Quick Review: Pacific Rim

I have to make an admission here: I am not the world’s biggest Guillermo Del Toro fan. It’s not that I hate the man or his work, far from it. My indifference to his work is that I really don’t connect to it, the one exception being the terrific fantasy drama Pan’s Labyrinth. There are plenty of great ideas and images to be found in Del Toro’s work but in the end it rarely comes together as an entertaining, cohesive whole (for me, anyway). Unfortunately, this issue carries over to the filmmaker’s latest feature, the mega-sized epic Pacific Rim. 

The plot is fairly straightforward: Giant monsters known as Kaiju have surfaced from beneath the Pacific depths to destroy cities and wipe out the human race. In response, the humans have created Jaegers, giant fighting robots powered by two humans inside the machines that are connected via their brainwaves. The Jaegers work for a while but are slowly being phased out. When the replacement plan begins to falter, it is up to what is left of the Jaegers to fight the increasing volume of Kaiju. 

That is pretty much all you really need to know about the plot. If it focused solely on robots and monsters kicking the living daylights  out of each other, Pacific Rim would have made for a great 90-minute movie. The rainy, nighttime battles are quite spectacular (even in unnecessary 3D) and there is a huge battle 70 minutes in that is worth the price of admission alone. Unfortunately, a human element is also present and this is what drags Pacific Rim down from one of the summer’s better thrill rides into a movie that is merely average. 

Now, I love visual effects epics that offer up some involving drama and character empathy alongside their visual spectacle. The Avengers had it. So did Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. But in order for those elements to work, they have to have some freshness to them. That is not the case with Pacific Rim. Del Toro and co-screenwriter Travis Beacham (writer of the dreadful 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans) opt to give us characters and story arcs that we have seen a billion times before. I actually started referring to main character Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnman) as Top Gun’s “Maverick” at one point (which is never a good sign).

As familiarity tends to breed contempt, I also found myself caring little if any about what happened to these people despite the best efforts of cast members Idris Elba (as project leader Stacker Pentecost) and Rinko Kikuchi (as a pilot named Mako). I won’t divulge the cliched arcs here. If you see the film, you will figure them out on your own and do so quickly.

I wanted to like Pacific Rim more than I did, I really wanted to. However, at this point in my life I am just tired of slapping the shopworn and familiar on to a project simply to keep the movie going until the next big action set piece. With movies costing so much these days (the budget on this film was $180 million), I still cannot fathom why no one can write a decent screenplay for these behemoths. Pacific Rim has the spectacle in droves but it doesn’t have the heart to back it up. 

Two and a half stars out of four. 

"Pacific Rim" opens on July 12th and is rated PG-13.