Max O’Connell: We've been eagerly awaiting Pacific Rim, not in small part because we’re big fans of Del Toro. I have a personal connection because I’ve been a Godzilla fan since I was about 3. It was my first movie love, so seeing Del Toro effectively do a Godzilla movie just made me happy.
Loren Greenblatt: When
I was 4, I saw Jurassic Park,
and during the showing, I stood up on my chair and said, “I wanna
do that!” I decided I wanted to make movies. I feel that there are
kids walking out of a theatre showing Pacific
Rim who are making the same
decision. This movie is an absolute joy.
MO:
Basic plot: in the near future
a bunch of giant monsters, called Kaiju (named for the Japanese film
genre that gave us Godzilla) from another dimension come through a
crack in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and start attacking. After
trying more traditional methods, humanity builds a bunch of giant,
human piloted robots called Jaegers, which is German for “hunter,”
to fight the Kaiju. But twenty years into the program, the war is
taking a turn for the worse and the Jaeger program is being shut down
in favor of building a wall. This turns out to be a bad idea, and the
leader of the program, the awesomely-named Stacker Pentecost (Idris
Elba of Luther fame)
brings in a former Jaeger pilot Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) to
be a final member of the human resistance.
LG:
This isn't the kind of film we
normally get in America, certainly not in live-action and at this
budget level. The closest equivalent we have in recent cinema are
Micheal Bay's awful Transformers
movies. All these films are
primarily concerned with giant monsters smashing up cities. The
difference between Bay's films and Pacific
Rim is that Guillermo Del Toro
understands that an action movie’s success doesn’t depend on
explosions, but on us caring about the people in those explosions.
It’s not enough that we have a person piloting the Jaeger- we have
two, because according to the film’s pseudoscience, one pilot isn’t
enough to handle the neural load that comes with having your mind and
movements connected to a giant robot. A jaeger requires two pilots
liked through their memories. It's not one chosen person against the
world, suddenly it becomes about teamwork, can these people overcome
tension between them to work together. It's probably no coincidence
that these Jaeger pilots tend to be family members, it makes thematic
sense and it ups the stakes. Like we see In the film’s prologue,
where Raleigh and his brother take Gipsy Danger, an American Jaeger,
on an ill fated mission that end's the brother's death.
MO:
He quits, and five years
later, Pentecost brings him back. Raleigh gets to pick whichever
co-pilot he wants, but the only one he really forms a connection with
is Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi of Babel),
who has her own past trauma with the Kaiju.
LG:
After the first couple of giant monster battles, which really are
quite wonderful, the film settles down and goes to the Jaeger complex
in Hong Kong, dubbed The Shatterdome, and it turns into a bit of a
drama about human cooperation in the face of outrageous adversity. I
like that this is a reasonably multicultural group saving the world-
we get a Russian team, a Chinese team, an Australian team, a British
black guy running the program, and a final team made up of one
American and one Japanese woman. It’s not just a bunch of Americans
saving the world (but mostly New York) from certain doom. It’s a
very universal-minded movie.
MO:
There was a piece in The
Dissolve this week by Tasha
Robinson that argued that the film’s success was partly based in
the fact that it doesn’t invoke 9/11, and that it tries to make it
more universal.
LG:
Not that it can't be done in a film like this. The original Godzilla
very liberally quotes WWII imagery, like the destruction of Hiroshima
and the firebombing of Tokyo, that would have been very fresh in the
minds of Japanese audiences and arguably more traumatic. But we've
been getting a lot of 9/11 imagery this Summer and I'm glad that Del
Toro didn't resort to it here, and Robinson is right, the lack of
that imagery with its coddled, American context fits in to Del Toro's
universalist mindset. It's one of the key things this film gets from
being directed by a non-American. Unlike similar films, we don't have
a jingoistic military fighting against a dehumanized group of
“others,” this is a film about humanity saving humanity.
MO:
I also love that while the main appeal of the film is the brawny
“giant robots fight sea monsters” angle, two of the most
compelling and helpful people in the group are a pair of scientists.
MO:
He’s kind of the Guillermo Del Toro stand-in. He’s made entirely
of boyish enthusiasm, and Day is very good in this role, credibly
spitting out the pseudoscientific dialogue in a rapid-fire pace while
still serving as a pretty great source of comic relief. And on the
other hand, we have Burn Gorman as the other scientist, Herman, who’s
much more button-down. It’s kind of a battle between an intuitive,
experimental scientist and one who believes almost solely in testing
numbers. So we’ve talked a little bit about how we actually care
about the characters in the explosions…but what about those
explosions?
MO:
There’s a sense of levels to everything, which was a problem with,
say, the Chicago sequence in Transformers:
Dark of the Moon, which is
just an hour of carnage. We don’t feel exhausted at the end here
because there is a gradual build. Part of that is the size of the
machines and monsters, part is Del Toro’s natural gifts with
pacing. I’ve heard some people complain that the fights are all
staged in the rain at night, which I guess I can understand, but they
all look great. He’s able to use some frenetic editing when it’s
called for, but we have a sense of where everything is, we can tell
what’s going on…for almost every fight, I know exactly where
every character is in relation to each other, whether it’s
established through photography or through cross-cutting. That sounds
simple, but so many blockbusters forget basics of spatial dynamics.
And that’s what makes everything so exciting, not just the robots
with swords. Though, come on, my inner 9-year-old was about to have a
joyful heart attack at that sword. But then there’s the look of
this: the way it’s composed, the way colors blend together in an
impressionistic blur. It’s a beautiful film.
LG:
And there’s a sense of humor
in the fights when there needs to be. Del Toro is great with those
cartoonish moments in the middle of his fights, like the Wile E.
Coyote shot in Blade II.
Not to spoil anything, but there's a wonderful moment involving a
Newton’s Cradle (the clicking metallic balls that go back and forth
when you hit one) and another involving a football stadium. I almost
feel like we’re underselling it by saying that the fights are
staged competently. It's almost a commentary on how badly many action
scenes are shot that we are too often impressed with 'competently
shot, ' but this goes beyond that. There’s a lot going on in these
fights to make them work. There's a lot things going on with the
mismatching of the abilities of the different Kaiju and Jaegers and
then on the inside of the machines- Raleigh and Mako need to link
their memories in order to pilot them. And Mako has a similar past
trauma, so there’s a lot of tension in whether or not she’ll be
able to hack it. It’s a little bit of a Top
Gun set-up.
MO:
It sort of is, though that’s subverted. This is kind of a regular
thing with fighter-pilot movies, where the cocky fighter-pilot gets
someone killed, but by the end he saves the day, so it’s no big
deal. Del Toro’s not interested in celebrating the macho hero. It’s
actually though shared experiences and understanding each other that
these people can fight together.
LG:
I also love how detailed this film is. This isn’t a film bound by
realism, it isn’t trying to be a realistic Godzilla movie. But it
does imagine what it might be like if a society had to deal with
these attacks for twenty plus years. In the beginning of the film, we
see the government deciding to abandon the Jaeger program and build a
giant wall. Now I’m not going to read into it too much, but I do
think there’s some sly humor here. We have a Mexican director
making a thing about a wall to keeps aliens out. It’s a cute,
clever little jab at how ineffectual that strategy is and at how
alien invasion movies tend to use their aliens as stand-ins for
“foreigners”.
MO:
Oh, that’s clever. I didn’t notice that.
LG:
And the biggest scene dealing with it is set in Alaska, a very Republican state. Again, don’t read into
it, it’s just a joke. But it is the kind of detail that sets this
film apart. Any other movie would probably not even think of
something like this, let alone would it find the time to show the
wall being built or give a sense of what it’s like building it. But
Del Toro does. We see how dangerous it is and it does a wonderful job
of showing the cost of living under this kind of a constant threat.
In one short scene, we get the sense that economies have tumbled, and
that society has had to rebuild itself in new and strange ways. But
it isn’t a movie that wallows in despair. Instead, it finds new
questions to answer and new details to dazzle us. I don’t know that
too many people wondered what happens to giant monsters after they
die, but we get a pretty good answer here. We get cites built around
their skeletons, which is awesome, and we get to learn what the
government does with the Kaiju organs and brains for experiments, not
to mention what a black market dealer like Hannibal Chau (played
wonderfully by Ron Perlman) does with them. They explain, at least in
a very general way, how the new Jaegers work differently from old
ones, and how some are analog where others are digital and some are
nuclear powered. It’s all gobbledygook, but it’s done with such
care that we believe it. It’s real gobbledygook. The same thing
goes for the Kaiju who have a well thought out biology.There’s no
detail of this world that Del Toro and screenwriter Travis Beacham
didn’t think of.
MO:
I like that we get a sense of how the Kaijus do work. Del Toro
believes that monsters are beautiful creatures, and they are here.
But we also get a complicated view of monsters. (Spoilers)
Where past Del Toro films
viewed monsters as animals rather than evil creatures, here they’re
perhaps evil, but they’re not just dumb
animals. There’s a method to their destruction that’s perhaps not
too complicated, but there’s an intelligence there. It’s
something that could have been explored more, but we get enough here.
If we got a sequel, we’d probably see more. There’s a little bit
more to the monsters than usual.
LG:
It’s kind of ridiculous to
assume that creatures this large, with equally large brains, are
stupid. Yes, I know that brain's don't necessarily work that way, but
this is sci-fi logic.
MO:
We also get a sense of being
in the Jaeger experience. When Mako and Raleigh first mind-link (it’s
called drifting here), there’s a wonderful blur of colors as we see
some of their past experiences in a blue light that reminded me of
Minority Report.
It highlights how important it is to share past experiences with each
other, and it’s beautiful just to behold. And I also love what
happens when Mako can’t handle her past trauma, which her first
mind-link makes her re-experience. It turns out that her family was
killed in a Kaiju attack when she was a little girl, and we her get
lost in that memory. It’s a little bit like Del Toro’s recreation
of a past experience in Hellboy,
and it’s a lot like how Christopher Walken sees the past in David
Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone,
which Del Toro is a huge fan of. We’re placed inside a memory, and
Raleigh can observe, but he can’t change it, and he can’t
convince Mako that it isn’t real. This is problematic because she’s
connected to the Jaeger, and when she gets scared, the giant killer
machine responds to her emotions. This was my favorite scene in the
film- I was genuinely terrified not only by what she might do, but by
the memory itself, which is like the “raptors in the kitchen”
scene in Jurassic Park
blown up to gigantic scale. And there’s a beautiful image of her
carrying a little red shoe that’s wonderful. (End
spoilers)
LG:
The thing about this film is
that it does outdo at least one aspect of the Godzilla
series. You’ve seen more of those movies than I have, but I've
never cared about the humans in those movies except for in the
original. Especially if it’s the 1998 version. I don’t go to
these movies for humans doing human things. I go for monsters
smashing things. And it’s very interesting that in this, I do
care about the human people doing human things. It really makes the
movie. Some of the human drama is a bit clichéd, which is often true
of Del Toro’s American films, but he does it so earnestly that it
doesn’t really matter.
LG:
He’s a cocky alpha-male shithead, and the father admits that he
loves him but doesn’t know whether he needs “a hug or a kick in
the ass”. Them learning to work with others and admit their love
for each other is a cliché, but it’s rather effective.
MO:
I was even more involved in
the relationship between Charlie Day and Burn Gorman as the
diametrically-opposed scientists who find a way to blend their
approaches- hard science with intuition- which ends up playing a
major part in saving the day. I love where Idris Elba’s character
winds up going, which ends up playing to Del Toro’s pet theme of
self-sacrifice. There is more going on in terms of character than
people gave it credit. It’s kind of like Jurassic
Park: not as rich with
character as some of its creators’ past blockbusters, but it’s
more complicated than it looks on the surface.
LG:
The characters in Jurassic
Park weren’t incredibly
deep, but there is more going on intellectually than people gave it
credit.
MO:
Del Toro did cut out about an
hour of character material. He said that we can’t pretend this is
Ibsen with monsters and giant robots. We get sketches, and that’s
all we really need.
LG:
I think it's kind of amazing
that the movie finds time to do as much as it does and does it in
only 2 hours. That’s short for most blockbusters these days, which
are bloated all the way to 2 ½ hours. It’s OK to have a long one
when it’s deserved, but it’s getting automatic. This doesn’t
stick around too long. It gets in, does what it’s doing, and gets
out. It’s very lean, and it moves well.
MO:
It moved so well, and it’s made with such boyish enthusiasm that it
made me not care about the few problems I did have with it, whether
it’s the structural problems with the protagonists, or the
quasi-romance between Raleigh and Mako. It’s cute in the beginning,
especially in a fight scene they have that determines how perfect
they are for each other for a mind-link. It’s adorable.
LG:
And (spoilers)
the movie doesn’t force a romance on these characters. It could go
there at some point, but at this point at the end of the world, it’s
about them working together, not learning to fall in bed together.
MO: That helps Mako stand out as more than just a guy-accessory,
which is what Del Toro wanted to do. And it does serve the film’s
central theme of teamwork by not having them fall in bed together.
But my issue is that the romance is
built up, and at the end, it
looks like they’re going to have that moment to admit their love
and kiss, but it doesn’t really go there. It felt to me like Del
Toro was a little too afraid of making her a guy accessory that he
kind of defeated what was left of their emotional arc.
LG:
But their relationship at that point has transcended “will they or
won’t they”. They’re co-combatants, they’re siblings in arms,
and they’re literally in each other’s minds. Remember that this
film associates the co-pilot relationship with family roles. I'm not
saying that they can't go there in a future movie, but not going
there in this film is a very deliberate statement on Del Toro's part.
MO:
I agree that it works intellectually and thematically. It serves the
film’s key theme of learning to work together and trust each other.
But by the end it sacrifices a bit of an emotional peak. (end
spoilers)
LG:
But we squeeze a lot more emotion out of this movie than I thought
was possible.
MO:
Yeah, this is really just a minor qualm. The film did make me forget
most of my complaints. All but one really. There’s one teeny-tiny
one that we can’t overlook. Almost every performance in this film
is wonderful- Perlman is fun, Day and Gorman make a great
comic-relief/heart of the film, Elba gives the gravitas, Kikuchi is
great. Charlie Hunnam…
LG:…he’s…not
the worst actor in the world. I haven’t seen him in anything else
before, but he's not great here. He’s particularly deadly when
asked to narrate.
MO:
The exposition in the beginning of the film works rather well,
considering that they have to get a lot of information out at once,
because it’s played with a bunch of monsters attacking the world.
The only problem is his narration, which is deadening. And it’s not
just because he’s a British actor doing a terrible, terrible
American accent. That’s not the issue. He has no charm or charisma
in this thing. The best thing I can say about this performance is
that he’s not Sam Worthington. He’s boring, but he doesn’t look
sleepy the whole time.
LG:
He’s much better than Sam
Worthington, but we all are.
MO:
We needed a light up in the smile kind of guy. Chris Pine was busy
with Star Trek Into Darkness,
but if we could just get a guy with that kind of charm we’d be
fine. Some of my friends complained that it’s not the most
interesting character anyway, which is true. Almost by default, he’s
the least interesting character.
LG:
I love Pine, but I don't think
his brand of cockiness would fit here. The film almost needs a
quieter character to contrast all the loudness of everything else. We
need stoic and haunted isn’t up to the task. It’s very unusual
for Del Toro to cast someone so bland in the lead. I know he’s
wanted to work with Hunnam for a while, but it doesn’t work.
MO:
I’ve seen him in a few other things. I only saw the pilot of Sons
of Anarchy, which I thought he
was fine in, but again, not the most interesting character in the
show. And I remember liking him in Cold
Mountain, but it’s been
years since I’ve seen it. I don’t know what happened. He didn’t
work here.
LG:
But that’s about the worst thing I can say about this movie.
Hopefully, maybe, by the skin of their teeth, we’ll get enough to
see a sequel.
MO:
I think this thing is going to be a success, I think there will be a
word-of-mouth for it that might make it stick around. A lot of people
are walking out of this thing thrilled.
LG:
Kids are going to love this.
MO:
They will, and I think there is more to chew on than people are
giving it credit. It’s not as rich as, say, Hellboy
II or obviously Pan’s
Labyrinth, but it’s not
intellectually bankrupt. Most of all, though, it’s an absolute
blast. I had a reaction of pure childlike joy.
LG:
In a summer of heavy blockbusters trying to be dark and serious, this
is a movie that really wants to entertain to the fullest extent
possible. It's a mega-budget film without cynicism or pretension and
that’s becoming increasingly rare.
Loren's Grade: Now, I’m of two minds when
grading this film. If I were reviewing this on its own without the context
of the Roundtable, I’d give it an A because it’s a top-notch
summer blockbuster, easily the best tentpole I'm likely to see this year. But in the context of his other films, I’d give it
a B. I’ll split the difference and give it a high B+.
Max's Grade:
I’m giving it a pretty unreserved A-. It’s the most joyful
experience I’ve had in a theater in I don’t know how long. Go see this fucking thing!
Roundtable Directory:
Geometria
Cronos
Mimic (director's cut)
The Devil's Backbone
Blade II
Hellboy (director's cut)
Pan's Labyrinth
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Unmade Del Toro
Pacific Rim
Roundtable Directory:
Geometria
Cronos
Mimic (director's cut)
The Devil's Backbone
Blade II
Hellboy (director's cut)
Pan's Labyrinth
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Unmade Del Toro
Pacific Rim
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