Pacific Rim

Like most children, I was obsessed with dinosaurs.  I remember digging in my backyard, hoping to find even the smallest evidence of an Ankylosaurus or of my favorite dinosaur, the Allosaurus.  The Allosaurus is like a smaller, faster Tyrannosaurus Rex and he could bust some serious heads.  Reminiscing on my paleontologist past, I think I understand my passion and perhaps most children's passion for those scaly, walking monsters.  When I was a child, the world felt like a big, strange place.  From the low vantage point of three feet, everything loomed over me and seemed ready to topple down on my brittle body.  Like most children, I had no real control over my daily life.  I could only get food through my parents and go outside only with their permission.  How envious I was then of the Allosaurus, stomping where he pleased and chomping down on any poor creature that crossed its path.  That was control.  That was power.

I wouldn't be surprised if Guillermo Del Toro spent his youth sifting through the dirt, searching for prehistoric fossils.  Watching Del Toro's newest film, Pacific Rim, I connected with that three-foot tall, toe-headed youth.  Though I stand at a staggering 6 feet 7 inches now, I felt very small in the theater, looking up at giant robots fighting 10-story dimensional invaders.  Absent in so many blockbusters is a sense of awe and amazement.  We have become cynical and unimpressed by expensive special effects.  Oh, that space ship just disintegrated in a black hole? Big deal.  That truck transformed into a talking robot.  What's on the next channel?  Yep, we've seen it all and it takes a truly talented director to make us look up and gasp in amazement.  It takes a director like Guillermo Del Toro to make us feel like kids.

All of Del Toro's films deal with themes of childhood in supernatural settings.  In the frightening The Devil's Backbone, a young orphan unravels a ghostly mystery while coming to terms with his own isolation.  In the beautiful Pan's Labyrinth, a small girl escapes into a fantasy world as her country is ravaged by revolution and war.  Even Del Toro's comic book films, Blade II and the Hellboy series, feature monstrous orphan protagonists trying to find their place in a "normal" world.  And now we have Pacific Rim, Del Toro's biggest budget film to date.  While the story doesn't deal with those same childhood themes, it feels like Del Toro's childhood imagination, perhaps our collective childhood imagination, played out on the screen.

The story of Pacific Rim is simple.  Big robots fight big monsters to save the world.  And...that's it.  In a different context, this would be a criticism.  However, after a summer full of films with lame plot twists, uneven characters, and ostentatious direction, it is refreshing to see a straightforward story depicted with such confidence and clarity.  Pacific Rim is basically a mosaic of blockbuster and Anime clichés, but Del Toro embraces them with great affection, giving the film an earnest and fun atmosphere.  True, some jokes die and some lines are drizzled with cheese, but Del Toro knows what his story is and he presents it in a streamlined yet nuanced way.  He also knows that his audience came to see robots punching monsters in the face.  And he gives it to them.

Del Toro has a great eye for scale.  In the Transformers films, Michael Bay never really learned how to capture the scale of his Autobots and Decepticons.  A director with a long history in the visual arts, Del Toro places small human figures next to his fighting machines to truly show their towering height.  The robots and monsters are also often shown from extremely low angles. The director even places his virtual camera on the backs of the shambling monsters, exhibiting their great power.  These seem like simple tricks, but they are ignored by so many action directors.  Del Toro understands that it’s the small things that make a film feel big.
And the action itself is no less big.  When metal clashes with alien flesh, you can feel the impact.  The action choreography is over-the-top, but still grounded by physics.  The computer generated creatures move slowly, with great effort.  As in all his films, Del Toro is fascinated by moving gears.  He shows the turning cogs and pumping pistons. We see what drives these machines and the weight of their power.  The editing moves at a similar pace, and we can actually see what is happening.  Del Toro allows us to relish the beautiful carnage.  This isn't the clashing, confusing mess of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, or the epileptic editing of a Christopher Nolan fight scene.  These are confident, exciting tableaus painted by an expert hand.

In his English-speaking films, Del Toro has never been as expert when it comes to directing actors.  That is the true weak point of the film.  As the film's protagonist Raleigh Becket, Charlie Hunnam is disappointing.  I have never understood the hype surrounding Hunnam.  He's good looking, sure, but his voice is annoying and his delivery repetitive. He's like this middle school teacher I had.  Everyone liked him.  The girls wanted to date him and the guys wanted to be like him.  I just sat in the back row making fun of his poor pedagogy. And he couldn't even draw...Sorry.  Hunnam's definitely less annoying than that guy.  It's nice to see Ron Perlman back with Del Toro again.  Perlman has been present since the director's first film, Cronos.  In Pacific Rim, he plays a black market dealer in monster entrails.  He's not in the film much, but he steals all his scenes.  Charlie Day is also funny as a monster biologist who has clearly had too much coffee.

And, finally, the film is truly lucky to have Idris Elba aboard.  Elba portrays Stacker Pentecost, the head of the robot fighting army.  Isn't that a badass name?  It makes Lee Marvin sound like he should be a cashier at Staples.  As always, Elba gives an intense and amusing performance.  He carries himself with an air of great authority and he delivers even the most poorly-written militaristic dialogue with great gusto and skill.  He gets to deliver his own version of Henry V's St. Crispin's Day Speech.  The writing is pretty crappy in comparison to the Bard, but Elba sells it.  I got chills, even though I was laughing.

That's the sign of true skill in Hollywood — a director who can take what appears to be a generic lame property and turn it into something special.  Pacific Rim is by no means Guillermo Del Toro's best film.  In fact, it's probably one of his worst.  Still, compared to the utter detritus that passes for big budget movies these days, it's downright brilliant.  Del Toro hasn't lost touch with his inner child and we're all the better for it.  For two hours, I got to stare up at creatures who exhibit great control and power.  As an adult, when everything still feels pretty out of control, it's a nice feeling.