I have been waiting to see this movie for months now because it looked epic and awesome and with the Missus and The Cigarillo visiting her Mom and her Grandparents in Iowa Falls for a couple of days and with enough coverage at work last night, I took a couple of hours of vacation to go and catch the late show.
And you know what? This movie was epic. And it was awesome. And it managed to do something rare: it made me feel like a kid again while thinking 'this is fucking awesome' over and over again. (The last movie to do that was the first- not the excrement filled sequels- Transformers movie.) Pacific Rim opens seven years into humanity's epic war against the kaiju- monsters that emerge from an inter-dimensional rift deep beneath Pacific Ocean. After suffering through the initial attacks on San Francisco and Manilla humanity needed a way to fight back and came up with the jaeger program- gigantic robots to fight the kaiju.
The jaegers are piloted by two pilots- one for the left side of the brain one for the right side of the brain joined by a neural connection called 'the Drift' and soon humanity starts winning- but it doesn't last and soon the kaiju are winning, the jaegers are losing and the governments of the world lose faith in the program, terminate it and start building a gigantic wall to wall off the coasts and provide some semblance of protection from the kaiju.
The head of the jaeger program, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) has enough time to assemble one, last desperate mission bringing back Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) an ex-Jaeger pilot of the old American jaeger Gipsy Danger. He used to pilot with his brother Yancey who was killed and ripped out of the cockpit during a kaiju attack. Now with one final chance to close the rift, Stacker brings Raleigh back to pilot a revived Gipsy Danger along with the Australian Jaeger Striker Eureka, Russia's Cherno Alphia and China's Crimson Typhoon. With a mega nuclear weapon, they're going to attack the rift and detonate it, hopefully sealing the rift once and for all.
It's obvious that Guillermo Del Toro put a lot of heart into this movie and the sense of scale is exactly right. You see the rivets and the bolts and the rust and wear and tear on all the jaegers. You get a sense of how massive and destructive the kaiju attacks are. (The battle for Hong Kong is just about as epic as you could possible get.) The kaiju have shades of Godzilla about them but manage to be equally as epic as their metallic, gigantic robot counterparts.
It's not a perfect movie, but then again, it doesn't have to be. At it's heart this is about gigantic robots fighting gigantic monsters and it seems ridiculous sometimes but it's sublimely, beautifully ridiculous and you don't care. The dialogue gets clunky in places but that too you're willing to forgive because well, everything else is just so awesome... you don't care. This is a rare, beautiful movie: it's not a sequel. It's not a reboot. It's not some dark re-imagining or barbaric destruction of some part of your childhood in the name of making mindless amounts of money for Hollywood. It's an original story and an original movie that's designed to be more than anything else, fun. And that's a beautiful thing.
Overall: **** out of **** Sheer, epic awesomeness all around. I'm torn about whether I want to see sequels. I think there's potential there but they also ended the movie in such a way that this could be the only movie or there could be sequels.
After that snore-fest known as Lone Ranger, I'm just glad to get a movie that's fun and knows what it is. For better or worse. Good review Tom.
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