Thanks, I Hate It: Pacific Rim (Patreon)

There is an undeniable appeal to the old Toho Godzilla movies. Rubber monster suits, singing faeries, fat dollops of exposition about Shintoist compassion—it’s a creative palette you’re not going to find anywhere in American cinema. Toho’s monsters have personalities, motivations, ties to the world around them. They represent the advent of unprecedented technologies—in particular the atomic bomb—and destructive imbalances between man and nature. Even at their silliest, they have a deeply earnest sense of wonder and awe for the titanic creatures on which they center.

Del Toro flattens that charm so completely you almost wonder if that’s what he was after in the first place. For a guy who mostly makes movies in someone else’s key (The Devil’s Backbone is a low-rent Almodóvar riff, Jean-Pierre Jeunet is all over The Shape of Water, etc, etc) there’s an astounding absence of everything that made the Toho Company’s monster movies so distinct. Not that perfect homage is the only way to make a kaiju flick, of course, but still. Del Toro’s send-up of the genre is all half-baked worldbuilding—some fun stuff with the director’s stalwart Ron Perlman as an underground kaiju-part dealer aside—and first draft tough guy dialogue about loose cannons and teamwork.  

And it’s not just the tone and setting that fall flat. Pacific Rim’s action scenes take place in churning, murky rainstorms, titanic combatants up to their waists in water more often than not, and between the generic, textureless monsters and the glossy impersonality of the robotic jaegers, there’s not much life or tension in them. It’s a bunch of pistons whirring and ratchets turning to create a sense of weight on which the lackluster CGI can’t make good. The neural “drift” link connecting the two pilots of each jaeger never really amounts to much either, its role relegated to smeary flashbacks and absurd shots of the characters moving in lockstep while on some kind of high-tech resistance treadmill. The drift is supposed to be the heart of the film’s message about teamwork and friendship, but the characters don’t have psychologies to mesh or explore, and their relationships are so straightforward that they essentially cease to exist in the final third of the film once the plot’s elements are all in place.

The whole cast is thinly sketched, which fits the Top Gun-like hotshot template, but the performances just don’t cut it. From Idris Elba’s enervated Stacker Pentecost (Elba’s maybe the most frequently miscast actor working today) to Charlie Hunnam’s slightly concussed-looking Raleigh Becket, there’s very little energy in front of the camera. Rinko Kikuchi gives a good turn as the earnest, focused Mako Mori, but it isn’t enough to bring the movie into focus. The tremendous surplus of near-identical beefy blond boys doesn’t help either. They growl at each other, spend a few minutes piloting robots through airless action sequences hampered by terrible choreography and the limitations of the film’s animation budget, and that’s about it. I can’t remember a single line of dialogue from the entire film.

There’s one thing that bothers me more than any other when I think about this movie. It’s a small thing, and as a rule I don’t pick nits, but why in the hallowed fucking name of God don’t they pull that sword out right away? It goes through the fucking monster like a knife through butter, and they wait until they’re on the ropes before they even consider whipping it out! It’s like going through an entire boxing match with your hands behind your back and then you whip out your fists at the end like it’s some big surprise. “Haha, I have HANDS.”

Fucking stupid.