Pacific Rim (2013) Review

Tagline: To fight monsters we created monsters

Pacific Rim (2013) Review

 

I can’t believe in all the time I’ve had this blog it’s taken me this long to finally review Pacific Rim. The year the giant monster epic came out I put it in my top ten of the year, but in the time since it came out, I’ve seen it multiple times, and still find it a highly entertaining sci-fi/action adventure, despite some issues I have with it. Even though it’s not in the realm of horror, Clayton’s Creepy Cinema is still all about monsters and genre stuff, and Pacific Rim is one of the definitive monster movies of the 2010s.

Director Guillermo Del Toro is great at making sympathetic and heroic monster characters, as evidenced in films like Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy (even better example: he won a freaking Oscar for The Shape of Water!) but in Pacific Rim the monsters are the bad guys, and they are wonderful tributes to the daikaiju of classic Japanese tokusatsu. Daikaiju is the Japanese term for giant monster (though they are referred to simply as kaiju in this film, a term already familiar to hardcore monster movie fans, but Pacific Rim helped popularize the term for the masses in the past decade) and tokusatsu is the Japanese term for films that use heavy amounts of special effects. I’m referring in particular to Godzilla and all the other Toho productions, but Pacific Rim also pays tribute to the giant robots of those films (and animes and mangas and half a dozen other media) with the Jaegers, the giant mechs built to destroy the invasion of kaiju.

There’s no time wasted in getting the story underway. The kaiju come through a portal at the bottom of an ocean trench, and main character Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) gives us a great voiceover of the early days of invasion, combat, and global decline into post-apocalypse. After a thrilling action sequence, we finally get to the opening title—seriously, it doesn’t grace the screen until almost twenty minutes in, making it feel totally redundant—then we skip ahead to 2025 and Raleigh is asked to return to fight the increasing kaiju attacks with the old school Jaeger Gipsy Danger. It’s not a super original story, but Pacific Rim really nails the world building and makes the monsters fresh. It packs in enough sci-fi concepts (like the kaiju being clones from another dimension sent by otherworldly beings, or “the drift”, where two pilots share their brain power (and thus memories and thoughts) to control the Jaegers) that it keeps your interest, even when the not-always-interesting human characters are doing their thing in between action sequences.

The battle in Hong Kong is the centerpiece of the film, and it’s an action spectacle. The only problem is, the battles between the kaiju and jaegers are so good, the final battle isn’t able to top Hong Kong, despite being set at the bottom of the ocean and featuring even cooler-looking monsters. One of my biggest issues that always bugs me is the pacing. There is a notable gap between monster fights in the middle, there’s a derivative scene of bow staff fighting that’s cool but also goes on a little too long, and the human characters feel like they get in the way sometimes.

Pacific Rim may be lacking in a few ways, but it is a visual treat and has it where it counts when it comes to a monster movie. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, delivers high-quality action and cgi, has an epic original score, and despite trying to be the start of a franchise which currently contains a lackluster sequel, Netflix anime spinoff, and comics, stands on its own as a solid piece of original entertainment.