After the end of the Millennium series of Godzilla we have only had a few extra Japanese kaiju movies made. Around this time, American producers seemed to pick up some interest in giant monsters. So the next several movies we cover are primarily going to be American releases! Finally, the Americans have gotten on board with how awesome kaiju are. The first of these films we're going through is Pacific Rim, directed by the legendary Guillermo del Toro. It is also the 21st century, so the era of suit actors for the monsters is functionally completely over. Our monsters (and robots, in this case) are now CGI. We will talk about suit actors in more detail in a later post. But it is something I will miss.
Pacific Rim is a movie about robots fighting Kaiju, so we in lieu of suit actors for the creatures we now have lots of human characters as the pilots of the robots. The most prominent stars of this one are Charlie Hunnam as Raleigh Becket, Rinko Kikuchi is Mako Mori, Idris Elba as Stacker Pentecost, and Charlie Day as Dr. Newt Geiszler.
There's no significant background drama to this one. It's a movie that was made by an American studio helmed by a Mexican director taking place primarily in China. Del Toro has claimed that the theme of the movie is empathy and/or togetherness, so if that's not a perfect example of that I don't know what is. Let's go!
If You Haven't Seen it Before
- Some years ago, giant monsters (called Kaiju in the movie) came out of the ocean and destroyed several cities and killed many people before humanity built giant robots called Jaegers that could fight back.
- Main character Raleigh pilots Gipsy Danger with his brother, as all Jaegers are piloted by 2+ pilots. On a fateful mission fighting a Kaiju, his brother is killed when he's ripped out of the cockpit, but Raleigh somehow manages to survive and even finish off their foe.
- Retired from Kaiju fighting life, Raleigh is brought back to the ranks with the promise of one last mission which will end the Kaiju threat for good.
- The plan is to go to the source of the Breach, the interdimensional portal allowing Kaiju to come to Earth, and blow it up with a giant bomb. This is time critical as the Kaiju attacks are coming faster and faster each time and they are expecting a double event (multiple Kaiju in one day) within a week.
- Still needing a 2nd pilot, Raleigh holds tryouts with everyone before finding a bond with Mako Mori, the adopted daughter of the boss Stacker Pentecost.
- In a training exercise, Mako loses control and nearly destroys the control center with the plasma cannon. Proving Stacker's initial hesitance to let her pilot correct, she and Raleigh are grounded.
- Shortly thereafter, a Kaiju emerges from near Hong Kong. All of the remaining 3 Jaegers are deployed, with Gipsy Danger left behind.
- 2 of the remaining 3 Jaegers (and their pilots) are killed when the Kaiju surprises everyone with an ambush partner (a double event), which also lures the 3rd robot Striker Eureka into the battle, only to be completely disabled with an EMP weapon one of the kaiju has.
- Gipsy Danger, being the last option and completely analog (nuclear), finally joins the battle since no one else is available to stop the 2 remaining kaiju. It pretty handily fucks them up, though does get taken into (and falls out of) the stratosphere in the process.
- Back on the ground, one of the pilots of Striker Eureka has been injured and is unable to continue the fight. But Marshal Stacker Pentecost is going to be the 2nd pilot of Striker Eureka despite knowing that piloting another Jaeger is going to kill him (after a past incident).
- Once under the ocean and approaching the Breach, Gipsy Danger quickly loses an arm and Striker Eureka is almost completely disabled because now there are 3 Kaiju with which to do battle.
- Revising the plan to have Gispy Danger explode it's nuclear core inside the Breach, Striker Eureka lures the monsters in before setting off their own bomb (and, of course, dying) in an explosion so powerful that it literally displaces the ocean.
- Heading into the Breach, Raleigh evacuates Mako before riding Gipsy Danger through the entire wormhole and making it face to face with their alien invaders. He sets Gipsy Danger to explode before riding his own evac pod back to the surface. Gispy Danger explodes in a fancy light show.
- Barely surviving, and the only Jaeger pilots to survive this entire endeavor, Raleigh and Mako simply touch heads with no words necessary as they have now been in each other's brains for quite some time.
Kaiju Notes
- The focus in this film is definitely the Jaegers over the Kaiju, quite different from most movies we cover on this blog. That said, the Jaegers are pretty cool. The Kaiju have clear design elements as well, but they tend to be grayish amalgamations of animals. Still clearly well-loved, but the focus is on the robots.
- (Almost) All of the Jaegers have cool shit in their design. Gipsy Danger has a sweetass turbine in its chest, Crimson Typhoon has three arms and is piloted by three brothers with spinning blades on each hand, Cherno Alpha is just a giant hulking beast, and Striker Eureka is... a pretty generic robot, but does have missile launchers hidden beneath it's chest plate.
- The Kaiju on the other hand, are pretty much just amalgamations of animals. There's a shark one, a gorilla looking guy, a fishy one, a crab-ish one. It's hard to make any particular assessments when the Kaiju are not the star of the show. They're more interesting in their abilities than in their appearance, and even those are pretty generic outside of the scene in Hong Kong where the Kaiju brought some interesting weapons to the table.
- The Jaegers, on the other hand, truly seem to use their robotic nature to its full advantage: hidden weapons and design elements that would never be "natural" all in the same creature. Gipsy Danger, for instance, has a rocket in the elbows to extra punching power, a plasma cannon built into each hand, and a kickass sword which can function as either solid blades or whips. It would make zero sense as part of a natural creature, but in robots it's the perfect combination of ingenuity and utility.
I love this movie. You'd think with a focus on robots rather than monsters that that might hurt my interest in the movie because I'm here for monsters not robots. Here's the dirty secret of this blog, don't tell anybody: robots are cooler than monsters. Who's my favorite kaiju? Gigan, a robot. If they made more films about robots (especially giant ones), this would be a blog about robot movies. So, Pacific Rim is great. It's not the most thematically dense or rich film, there's few important themes, it's not complex or leave you questioning. It's a movie about giant robots punching giant monsters in their giant faces, with the directorial excellence of Guillermo del Toro behind it. What more do you really need? It's not going to change the world, and it doesn't need to: it's baller.
That said, there's not a whole lot else to be said about it. I like it, it's nice. What else? ROBOTS COOL. What else?
Okay but I do have two things - the first is the film's biggest weakness. I feel like a we know enough about the pilots of Gipsy Danger and Striker Eureka to follow a general character arc for them. And the movie itself is relatively bleak, with only a few people surviving to the end. It seems that part of the message of this movie is truly "war is hell," and we do see that on a resource level but we don't feel it on an emotional one. When 2 of the 4 remaining Jaegers (and their crews) die in Hong Kong, we understand this is bad but we know nothing about the characters so it's difficult if not impossible to sympathize with them. I have seen this movie no less than 5 times in my life and could not even tell you the name of the pilots in either Cherno Alpha or the Crimson Typhoon. I know the Crimson Typhoon pilots are triplet brothers and I think the Cherno Alpha team are father and daughter, but they get absolutely no attention so when they die it really seems more like "aw damn that robot died' and not "aw damn those people died". Some sort of characterization or even knowing their names would potentially go a long way in making their deaths and the loss of more people on this mission to literally save the world hold more weight. Raleigh and Mako could have been avenging their lost compatriots rather than beating up big monsters because Kaiju are dangerous. Just a bit of wasted potential on the character front. It's not as though the robots themselves have any personality outside of the pilots, so it wasn't like there wasn't space for a few more personalities.
The only other significant thing I can think to mention is that Pacific Rim is a great example of subtlety in movie-making. The characters have thoughts and hope and dreams which are implied but largely left untouched, as things might happen in real life. Mako and Stacker being adopted family is basically never officially acknowledged, the grudging respect that the younger of the Striker Eureka pilots develops for Raleigh and Mako goes unmentioned, and Mako and Raleigh's apparent romance is left at apparent. These are just three examples, but all point to the same thing I'm going for here. It's impossible to do a movie like this without exposition, but if anything ever tried to pull it off it's Pacific Rim. This is something I really appreciate because 1) exposition and explaining every thought and feeling your characters have it boring and 2) it leaves room for interpretation. Does drifting with someone really show you every memory someone has? That seems... intense. Does Mako now have the memories of both Raleigh and his dead brother? How does Hercules feel about sending his son on a suicide mission? Why is everyone's name so damn strange? Lack of explanation, but I dig it!
Pacific Rim is dope and it does dope shit. End of. Watch it if you have literally any interest in either kaiju or robots (or both)!
Next: Godzilla (2014 film)!
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