Culture

Rating: 3.5/5

Guillermo del Toro is one of my favourite modern directors. Regardless of whether he is dabbling in horror (The Orphanage), dark fantasy (Pan’s Labyrinth) or action (Hellboy), he brings to each of his movies a unique sense of wonder and imagination. Pacific Rim sees del Toro exploring both science fiction and the monster genre, in a big-budget blockbuster critics are calling “the Star Wars for a new millennium.” Does Pacific Rim deliver on this lofty praise? Does it live up to the hype? Sort of.

I’ll start by clarifying that Pacific Rim is a big dumb popcorn flick, and it knows it. Boiled down, it is a movie about thousand-foot robots brawling with colossal monsters from outer space. There is an impressive amount of time and attention devoted to the characters who inhabit the robots (far more than in the Transformers franchise), but ultimately Pacific Rim’s focus is on its gargantuan fight scenes.

It has more of a plot than most movies of this variety: in the near future, an inter-dimensional portal appears on the Pacific Ocean floor and starts coughing out huge aliens (the Kaijus). To defend our planet, the human race manufactures equally enormous mecha (the Jaegers) that, through a neural bond, are piloted by two (or in one case three) strapping young pilots. To its credit, Pacific Rim spends a hell of a long time developing the science behind all of this remarkable technology, especially when it comes to the mental link the pilots share in order to control the Jaegers. When they’re hooked up, all of their memories, secrets and fears are pooled, resulting in some interesting downtime between the massive fight scenes.

Unfortunately, Pacific Rim is undone somewhat by its middling actors and dialogue. Idris Elba is fantastic as the fatherly commanding officer of the Jaeger pilots, but the mediocrity of the rest of the cast and the second-rate script they read from prevents Pacific Rim from being the classic it’s being hailed as. The action is sensational, the visuals are stunning, and the overall operatic grandeur makes for a thrilling couple of hours. But its flaws make Pacific Rim fun rather than fantastic.