Pacific Rim
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charlie hunnam
rinko kikuchi
idris elba
One: don’t you ever touch me again. Two: don’t you ever touch me again.
~ Marshal Stacker Pentecost
quick fox : C-
winding dragon
Robots and monsters. It’s a pairing that seems impossible to get wrong, especially when you have artistic director Guillermo del Toro and visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic at the helm. And Pacific Rim does not fail to deliver on the robots and monsters, the Jaegers and Kaiju, with impressive character designs and a spectacle of heavy-duty fight scenes.
Everything else, unfortunately, is somewhere between underwhelming and incompetent filmmaking. Pacific Rim has a lot of disappointments—personal trivial things like the fact that Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” was nowhere in the movie and the character Tendo Choi is supposed to be Chinese but he’s played by a Mexican-American who looks Caucasian—but the biggest conceptual problem is its unabashed refusal to logicize anything.
In Pacific Rim (2013), the Kaiju arise from The Breach, a crevice in the Pacific Ocean, and lay waste to coastal cities like San Francisco and Tokyo. Nobody knows who they are or where they came from or what they want (and neither does the audience by time the credits roll), but everyone realizes that this isn’t pest control—this is extermination. The world leaders pool their resources (even, presumably, including Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, and Bashar al-Assad) to launch the Jaeger initiative, giant robots that look like Baymax on steroids. Led by the formidable Marshal Pentecost (Idris Elba), Jaegers gain the upper hand against the Kaiju. These Jaegers are mentally controlled, meaning that there are two pilots per robot to prevent the neuron connection frying their brains. Being a pilot, though, means leaving themselves vulnerable to their co-pilot—all their memories and emotional baggage is transmitted both ways when they mentally link, or “Drift.” For Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), this burden is too much to bear when a Kaiju kills his brother while they are on a mission. But five years later, the intelligent Kaiju grow in strength and the world leaders inexplicable decide that building a massive wall along the coastline (I blame Trump) is more useful than the Jaegers. Becket is dragged back into the war, and the pilot has to learn how to drift with the impassioned Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), prove his worth to the condescending Chuch Hansen (Robert Kazinksy), and save the world from invasion.
The real “breach” in Pacific Rim is the fluctuation between excitement and frustration. The dedication from del Toro to give each Jaeger and Kaiju its own unique style is striking because it makes each battle sequence feel distinct. Learning about the design process is fascinating, as del Toro created an actual competition with over a hundred Jaeger and Kaiju concepts submitted before the winners appeared in the film. The result is spectacular—the fight in Hong Kong between Becket’s Jaeger Gipsy Danger and a Kaiju that’s like a cross between a komodo dragon and a pterodactyl is easily the best scene in the film.
And that might be Pacific Rim’s curse as well, because it feels like they spent so much time designing the visuals that they forgot about all the other elements. There are too many things that are glaring holes to mention them all, but here are some quick ones:
— Becket and Mako don’t use Gipsy Danger’s sword, which is clearly their most powerful weapon, until they’re at their most desperate. Also, their romance had some really cheesy dialogue. Actual line — “All those years I spent living in the past, I never really thought about the future. [Looks at her] Until now.”
— It’s never explained why, when Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day) drifts with a kaiju brain, it causes a different Kaiju to target him specifically.
— The uptight scientist Dr. Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) feels like he is meant to be a villain in an episode of The Twilight Zone.
— Nobody communicates. Nobody. Becket and Mako are about to “drift” together for the first time, which is proven to be a hazardous journey because of the emotional overload, and they don’t do any sort of discussion/bonding beforehand. I realize Pentecost is supposed to be a “tough guy” but withholding pertinent information to missions when literally the fate of humanity rests on him is outrageous. Dr. Newton has to take a helicopter just to relay life-saving information to the command center. Try a text next time.
Pacific Rim is entertaining to watch for the robots and monsters, but the poor script and underdeveloped characters make even the visuals seem out of touch. What’s especially frustrating is it feels like with a thorough editing job, the movie could have been much improved with more engaging dialogue and a line here or there to explain some of the illogical moments.
Let’s just hope the sequel learns from these mistakes.