Pacific Rim - Cinema Review

Motion pictures at the cinema have always been about spectacle. From the earliest recordings of trains arriving where audience members fled in fear thinking it would actually keep travelling through the screen and towards them. To modern day blockbusters; packed with special effects and bombastic dramatic stylising to try and retain it's purpose against the convenience of television, dvds and the internet. This obsession with dazzling the audience all too often results in a lacklustre or mediocre storyline, forgetting that we need to be immersed in the plot to properly feel amazement at those spectacular stand out moments. Pacific Rim understands this to an almost perfect degree.

The premise is relatively simple in that hostile monsters called Kaiju have emerged from the ocean floor and humanity's best defence lies with towering mechanical robots called Jaegers. Said robots need to be piloted by two people in order to deal with the mental strain of controlling these colossal mechs. Things get a bit more complicated when the two pilots must experience a melding of minds in order to work together and control the Jaegers. This perfectly sets up our relatable human characters in roles deeply intertwined with the spectacle of Godzilla creatures fighting gargantuan killer robots and avoids the need to have humans dragged into the fray on flimsy pretences and spend the whole time cowering beneath bloody robot testicles.

I'm running out of adjectives for just how big these things are...

The obvious comparison is with the aforeimplied Transformers movies but Pacific Rim frankly blows them out of the water. One of the most frustrating things with those patronising, clueless nauseating tumours of films was losing track of the action because of a camera too focused on a robot's knee as it goes flying across the screen. Mercifully Pacific Rim suffers very few of these moments, and when it's not pulling the camera back to give us some perspective on the size of the combatants and actually enhancing the epic atmosphere, it has the courtesy to hold a closer shot for a few valuable seconds more so we can determine what the hell we're looking at.

 Another important point is that the Jaegers are far from indestructible. There is a high point, through the years, of victory over the monsters that the film fleetingly visits but most of the film has humanity on its last legs with only four of the giant mechs surviving to struggle on. Hulls are breached, chests are clawed open, arms torn off and pilots ripped from supposed safety into the Kaiju's merciless imposing jaws. This vulnerability is established early on and there's no magical maguffins to restore the Jaegars instantly. Just months or sometimes years of hard labour, assuming the mech survives to return to base and this is without mentioning the mental scarring the pilots can suffer as a result of melding with co-pilot and machine.

The characters themselves are fairly considered and with depth to be explored as the film progresses. There are a few wincing stereotypes in the form of Asian martial artists and cold brutish Russians playing the parts of other Jaegar pilots but the more important characters thankfully come across as more convincing and engaging. After the film several plot holes became slowly apparent and it dawns that Pacific Rim is not perfect in terms of its story.
However the important point to note is that for me personally, these revelations happened after the film had finished and the plot holds up enough to keep you interested and invested throughout its actual showing.

Telling you just enough to keep watching but not enough to dispel the mysteries.

The film balances several storylines involving the Jaegar pilots, the military general in charge of the pilots and quirky scientists who attempt to find the cause of the monstrous Kaiju. The pacing is exceptional and we're never kept too long or too briefly with any of the main characters but they prove diverse enough to appeal to a wide range of audiences. The acting is also far better than i'm used to seeing in these kinds of films and there is a fantastic balance of gripping physical drama in the action scenes and moving emotional scenes dealing with the mental impact this new world of mammoth monsters has on the average human. The overall feeling you get from Pacific Rim is still one of spectacle but it's spectacle filmmaking how it should be done, by not forgetting the substance and foundations needed for us to feel tension, excitement and awe in the first place.