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Deep and meaningless


FILM REVIEW

Pacific Rim
DIRECTED BY: Guillermo Del Toro
STARRING: Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, Idris Elba
CERT: 12A

Oh look, it’s the apocalypse! Again! And it’s just around the corner, round about the year 2020. This is when we Earthlings discover we have a bit of a problem. A huge one, really. Lots and lots of huge problems, to be honest about it.

No, not huge zombies. As far as I am aware, the undead have yet to discover that large doses of banned substances can do wonders for their muscle mass and athletic prowess in general. The Zombie Games is a distant prospect.

The doomsday visitors are not aliens from outer space, either, or demons let loose on the earth following the Rapture. They’re not even massive comets, hurtling mercilessly towards impact to obliterate us all and magically reawaken the dinosaurs. Though now that you mention big lizards…

Mankind will meet its doom at the hands – and feet, and claws, and teeth, and wings, and tentacles, and big scaly tails – of gigantic beasts who emerge from the ocean. A breach has opened between dimensions, down in the depths of the Pacific. Like that time military experiments opened a hole between dimensions in Stephen King’s The Mist and big flying monsters (and even scarier spiders) started terrorizing the local shops.

Only, Pacific Rim has its origins in the 1960s Japanese monster battle genre that spawned movies like Godzilla vs The Sea Monster. Director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) is a long time fan and fellow fanatics will have a right hooley here. If that’s not your cup of tea, this is still a big load of silly fun – in between times when it’s a big load of silly, tedious rubbish.
Anyway, these creatures come from the deep. They’re called Kaiju, which is Japanese for “strange beast who hates that movie, Pearl Harbor – and, well, harbours in general”.

So, anyone living by the sea along the Pacific Rim – in San Francisco, say, or within sight of the Sydney Opera House – is in for a bit of a stomping.
In response, the humans build monsters of their own, massive robots called Jaegers, which is German for “hunter who really, really wants to be Iron Man but has to settle for being The Iron Giant, which was actually a better movie”.

For a while, the Jaegers and their human pilots seem to be doing the trick. But these monsters keep on coming and soon they have the upper hand again only this time they’re going to finish us off.
As usual, the only man who can save the day is retired. Raleigh Becket (Hunnam) was once the top pilot in the program but packed it in for family reasons.

With not an awful lot of persuasion from his former commander Stacker Pentacost (Elba), he agrees to get back in the saddle on his old robot. His chosen co-pilot is rookie Mori (Kikuchi), a fine young woman whose dark memories he will have to share in order to operate the Jaeger – a mind-meld process known as neural drift, an element of the story that might have been very intriguing if Del Toro had taken a minute to stop thinking about the next monster fight.

The Jaegers are back to kick lumps out of anything with scales, to cancel the Apocalypse, as the man says. Their mission: nuke the Kaiju nest to kingdom come, using what I can only presume is called a Jaeger Bomb. That will hit the spot, right enough.

On a certain level, Pacific Rim is basically Godzilla vs Transformers, and every bit as stupefying as that sounds. Robots and monsters beat the daylights out of each other and, in between rounds, disposable cardboard characters spiel off trite dialogue that must have been written by infants exposed to too many bad movies and not enough Spongebob. Certainly they don’t know what comedy is, or we wouldn’t have to endure a pair of “mad” scientists (Charlie Day, Burn Gorman) whose contribution is supposed to be comic relief.

Now, some will say this is the whole point, that it’s cheesy and rubbish on purpose – sure weren’t those old monster movies only pure ridiculous in the first place? That’s one way of seeing it, but I don’t buy it – there’s just no excuse for how bad this gets.

Then again, there’s no denying how good it can be, either. Visually, it can be downright incredible and in this sense – the design of the monsters and machines, the destruction, the entire look of this world he creates – Del Toro and his movie tower over Michael Bay and his Transformers.
Though sometimes the fights can drag on and be repetitive, if I didn’t get a huge kick out of watching these giants beat the living crap out of each other, I’d have to admit I have no soul. It’s great fun.

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