***SPOILER ALERT!***
If you mash up some of the biggest hits of Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich’s careers, you might end up with something resembling Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro’s flashy, big-budget love letter to Japanese monster movies. The numerous scenes of robots and supernatural monsters beating the crap out of each other inevitably bring Transformers to mind, though the action here isn’t quite as mind-numbing. A diverse group of people who come together and have to save the world by dropping a nuclear bomb down a small crevice a la Armageddon? Check. In fact, the central motivation of the kaiju, an alien race that invades Earth from another universe, has been plucked straight from Independence Day, and there’s a speech at the film’s climax that aims for the fist-pumping adrenaline rush of Bill Pullman’s classic tribute to American exceptionalism and extraterrestrial ass-kicking but falls woefully short. Add in a dash of Godzilla, the movie’s most obvious and probably only intentional influence, and a pinch of James Cameron’s Avatar, and you’ve got Pacific Rim.
Perhaps that’s doing the film a
bit of a disservice. As loud and testosterone-heavy as it is, there’s a
sincerity to del Toro’s vision that’s absent from the cynical, manufactured
destruction porn of Bay and his ilk. Eye-popping, state-of-the-art CGI breathes
life into the monstrous kaiju and robotic Jaegars, allowing viewers to fully
appreciate the extensively detailed creature design, always a strong suit of
del Toro’s work, and the care poured into constructing the movie’s internal
universe and mythology is evident within the first twenty minutes. In contrast
to the bleak, dystopian approach that modern sci-fi often seems to gravitate
towards, Pacific Rim offers up a more
optimistic future where humanity sets aside its differences in order to unite
against a common enemy, because apparently, nothing brings people together like
war and the threat of imminent annihilation. It’s a nice utopian ideal, even if
the movie doesn’t convey it as effectively as it could have or transcend the
usual, dumb action movie clichés quite as much as it wants to. Still, this
earnest belief in the power of teamwork gives the film a lightness that
prevents it from devolving into the monotonous, chaotic self-indulgence that too
often plagues summer tentpoles.
Unfortunately, the attention
paid to world-building doesn’t extend to the actual human characters who
populate that world. The screenplay, written by del Toro and Travis Beacham,
never delivers on the potentially juicy backstories and relationships hinted at
in the first half of the movie, instead offering hasty conclusions or dropping
character arcs off entirely by the climax. Perhaps the most egregious offender
is Robert Kazinsky’s Chuck Hansen, who’s essentially your generic, arrogant
bully character bent on antagonizing the central heroes for little apparent
reason other than that he’s an asshole. Sure, he gets some predictable
redemption at the end, but the sentiment there rings false, feeling obligatory
rather than earned; for good measure, they also toss in some daddy issues that
are never fully explained or fleshed out (and let’s be real here, daddy issues are
a pretty cliché way to lend supposed emotional complexity to an otherwise
shallow character). Not helping matters is the fact that Kazinsky looks like a
clone of leading man Charlie Hunnam, he of the golden locks and Sons of Anarchy fame. Playing protagonist Raleigh Beckett with
bland, wide-eyed eagerness, Hunnam doesn’t get across the psychological stress
that his character’s supposed to be experiencing after the early death of his
brother. He lacks the charisma needed to anchor such a visual effects-dominated
film, hampered by a script that doesn’t allow him much in the way of a
personality. His co-lead Rinko Kikuchi fares somewhat better as the docile but
intelligent prodigy Mako Mori. Despite her small stature, she proves a
believable match/rival for Hunnam’s Beckett (indeed, their pseudo-martial arts
fight scene together is the best moment in the movie), even if they don’t share
much chemistry and their relationship – thankfully, not a romance – doesn’t
develop in any particularly compelling ways. She does her best to add nuance to
a surprisingly passive and flat role, using those doe-like eyes to express a
range of bottled-up emotions and inner doubts.
The supporting cast consists of archetypes,
rather than sharply-drawn individuals. There’s the stern and world-weary but
inspiring authority figure in Stacker Pentacost (Idris Elba, oozing debonair stateliness),
Max Martini’s Herc Hanson as his trusty advisor and a Gruff, Emotionally
Distant Father Figure for Chuck and a pair of bickering scientists played by Charlie
Day and Burn Gorman that are supposed to act as comic relief but instead become
just obnoxious distractions. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic character, at least
superficially, is a self-interested black market dealer named Hannibal Chau
after his favorite historical figure and his second-favorite Chinese restaurant
in Brooklyn and played by del Toro regular Ron Perlman in a somewhat
questionable casting decision. For all his quirks, though, Chau doesn’t add
anything meaningful to the tale; it’s easy to imagine that the movie would be
no better or worse off if he never existed in the first place.
In a way, this brings us to Pacific Rim’s big weakness. Buoyed by
fantastic visual effects and some interesting albeit not fully explored ideas,
the film never seems as interested in its human characters as it is in staging
large-scale battles between hulking, fantastical creations. Del Toro focuses on
the external world and plot-related tension at the expense of compelling
internal conflicts. Given its preoccupation with intricate world-building, this
story, which feels simultaneously overstuffed and not substantial enough as a
big screen enterprise, might have been more successful as a TV show, where
they’d have more time to delve into the mythology, characters and themes. As it
is, Pacific Rim mostly works as light
popcorn escapism, but with such thinly-drawn humans at the center of the
action, not even an impending apocalypse provides reason enough to become truly
invested in this onscreen adventure.
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