Pacific Rim is a deeply dorky movie. That isn’t criticism (or praise); it’s an observation, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Pacific Rim is a Guillermo del Toro film, and Guillermo del Toro is a deeply dorky filmmaker. I’m not sure how del Toro convinced Warner Bros to finance Pacific Rim, an original property with no stars. It’s a tough sell in this summer landscape of sequels and superheroes (and might explain the film’s poor tracking so far), but that’s only one way in which del Toro’s film differs from its competitors.
For another, del Toro seems utterly uninterested in telling an origin story, which has been the predominant narrative form of popular cinema for the past decade or so (thanks to the influence of superhero movies, but also present in everything from Casino Royale to Star Trek). Pacific Rim begins with a 5 minute prologue that explains the universe of the movie. Giant monsters (dubbed “kaiju”) came from under the sea, through a breach in the tectonic plates. They attacked coastal cities, forcing humankind to cooperate and create robotic monsters of our own (dubbed “Jaegers”), each operated by two pilots who meld minds through some barely explained neural connection called “drifting.”
Although the film comes complete with its own mythology, del Toro is telling us an archetypal story of robots fighting monsters, not a prototypical one. Like the Japanese monster films that inspired it, Pacific Rim, despite containing the seeds of a franchise, is not a chapter in an ongoing story; instead, it’s a self-contained story.
Pacific Rim feels like an on-screen representation of a pre-adolescent boy’s sugar-addled mind, fresh from watching a Godzilla marathon on SyFy. It’s the anti-Dark Knight. Unlike other blockbusters this year, Pacific Rim can’t double as an allegory about Christ (Man of Steel), American foreign policy (Star Trek), or media-perpetrated fear mongering (Iron Man 3). In comparison, it eschews any sort of allegorical pretense. It’s a big, colourful tale of good vs. evil, robots vs. monsters. The Godzilla movies may have been stoked by post-War anxiety over nuclear proliferation, but Pacific Rim is willfully apolitical.
The film’s best action is set in Hong Kong, where the kaiju and the Jaegers battle amidst the city’s skyscrapers. Between The Avengers and Man of Steel, the destruction of cities in feature films seems close to reaching a point of no return (in which audiences would be forced to realize that the amount of property damage done in these films could cripple entire economies), but Pacific Rim makes both of those films look half-assed in comparison, despite featuring less destruction than either. Between the design of the monsters, which is detailed down to the texture of their knotty reptilian skin, and the neon-tinted cinematography of Guillermo Navarro, this scene shows what is aesthetically possible in a big budget film from a filmmaker as unique and imaginative as Guillermo del Toro.
That said, while del Toro is a gifted filmmaker, he isn’t always the best storyteller. Perhaps because Pacific Rim interprets its influences, Japanese monster movies, with no intention of critique or irony, it ends up rehashing similar flaws. Our lead character is Raleigh Becket, a Jaeger pilot. Other than being a good fighter, Raleigh is just another muscular white guy with nothing interesting going on. Indeed, the main narrative of the film, about an outpost of fighters using the last of their resources to put an end to the kaiju invasions once and for all, doesn’t have anything particularly interesting going on. That includes Idris Elba as a the outpost’s commander, as well as Rinko Kikuchi as Raleigh’s inexperienced co-pilot.
The supporting characters of Pacific Rim are much more intriguing than the core group. A whole movie could have been made about Charlie Day’s Dr. Newton, who spends much of the movie trying to acquire a kaiju brain from a black market salesman, Hannibal Chau, played with an eccentric sartorial attitude by Ron Perlman. The most del Toro-esque scene of the film takes place in Chau’s kaiju part shop, as nameless workers carry grotesque kaiju limbs from one side of the room to another, as if for no other purpose than to keep it in front of the camera for a split second.
Guillermo del Toro may have wanted to make an epic film, and an epic film may require a story about classically good looking, square-jawed hero, but that’s not where his strengths lie. In Hellboy, his hero is a red skinned freak who desperately wants to be normal. In Pan’s Labyrinth, his heroine is a little girl trying to escape from her abusive stepfather. I can’t imagine del Toro, the enthusiastic, HP Lovecraft-loving dork, identifying with Raleigh, the handsome fighter pilot, over Newton, the neurotic monster-obsessed scientist. I’m sure Pacific Rim will get a lot of love from fans who are happy to see monsters battling robots on such an epic scale, and it’s hard to blame them when those battles are so well-made. Before praising the film too much, let’s remember that del Toro is a better filmmaker than the drama of Pacific Rim suggests, and, as talented as he is, perhaps this is evidence that he’s not a perfect match for a $180 million spectacle.
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Alan Jones writes about film (and sometimes music) for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @alanjonesxxxv.
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