Pacific Rim, Take II.

Pacific Rim starts out with a giddy Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam) waking up his brother as if it were Christmas Day. The cause of his excitement? A massive Kaiju (extraterrestrial dinosaur) has just been spotted coming from the sea, and it is up to them to pilot their one-of-a-kind Jaeger (a big, customized robot) to stop it before it reaches land. Pacific Rim is a magnificent action film, and from the opening fight scenes, director Guillermo Del Toro delivers.

Del Toro brings an impressive clarity of vision not only to the elaborately detailed, Kaiju ridden, cynical world he created to stage his fights in, but also to every beautifully composed shot of the film. Pacific Rim is never dull or dark, like so many contemporary action movies, a phenomenon that can be traced to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. It relishes fluorescent blues, bright neon pinks, greens and oranges above all. It is brimming with color and life in every frame, and it is edited in a way that lets viewers behold the majesty of the Jaegers and the Kaiju with plenty of wide shots -- to emphasize the overall choreography of the action sequences -- and loving closeups  -- to take in the painstakingly designed details, such as the rocket-propelled metallic arm of the main Jaeger, the Gypsy Danger. But for all of its monsters versus robots glory, at its core, Pacific Rim is a film about relationships, about the bonds we build to make life worth living.

 At the beginning of the story, even before the first fight, Del Toro takes care to show how much Raleigh’s brother Yancy means to him. He dies relatively quickly, but the impact of that loss carries deep consequences which resonate throughout the film. Raleigh loses faith in humanity as a result of his personal loss, and resigns himself, like most of the scattered population, to hiding from the Kaiju by building a wall that no one really thinks has a chance of stopping the beasts, but a wall that allows enough escape from life to be a welcome project for many who no doubt have suffered similar loses as Raleigh did. Del Toro quietly studies the cynicism which has corroded humanity, but never shines a spotlight on it like he does on the action. It exists just beyond the edges of the frame, making it much more powerful and understated. But it is there, and it lends an emotional weight to the action lacking in many movies. When Raleigh fights the Kaiju, we get a feeling that he’s fighting to restore humanity from its current, broken state. 

After the prologue, the film picks up with Raleigh in this dark place and traces his classic hero’s journey as he regains hope and finds new reasons to live. I find the drift -- the connection which requires Jaeger pilots to be honest with one another, to share memories and feelings as they jointly control their machine -- to be a brilliant, incredibly useful concept. It is used as a simple metaphor to explore our need for our need for codependence, and it also serves as the justification for a few flashbacks, thus providing the film with some of its finest scenes and images (Idris Elba piloting a Jaeger solo!). In the drift, Raleigh is forced to face his past and the death of his brother, which eventually allows him to move on, with the help of his copilot Mako, of course.

There are  so many great character moments in this film that it astounds me that it was simply brushed off as another massive, meaningless action film. Almost every character is given someone to care about, someone to fight for, and Del Toro provides plenty of scenes with several different pairs of characters to deepen their bonds and show us why the battle against the Kaiju is worth the trouble. A particular favorite scene of mine features Marshall Pentecost, the resistance leader, quietly chatting with Mako, his adoptive daughter, before he goes to his death. He reassures her, and lets her know he's proud of her, but before he goes on to give his "cancel the apocalypse" speech to the troops, he looks her in the eye and straightens his posture, something that makes Mako snap up from her slumped position. It is like a little private joke to which the audience is only partly privy.  These characters have a shared history, a life that extends beyond the film, and possibly into an unknown future. That’s the reason they fight the Kaiju. They make the action matter. 

Verdict- 4/4
Pacific Rim (2013) 2h 12min. PG-13

Random Thought
- “Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out,” said Martin Scorsese. I thought about the quote a lot while watching Pacific Rim this time.
- Hannibal Chau, “you like the name? I took it from my favorite historical character and my second-favorite Szechuan restaurant in Brooklyn.”