Brace yourself, otaku boys across the globe, Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim is the most expensive B-movie ever! And that's a big, big compliment in the season of sterile blockbusters, for this is an immensely imaginative, wildly exhilarating ride through kaiju geekery, Godzilla roars, apocalyptic frenzy and robot fetishism. In short, an East Asian monster flick begotten from the unlikely womb of a Mexican director by way of Hollywood surrogates. Move over Marvel heroes and Superbore, Pacific Rim is the most shamelessly entertaining summer movie we've seen so far this year.
Pacific Rim
Starring Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi and Idris Elba. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro.
Of course I'm speaking from the perspective of a generation that grew up watching Godzilla flicks and Japanese monster TV movies _ those low-tech apocalyptic flicks full of hyperbole from the hi-tech nation that knows a few things about annihilation (or being annihilated). Some early reviews from US-based reviewers call Pacific Rim "derivative", which is completely missing the point, because the film wants to be derivative, it has to be derivative _ a proud derivative of a cinematic tradition from this side of the world (Pacific side, indeed) that once thrived on monstrous obsession and otherworldly horror. It is also a cinematic tradition that pins the survival of mankind on the help of man-made machines and gigantic automatons, and this is what Del Toro embraces and expands with a crazy mixture of childlike glee and professional mania.
The satisfaction is in how Del Toro combines sophisticated computer imagery _ a now-standard practice in Hollywood sci-fi _ with pre-digital special effects, cruder around the edges and yet highly effective in the combat scenes. His sense of story also has that barefaced naivete of a matinee cartoon: in the near future, the planet is attacked by a successive wave of kaiju _ monsters in Japanese _ which warp themselves from another dimension to a crack in the Pacific Ocean. These aliens _ leathery, acidic, colonial-minded _ have flattened cities along Pacific coasts, and humans have united to fight them by inventing Jaeger, a fleet of gargantuan robots of various nationalities (a three-limbed Chinese make, for instance, and a Stalinist monolith from the Russians). Each Jaeger is controlled by the neuro signals of two pilots, who have to work together in a telepathic "drift" which syncs their movements with that of the colossal machine.
Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi and Idris Elba, to name just a few, are among the last batch of Jaeger pilots, each with their own emotional baggage caused by the ruthless, increasingly reprehensible kaiju. The massive death-matches between the Jaegers and the monsters take place mostly in the ocean _ off the Alaskan coast, in Hong Kong Harbour, and down in the depths of the Pacific. But the central set piece in the city of Hong Kong, where the entire metropolis becomes a gladiatorial ring of two beasts, is one of the most sensational and transfixing in recent memory. That's also a scene where the Godzilla aesthetics and almost home-made special effects prove their merit in the age of digital dominance. Don't be fooled into thinking that this is another dumb robo-brawl like Transformers, which is hideously militaristic and cluttered, or the child's play of Real Steel, which not many people even remember now. What makes Pacific Rim tick is Del Toro's precise visuals and his skilful choreography of the diverse elements in the frame. Even in the tumult of the combat, we know what's going on in each successive shot _ it's the rhythm that propels the film and keeps it steady even during the insanely fast action. Talking about the combat: Fans of Japanese monster series will also be surprised at how the Mexican director's is so well-versed in the visual vocabulary of the genre. Pacific Rim quotes a number of familiar shots and "gestures" young boys saw on late-morning Thai TV 30 years ago _ especially a selection of signature coups de grace when the heroic robot deals fatal blows to the monsters. My only guess is that the cinephilic riches has certainly spread across the Pacific from Japan to Central America.
What Del Toro has done here reminds us about what Quentin Tarantino did in Kill Bill: a Western homage and internationalising of the Asian cinematic memory (which always has an inherent "B-movie" quality to non-Asian viewers). Tarantino is a fanboy/intellectual, and his appropriation of another movie tradition, while immensely physical, involves a lot of mind work. Del Toro, schooled in schlock horror and Third-World sensationalism, aims for surface fun and and announces himself into the league of boy-men who know how to preserve a boy's exuberance and develop a man's gift to turn toys into weapons, and memory into action.
Charlie Hunnam as Raleigh Becket and Rinko Kikuchi as Mako Mori.
