Pacific Rim: Godzilla vs. Badass Robots

By Kevin Hyde

There was so much I liked and appreciated about Pacific Rim, the new film by the wondrously imaginative Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, I left the theater almost feeling guilty that I didn’t like the movie. How I have longed for big, summer entertainment that is neither a star vehicle nor an adaptation of a comic book, neither a sequel nor a series reboot. Don’t get me wrong. I have enjoyed the vehicles, sequels and reboots this summer, but it’s nice to revel in a completely original piece. Too bad this one was not made for me.

Travis Beacham, who conceived the story and co-wrote the screenplay with del Toro, apparently was walking along the beach on an early, foggy morning in California when he was struck by the shape of a pier. He thought it looked like an enormous monster rising from the water. He then visualized a giant robot standing on the shoreline, waiting to do battle. That’s cool. I like it when creativity happens on a beach rather than a boardroom overlooking a beach. My problem with the film involves much of the writing that came after the inspirational walk—the two-dimensional characters, the inane dialogue, the rousing speeches that only rouse cringing and the goofy attempts at comic relief. I have some theories about this that I will share at the end.

Here is the setup for Pacific Rim. A portal to another dimension has opened at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, far off the coast of Hong Kong. One at a time, giant, dinosaur-like creatures emerge from what is called the breach, killing millions of people and reducing cities to rubble. This has been a summer rife with crushing cinematic destruction and collateral damage. We already have seen Metropolis get leveled in Man of Steel. Washington D.C. is distinguished for having been wrecked twice this summer, in Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down. And the whole world pretty much gets trashed by zombies in World War Z. Not to mention what happened to New York last summer during the climax of The Avengers. I wonder if I might be suffering from mass destruction fatigue.

The invading monsters in Pacific Rim are called the Kaiju, which means strange beast in Japanese. (It is used to refer to the giant monsters from Japanese science fiction films, like Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, etc.) Facing human extinction, countries around the world set aside their conflicts, pool their resources and begin to fight back. Special weapons are developed—massive, badass robots called Jaegers. Jaeger is the German word for hunter. (Jägermeister means hunting-master. That is why doing shots of Jägermeister makes you feel like a gamekeeper. Or maybe that’s just my thing.)

Each Jaeger is operated by two pilots whose minds are sealed in a neural bridge, each having access to the other’s memories and thoughts. The thunderous, theater-rattling awesomeness of the Jaeger vs. Kaiju battles are the reason to see this movie. I have a friend who absolutely loved Pacific Rim and plans to see it again. He recommended it with one caveat, he brought plenty of geek, childhood baggage to the proceedings, he admitted. I loved Godzilla and Shogun movies.

But the Kaijus keep coming, larger and in a bigger numbers. With the world running out of defense options, Jaeger program commander Stacker Pentecost, played by the fine British actor Idris Elba (Stringer Bell in The Wire), calls on a troubled former pilot (Charlie Hunnam) and a young, vengeful trainee (Rinko Kikuchi) to man an obsolete Jaeger and pull off an unlikely mission to close the portal. Meanwhile two eccentric, bickering scientists (played with annoying, over-the-top camp by Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) try to understand the Kaiju by enlisting the help of an underworld Kaiju carcass poacher played by del Toro mainstay Ron Perlman.

This brings me back around to my theory about the Pacific Rim’s generic characterization and functional, easily translatable dialogue. Was it just another level of homage? Del Toro clearly was inspired by the Japanese anime and early FX-driven, Japanese TV series and film exports of his youth. These films and series were dubbed from the original Japanese into other languages by disjointed, over-emotive voice performances, which create a very specific vibe. Maybe del Toro was trying to create a similar sense with the performances he elicited from his actors.

But I will insist always on interesting characters saying interesting things to each other. On that front—despite all of its other appeal—Pacific Rim fails massively.