Scriptwise I could have done with a little more sparkle in the dialogue, and a little less Independence Day in the third act. ![]() It’s as refreshing to see a genuinely multinational cast as it is to watch cataclysmic action scenes played out not in some seen-it-all-before American metropolis but in downtown Hong Kong and, strikingly, the Pacific Ocean itself. Ron Perlman clearly has a ball in his cameo as kaiju-organ bootlegger Hannibal Chau. Pacific Rim features solid performances from Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi and Idris Elba, with Charlie Day and Burn Gorman injecting comic relief as a dysfunctional duo of scientists. Aren’t they meant to be the lifeblood of storytelling? It’s sad I should be surprised to receive such gifts. ![]() For me, however, Pacific Rim hit the sweet spot, unleashing stupendous robot-on-monster action while still giving me characters I cared about and plot developments that actually made sense. It’s a common complaint with this kind of film that the visual effects overwhelm the characters (I was bored senseless by the fight scenes in Man of Steel boy, didn’t they go on?). The result is a gargantuan grappling match that’s genuinely character-driven rather than merely an excuse to let robot and monster slug it out. The drift is introduced in the opening battle, in which brothers Raleigh and Yancy Becket fight side by side trying both to defeat a kaiju and preserve the lives of the sailors on board a nearby ship. It’s a simple concept that allows the filmmakers to develop several sub-plots around the drift – a kind of mind-meld state in which the psychologically-matched pilots share their thoughts … and which also leads the eccentric Dr Newton Geiszler to attempt such a bond with the kaiju themselves. But it’s tackled with such love and conviction, and invested with sufficient internal logic, that it succeeds on pretty much every level.Ĭentral to its success is the idea that each Jaeger requires two operators. Inspired by del Toro’s love of Japanese monster movies and anime, the plot’s as daft as it gets. Not least of these is the care with which del Toro and his team have constructed the near-future world in which gigantic mechanoids (Jaegers) battle equally immense monsters (kaiju) from another dimension. ![]() Superficially a big, barmy summer blockbuster, Pacific Rim scores over its rivals ( Star Trek Into Darkness, Man of Steel et al) in countless crucial ways. I was just tickled that director del Toro and co-writer Travis Beacham had decided to deal with the ritual trashing of America right out of the gate, thus freeing them up to get on with the story they really wanted to tell.Īnd what a story it is. I know some very nice people who live there. Why? Because that’s roughly how long Guillermo del Toro’s new film takes to reduce the west coast of the USA to rubble.ĭon’t get me wrong. It took me two minutes to decide I was going to love Pacific Rim.
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