Pacific Rim (2013)

**/****
starring Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day
screenplay by Travis Beacham & Guillermo del Toro
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I have this theory that the reason the
United States started remaking Japanese movies (particularly the J-Horror
stuff) almost immediately post-9/11 is that it was after that pivotal event that the
country assumed a distinctly Japanese worldview. Suddenly, it was possible for
something unthinkable to happen to civilians; the universe was callous and
arbitrary in its measuring out of lives, and the idea of a “civilian target”
or, more to the point, of “innocence,” was hopelessly quaint. It’s as
good an explanation as any as to why there are so many evil children in
Japanese horror–the same explanation, as it happens, for why there were so
many evil children in late-’60s/early-’70s American horror–the
difference being that there was usually an explanation for why the children
were bad in the United States (the Devil, mostly). In Japan? Not so much. In America’s post-9/11 evil-kid flicks, even the ones not remaking
Japanese films, the kids are generally just born that way. Even the rise of “torture
porn” is more or less a not-as-graphic reproduction of Japan’s “Guinea
Pig” cinema–seven pictures from the ’80s (including the indescribable Mermaid
in a Manhole and Flower of Flesh & Blood, which caused a
credulous Charlie Sheen to call the FBI), culminating now in the United States
with a pretty rough update of Maniac starring everybody’s favourite
probably-murderer, Elijah Wood.

What the United States hasn’t done that often is reproduce Japan’s kaiju eiga–“giant monster”
flicks, a genre launched by its still-most-prominent example (Gojira, naturally). In recent years, maybe Peter Jackson’s King
Kong and Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield were the first tentative shots
across that particular bow. Or maybe the appetite for urban-levelling
destruction in kaiju eiga has emerged in the United States without the kaiju, melding instead with the threat of terrorism from without and the unseemly lengths to
which our own government will go to protect us from within. Destroying
metropolises has become the lingua franca of the summer blockbuster season,
with or without giant monsters (though there were a few cool-looking armoured kaiju
in The Avengers). In one summer that’s seen the destruction San
Francisco twice (Star Trek Into Darkness, Pacific Rim),
Manhattan/Metropolis once (Man of Steel), every-fucking-where thrice
with Oblivion, After Earth, and World War Z (although Israel in
that one only falls through over-enthusiastic Palestinian ululation–the most
subversive element in an otherwise-uncontroversial film), to say nothing of the vivid
suicide-bombing in Hollywood in Iron Man 3, only one happened through the
agency of giant monsters, though two, arguably three, were through the agency of
something extra-terrestrial. Do we read an element of the uncanny in that? The
idea that we are, like Reagan, looking forward with dread and anticipation to
the day when something other invades, thus unifying all citizens of
Earth under one banner? It’s either indulging in the fantasy of absolute
righteousness that we enjoyed for about 12 hours in the wake of 9/11, or it’s a brand of fatalism that suggests it will take something unprecedented now to bring us
together before The End.

Whatever it is, here’s Guillermo del Toro’s
unapologetically-gobsmacking Pacific Rim, trafficking in broad melodrama
and mecha-vs.-kaiju battles begging to be seen in IMAX. The sound
design is fillings-rattling, the special effects are extravagant, and the cast? Yes,
of thousands. And yet, the human hero, Raleigh (yup) Becket (Charlie
Hunnam), is vanilla, non-descript, difficult to root for despite attempts at lending him depth through the early death of his brother in one of the film’s half-dozen ultimately-interchangeable kaiju battles. Likewise his waifu
sidekick Mako (Rinko Kikuchi), who, it’s revealed, is the adopted daughter of
square-jawed marshall Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), aching to prove herself
in mortal combat against the pan-dimensional beasties. Apparently some mysterious
aliens are using the beasties to clear out Earth of its “vermin” so
that they might inhabit it themselves. (Shades, now, of Oblivion.) To be
fair, Mako has a flashback story in a bombed-out, ash-raining Tokyo that is
haunted in a way the rest of Pacific Rim isn’t. It, plus a moment where an
earthbound kaiju suddenly reveals it has wings, are themselves
worth the price of admission.

Because I’m a huge, unapologetic fan of del
Toro’s work, I expected there to be some pathos and personality in the
monsters, but there isn’t save one baby monster that’s hilariously hungry. I
expected there to be some weight in the human relationships–fathers and sons,
fathers and adopted daughters–but there isn’t. There isn’t even all
that much tension. There’s a training sequence in the middle of the film, for
instance, where Raleigh fights Mako to test, I think, their compatibility for
a neural “drift” that Vulcan Mind Melds them in the robot for some
reason. It’s not set up, not paid off, not explained well, period. I think often of when Hellboy kills
the Earth Elemental in Hellboy II, of the enormous moral complexity of
that sequence, the peril, the sense of ecology, and the feeling of loss once the monster is vanquished–all things seldom felt at the movies since Dragonslayer,
perhaps (making apt del Toro’s screenwriting collaborations with Dragonslayer helmer Matthew Robbins on
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and the upcoming Crimson Peak), and none of which is especially evident anywhere
in Pacific Rim. It all seems very much like an expression of
extreme creative frustration: the manic ejaculation that follows years of
cinematic cock-blocks and the heartbreak of being literally two days away from
starting production on a dream project, At the Mountains of Madness,
before Universal decided to invest in Battleship instead. There’s real
joy, real release, in the film, but it’s every inch a visionary filmmaker
shaking off the rust by indulging in almost every trope of an established niche
genre without adding anything to the conversation. It also feels like
a calculated “dumbing down” of an artist’s vision and work in the
hopes of gaining the collateral to direct the movies he really wants to by
convincing investors he can give the audience what it wants without also
making it uncomfortable.

Early reviews say that Pacific Rim is a “thinking
man’s” Transformers movie–strange, almost backhanded
praise along the lines of the also-popular “dumb in a good way.” It’s
neither of those things. Rather, it’s the worst of Guillermo del Toro’s Hollywood
output (yes, worse than Mimic)–which is all worse than his Spanish
output–and mainly because it’s essentially a Japanese movie by a Mexican
filmmaker trying to woo an American audience. It’s a for-hire project from what
has been one of our most unique filmmakers; consider that the primary
screenwriter on the piece is not del Toro, but the guy who wrote the remake of Clash
of the Titans. The real miracle of Pacific Rim, though, is that it
was made at all. The story, of kaiju rising from the deep to
battle dual-piloted robots called “jaegers,” is ridiculous, of
course; the acting is uniformly awful; and the screenplay is likewise a poor hodgepodge of macho double-talk for the alphas and simpering
pseudo-science for the techies (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman). It climaxes with
a giant battle–well, giant-er battle, no less easy to follow
for its scale–complete with noble
sacrifices that don’t land with much impact and a cutesy-pie denouement I
didn’t care for when I saw it at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me,
Octopussy, and Tomorrow Never Dies, either. And it has a cameo by Ron
Perlman that had me hoping with all my hope that they at least spent some of
their time on set together working out how to get Hellboy 3 made. The fact of Pacific
Rim, in other words, is far more cause for celebration than the execution
of it. It’s a product designed for overseas success, and should it land, hopefully it’ll
translate into the misinterpretation that it turned a profit because it was somehow original. Whatever the case, if it wins del Toro the golden ticket to do whatever the hell he wants to from now on, call it a major success.

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