As a war between humankind and monstrous sea creatures wages on, a
former pilot and a trainee are paired up to drive a seemingly obsolete
special weapon in a desperate effort to save the world from the
apocalypse.
Director:
Writers:
Stars:
Story:
The Mexican cinéaste
Guillermo del Toro
is a brilliant writer, producer and director of horror, fantasy and
supernatural movies, one of the most gifted to have emerged in these
fields since
Tod Browning and
James Whale
in the 1920s and 30s. His finest films to date have been made in Spain,
most notably two subtle gothic fables set during the civil war and its
aftermath,
The Devil's Backbone and
Pan's Labyrinth. But he's also made the highly popular American horror flicks
Hellboy and
Hellboy II aimed at a younger audience and both starring Ron Perlman as the eponymous comic-book superhero, and his new picture,
Pacific Rim, which he co-scripted with Travis Beacham, belongs to this category.
Pacific Rim is a holiday blockbuster, a $180m bag of popcorn as unpretentious as it is expensive, designed, del Toro says, for
family
outings, his own included. Exactly the same honest claim was made by
Richard Burton when explaining, if explanation was needed, why he was
making
Where Eagles Dare
back in the 1960s. He said it was far too long since he'd made a
picture that his own children could (or might want to) see. Indeed if
you look at the 15 pictures he'd made after
Cleopatra
(rereleased this week to mark its 50th anniversary), you can see his
point. I remember my own children, then aged 10, eight and six lapping
up
Where Eagles Dare back in 1969, the same year they also loved
The Valley of Gwangi, the British monster movie by the great special effects maestro
Ray Harryhausen, the co-dedicatee of
Pacific Rim along with Ishiro Honda, who made the series of Japanese monster flicks that began in the 1950s with
Godzilla and
Rodan.
Pacific Rim
is a war movie set in a near future that resembles in its combination
of high technology with cultural and social dilapidation the grim worlds
to come in
Alien and
Blade Runner.
The opening narration tells us that for too long we've been looking to
the heavens in awed anticipation of visitors or invaders from above when
in fact we should have been keeping an eye on gateways to hell that
admit unwanted strangers from below. Some seven years earlier creatures
known as Kaiju, the size of tower blocks and far less friendly than King
Kong, slipped out of Pacific troughs due to shifting tectonic plates
and began setting about states bordering the ocean. Nothing new about
this of course. The human response, however, was new. Giant robots known
as Jaegers were created, each the size of the Statue of Liberty.
They're manned by pairs of operators who need to build a neural bridge
between their minds so they can work together in a way that the machine
can mimic and replicate in battles against the Kaiju.
After a
spectacular fight in which large boats are flung around like corvettes
in the Lilliputian navy, the Kaiju appear to be winning, and some years
later the Earth is moving to the desperate Plan B, which means investing
everything in a giant containing wall around the Pacific rim. We also
learn, for those who like moral explanations, that these monsters thrive
in our polluted atmosphere, and that they're controlled, as they have
been for millennia, by malevolent colonial powers. Then comes that
familiar apocalyptic moment when a great leader, a former four-star
general, is given "one last chance". Called Stacker Pentecost, his very
name is resonant enough to make you shake even without the formidable
presence behind it of Idris Elba, shortly to play Nelson Mandela in
The Long Walk to Freedom.
He's allowed to form a final Jaeger team based in Hong Kong to confront
the ever bolder, more ferocious enemy in an ultimate showdown.
He
recruits an international team of ace pilots from each edge of the rim,
to be led on this do-or-die mission by a Chinese woman, two Australians
and an American who's lost his brother in action and has the equally
resonant name of Raleigh Becket. All have their own demons to contend
with and they're united (and divided) as fathers, sons and daughters. To
provide a sort of comic relief there is a pair of dotty scientists on
hand (one of them with a gammy leg and called Gottlieb, in honour of
Kubrick's
Dr Strangelove).
Also present is a maverick entrepreneur called Hannibal Chau (played by
del Toro regular Ron Perlman), a not unfamiliar science-fiction
character who wears gold-plated shoes and collects remnants of the
monsters for sale to dubious international clients.
In addition to
Blade Runner and
Alien, the movie touches several other bases, among them Christopher Nolan's
Inception as well as
RoboCop,
Iron Man and
Independence Day.
It imitates the last named right down to Stacker Pentecost gathering
his band of brothers around him to deliver an uplifting prose version of
King Harry's eve of Agincourt speech, which, as a result of Laurence
Olivier's
Henry V, is forever associated with D-day in 1944 by my now dwindling generation.
Del
Toro generally manages to keep triumphalism at bay, avoids solemnity,
gives each nation a fair share of the limelight and cheerfully embraces
the mock seriousness that such films insist on. He also plants a little
joke halfway through the final credits both to reward the few people who
haven't removed their 3D glasses and left the cinema, and to let them
know that a sequel is a strong possibility. He has been greatly helped
in the project by his regular cinematographer Guillermo Navarro and the
excellent production designer Andrew Neskoromny, both of them highly
experienced in this genre.
Trailer:
Movie Rating (max. 5 Stars):
Summary:
A nice science fiction movie with sympatic main actors. It is not a very groundbreaking story, but basically an interesting and entertaining storyline. Never thougt to look to my watch during the 130 minutes.
So my facit ...
Box Office:
| Domestic Total as of Oct. 3, 2013: $101,665,095 |
| Distributor: Warner Bros. | Release Date: July 12, 2013 |
| Genre: Sci-Fi Action | Runtime: 2 hrs. 11 min. |
| MPAA Rating: PG-13 | Production Budget: $190 million |
Reverences:
www.imbd.com
www.theguardian.com
www.youtube.com
www.boxofficemojo.com
