Movie # 20 - Pacific Rim

Sometimes life can be a bit rough and tough to you, and you think "I just want to get away from reality and problems and have a bit of mindless fun".  So this is how I and my friend L came to be sitting at the movies on a Monday night, marvelling at the fact that us two girls were about to watch a dumb giant robots vs giant monsters movie, which the men in our lives didn't really want to see.  And it was EXACTLY what we wanted and needed. Giant robots smacking the fluorescent guts out of the giant monsters invading Earth! Hell yeah! End of review. Oh, you want a bit more information?

Pacific Rim might come across from the ads as a Transformers rip off.  But I can assure you it is a lot better than Transformers.  This is the latest film from Guillermo del Toro, the man whose wonderful imagination has given us the brilliant Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy 1 and 2, Cronos, Blade 2 and Mimic.  If there is one thing del Toro excels at, it is inventing amazing monsters and creatures, and he has done a fantastic job with this movie. And that's because it's a subject close to his heart.  Empire Magazine has a great feature article this month written by del Toro himself, outlining how as a child growing up in Mexico he saw many Japanese 'kaiju' (giant monster) movies, loved robots and sci-fi and also enjoyed Mexican wrestling.  These three major influences are combined with a lot of love into this blockbuster action film.

A portal has opened deep in the ocean, and a giant monster comes through and destroys San Francisco.  Another follows some time later to destroy Milan.  The various countries stop fighting each other and come up with a way to defeat the bigger enemy: build a giant robot which is operated from within by a brave pilot to kick, punch, saw, shoot, burn and generally slice and dice the monsters.  These are known as "jaegers".  Sadly the movie has missed the opportunity to use the term "jaegermeisters" for the operators and has gone with the much less fun title of "jaeger pilots".  The jaeger pilots operate the machine through something known as "the drift" and there must be 2 pilots who are extremely compatible with each other and the drift which is a mental link that allows them to know each other's thoughts and operate the giant robot in unison.  Because the portal is in the ocean, a lot of the fights take place, or at least start, in the ocean.

The jaegers initially win the war, but the problem is that the portal seems to be sending through more and bigger kaijus all the time, who seem to be intent on destroying the entire planet and can defeat the jaegers.  The jaeger program is in danger as the world searches for a better solution.

So after getting all that out of the way in the first 5 minutes, we open with a cool jaeger vs kaiju fight, with pilot Raleigh Beckett (played by Charlie Hunnam who is Jax Teller in TV's Sons of Anarchy) and his brother seemingly kicking the crap out of the kaiju, who uses the old wrestling trick of playing dead but it's not!  Raleigh's brother is fatally injured but he manages to finish the kaiju and get to land. He then disappears from the jaeger program, which is being shut down anyway.  But one man, Major Stacker Pentecost (played by Idris Elba) is given one last chance to save the world by using the remaining jaegers to try to plug the portal and stop the kaijus for good.

The movie then follows Pentecost as he recruits the best remaining jaeger pilots and combines them with a couple of mad scientists to come up with the best plan to save the world - use the jaegers to throw a nuclear bomb down the portal while fending off any kaijus that come through.  The mad scientists are really overdone but at least they provide some much needed comedic moments as the rest of the film is deadly serious and full of weighty speeches.

The best part of this movie are the fight scenes.  They are filmed really well and anyone familiar with wrestling will recognise certain moves or plays being used.  You can actually understand what is going on most of the time, so you cheer along with the good guys.  At some times I was either clapping my hands or throwing my fists up in victory!  And the special effects and use of 3D are pretty spectacular, with del Toro's typical skill with industrial design showing in the jaeger bunker.

The worst part of this movie is the "Australian" jaeger pilots.  As played by two non-Australian actors who have obviously never been to Australia, they sound like a mangled cross between English, South African and New Zealand, and have some terrible clichéd dialogue.  Every time they spoke, which was frequently in the middle section of the movie, I laughed. Surely there are enough Aussie actors in Hollywood these days that we could have had something authentic?  It really ruined my immersion in the film.  The acting by Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi (best know for Babel) and Idris Elba is convincing but ultimately the characters are just hero clichés.  But it didn't stop me from wanting them to succeed!

I give this a very enthusiastic four out of 5 for anyone who likes a good robot vs monster rumble or just a big, dumb action flick that has more style than most Hollywood blockbusters.