father remarked, “What movie do these two really belong in?” Finally, I’ve said nothing about Ron Perlman’s black marketer Hannibal Chau, in part because he’s another tonal inconsistency (included, I’m sure, because of Perlman’s Hellboy history with del Toro); Perlman has compelling screen presence, and his character is just the right amount of bizarrely-out-of-place, but Pacific Rim becomes an entirely different movie whenever he’s on screen.
It’s not that I went into Pacific Rim looking for brilliant character studies and subtle storytelling; I went in looking for characters and plots – y’know, the things we expect from a movie. What I got was a big, dumb, loud movie about pixels punching pixels. If that’s your thing, Pacific Rim is right up your alley. Me? I’ll pick substance over style any day of the week.
(Go ahead, take to the comments and tell me I’m missing the point. Just be sure to tell me what the point of the movie actually was. That’s not a joke. What is the point of this film?)
(Also, if you know the point of tofu, that’d be helpful, too.)
It turns out that there are people in this world who liked Pacific Rim better than Man of Steel. I can’t fathom such a poor life decision, but be sure to click back here on Friday for my list of “The Top 10 Reasons Why Man of Steel Is Better Than Pacific Rim”!
