Pacific Rim
Rated PG-13 (for roughly the same reasons as "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom")
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Written by del Toro and Travis Beacham
**** out of ****
I don't see how it's possible to see a better movie (not film) this summer than "Pacific Rim".
Summer movies are supposed to be big, colorful, loud and entertaining, with clear-cut good guys and bad guys. Mellerdrammers with bigger budgets and similar acting styles. Like summer stock theatre, these movies should be acts of love on the part of the cast and crew, and the best ones are. "The Goonies", the first "Iron Man", the original "Star Wars", "Super 8", "The Cabin in The Woods" -- all very entertaining, all very loud and colorful (except "Super 8"), and all of them just dripping with the sheer, unbridled joy that the makers poured into them. The joy in these movies is contagious. And this movie, oh, man. I couldn't stop smiling.
Monsters called "kaiju" (the Japanese term for the giant monsters like Godzilla and Mothra) are invading the planet from beneath the Pacific Ocean. As you all know from the trailers, to fight monsters, we had to make monsters. Apparently, the solution to the kaiju invasion was to throw all the world's money at Japan to make giant battlemechs called "Jagers" (the German word for "hunters"). Each Jager is piloted by a pair, because one person doesn't have the brain power to make the mech move. The pilots are rated by compatibility called "drift" -- how well their minds work together. A kaiju appears, a Jager team is deployed, the Jager punches the holy hell out of the kaiju, and humanity lives another day.
The plot is pretty bare-bones, but that's OK. We see glimpses of things like the UN, and are made to understand that, after several years, the Jager program is losing its effectiveness. Marshall Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) is given six months to make it work, or it will be shut down. Former Jager pilot Raliegh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) is brought back into service for One. Last. Mission. We meet the other pilots, the research team of Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day), who is a wanna-be rock star and Gottlieb (Burn Gorman), who is a weird crippled math dude. We see bits of the black market for kaiju body parts, and the best of the worst is Hannibal Chau (Ron Goddamn Perlman). That's pretty much it. There's very little interpersonal drama between pilots, there are hints at romance (but, for the target audience and for those of us who remember what it was like to be the target audience, girls are kind of neat, but kind of scary at the same time).
Mostly, it's giant robots punching giant monsters in the most awesome ways you can imagine.
"Pacific Rim" is a big, giant, live-action anime. It's a less-epic "Robotech", a less David-Lynchian "Neon Genesis Evangelion". It looks and feels like the best after-school cartoon EVER. del Toro is an amazing designer, and, wow. This movie is almost entirely about design.
One of the challenges Bryan Singer had with making a live-action X-Men movie was making the costumes not look stupid on-screen. It looks like del Toro went the opposite direction. The Russian Jager pilots have blonde pompadour haircuts. The Chinese team is played by triplets. The guy manning the ops station looks like he stepped out of the original "Speed Racer" cartoon. Hannibal Chou has a switchblade, sunglasses, and the best damn shoes I've ever seen. Every character is a stereotype, and every character SHOULD be a stereotype. We don't want to think here. We want to see giant goddamn robots, and, by god, we do.
Special effects-wise, I don't see any other contenders winning Oscars over this one. It's almost flawless. And, unlike Michael Bay's "Transformers" movies, nothing hurts to look at. I mentioned that with Zack Snyder's "Man of Steel", I like Snyder's ability to keep the huge action sequences focused on what they should be focused on. In "Pacific Rim", the objects in the screen are too big to allow for distraction.
Does this movie have toys? Because I want to get all the Jager models that I can. 8-year-old me loved this movie. Teenage-anime-watching me was just enthralled by the fact that they actually did it, and it didn't suck. 36-year-old me smiled, and smiled, and smiled.
