Pacific Rim - I Heart Destruction

So my house mate and I decided that the best cure for our hangovers was a trip to the cinema. In the state of hangovers, the easiest thing to follow is a good ol' big dumb action film, something to excite the brain without having to think about why.

That's what helped us to decide that Pacific Rim fit the bill.

Don't let my comments make you think this is a start to a rant about how bad the film is. In fact, I actually enjoyed it. A lot. There's a lot of reasons people could easily point out why this movie is bad or dumb, but in my opinion I think the film deserves a free pass, since it embraces these "dumb" elements for the fun ride it takes us on. That's not to say that these "bad" elements are necessarily always a fun thing though, every action movie usually has a good ol' cob of corn thrown in for hell knows why. Pacific Rim unfortunately plants a field of corn and then tries to serve it to you. All of it.

That aside, these things are just there to drive the simple story along. Giant monsters named "Kaiju" have come from a spatial tear at the bottom of the Pacific ocean. They are huge (seriously, they're enormous) and they're here to destroy everything. This of course forces the world to stop fighting with each other and work together, which results in building giant robots to fight them and blah blah blah... The story is nothing special, same ol' apocalypse story that is just slightly more fleshed out then the usual tripe. The more unique story elements in the film is the idea of "drifting" which is joining two minds so to operate the films giant robots, which means the operators know everything about their co-operators lives for the time they are driving the machines, but unfortunately it is used to little effect. But that's fine, because given the tone of the film, Mr. Del Toro wasn't giving us a thoughtful exercise on the intricacies of the human mind.

 Kaiju, the stars of the film.

The film basically picks up year after the first encounters and the situation is becoming more and more dire as the Kaiju appearance becomes more frequent. That in combination with them getting larger and more deadly.
Our main hero is basically an every action hero cliché with a traumatic past which becomes a central struggle for him to overcome (by fighting giant monsters in a giant robot). Then there's a slew of others who are there too. Honestly I cared little for all of the characters as they were all literally there to fit the respective roles required in the action hero roster. The only stand-out mention was a fun cameo from Ron Perlman as a black market dealer and a much less, but slightly touching story, involving the lead lady characters' motivation and past. Apart from that, there's little emotion derived from relating to the characters in the film.

Now, that's pretty much the bad stuff out of the way, I'll get on to the good stuff which happens to be really good. The real stars of the film here are the Kaiju. They're animated and designed wonderfully with tonnes of character for giant monsters. They are also pretty terrifying in their own right. The films many action sequences show shots of them lunging through buildings towards the camera and you can't help but feel the sheer terror of a skyscraper sized creature barrelling through a city towards you. This combined with giant robots, called Jaegers, fighting them makes for some sizeable spectacle and action sequences.

Indeed it is here the film elevates itself most, the creative team behind this clearly had more than fun choreographing and plotting the directions and developments of each battle. The spectacle of it all is off the charts, the Jaegers are all unique with their own silly but hilariously destructive and fun weapons, the Kaiju are all different and each match different purposes for the destruction they wreak and then to top it off the bigger action scenes makes for some crazy city wide fun destruction (using a cargo ship as a baseball bat was a hilarious stroke of genius). You can easily spot out all of the plot holes and logic holes of these sequences as you watch, e.g. Why would you not try to lure a gigantic monster out of a city before pummelling it to bits so as to save the destruction of a city? Why pummel them with giant metallic fists when they clearly have weapons which do much more catastrophic damage to these creatures? But these are questions that you can easily ignore because it's just too damn fun to care about them, in particular an action sequence about two thirds into the film makes the price of your ticket worth it alone. These are also elevated by a simple but great score that gives some life to the "horn of doom" which has become abused consistently since Inception.

The Jaegers, the giant fighting robots of the film

 The film is a little over-long at about 2 hours and 10 mins, but thankfully the action sequences are frequent enough that they break up the mindless story and cardboard characters. What you're here mainly to see is the monsters and robots and that's it. Some people have also complained that it is basically a mish-mash of other big action films; transformers, cloverfield, godzilla. And I agree, but I don't see it as a problem. I see it more as a respectable love letter to these franchises and it does do some things much better than the more recent iterations of these franchises too.

Overall the film in a whole is just a big loud dumb but really fun action movie, with sprinkles of genius and truckloads of destruction and action welded together into a pretty cohesive machine. It's definitely elevated by the great creature design, creative action sequences (and you'll probably say "wow" to one or two of them) and Del Toro's obvious visual flare. Go see it in the cinema, it's what big screens are made for.