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drwexThis movie is a vast wish fulfillment for kaiju-lovers. Guillermo del Toro clearly shows he is one of "us" and gives us exactly what we'd want. Big nasty scary monsters (yet somehow all clearly derivatives of our basic quad-limbed, bipedal forms) and robots that are big-ass Transformers without the cutesy gimmicks and with a lot more sumo style.
Attempting to translate any of this into real reality would cause your brain to hurt. You just have to accept that it exists in its own sort of fantasy universe and move on. Given that, you have to evaluate the film on two bases: how does it treat its fantasy elements and how does it handle its human elements? On both counts, I think the writers do better than I expected.
First, the punch-ups. I found them slightly disappointing. The movie runs long and these things are all spfx so I can see why some of them got shorted, but I wanted more and and wanted something different.
The movie makes a big deal of there being different models of Jaeger, including one with three arms, and different styles of each crew. But what you see is essentially the same thing over and over and the unique Jaeger types don't get enough screen time, in my opinion. There is some variation in fight settings and that helps - those fights stand out in my mind - but it's not as much as I wanted.
I felt like there was also not enough tech-geekery. There are some standard future-tech tropes, like 3D vertical displays, but the interiors of the Jaegers don't seem to be much different from a current cockpit and other than one plasma cannon reference there's not enough cool weaponry. Rocket-powered punching and sword-blade hands are just the sort of thing I went to the movie for and I wanted more of that, too. If Iron Man and Batman can have lots of cool tech gadgets then why can't the Jaegers? It would have been cool if, say, one of them launched a drone swarm or if they'd had more of the all-over weaponry that Battletech popularized.
Future Hong Kong seemed to be lifted straight out of Blade Runner - dark, neon-lit, and rainy. Ron Perlman plays a great over-the-top black marketeer but otherwise the city setting is wholly disposable.
That said, the biggest and best surprise to me was the level of featuring given by the script to a black man (played by Idris Elba) and an Asian woman (Rinko Kikuchi). Both have stereotypical elements to their characters but both have range beyond the stereotype. Any Kaiju movie risks being a testosterone-drenched MMA sweat-fest but other than one scene Pacific Rim largely avoids that. The Aikidoka in me was very happy with the jo scenes - they seemed just right.
The script has other good character surprises. The moment where the tough-as-nails, can't-let-anyone-see-my-weakness male commander turns to the female pilot and says "I need you to protect me now" without any trace of irony or patronization was a stellar moment. Make no mistake, this movie fails the Bechdel test massively. It's a "guy film" but with that said, the script does a remarkably decent job of having its characters be actual humans, not cardboard cut-outs.
A solid 7 or 8 of 10 overall and I hope they do a sequel.
Attempting to translate any of this into real reality would cause your brain to hurt. You just have to accept that it exists in its own sort of fantasy universe and move on. Given that, you have to evaluate the film on two bases: how does it treat its fantasy elements and how does it handle its human elements? On both counts, I think the writers do better than I expected.
First, the punch-ups. I found them slightly disappointing. The movie runs long and these things are all spfx so I can see why some of them got shorted, but I wanted more and and wanted something different.
The movie makes a big deal of there being different models of Jaeger, including one with three arms, and different styles of each crew. But what you see is essentially the same thing over and over and the unique Jaeger types don't get enough screen time, in my opinion. There is some variation in fight settings and that helps - those fights stand out in my mind - but it's not as much as I wanted.
I felt like there was also not enough tech-geekery. There are some standard future-tech tropes, like 3D vertical displays, but the interiors of the Jaegers don't seem to be much different from a current cockpit and other than one plasma cannon reference there's not enough cool weaponry. Rocket-powered punching and sword-blade hands are just the sort of thing I went to the movie for and I wanted more of that, too. If Iron Man and Batman can have lots of cool tech gadgets then why can't the Jaegers? It would have been cool if, say, one of them launched a drone swarm or if they'd had more of the all-over weaponry that Battletech popularized.
Future Hong Kong seemed to be lifted straight out of Blade Runner - dark, neon-lit, and rainy. Ron Perlman plays a great over-the-top black marketeer but otherwise the city setting is wholly disposable.
That said, the biggest and best surprise to me was the level of featuring given by the script to a black man (played by Idris Elba) and an Asian woman (Rinko Kikuchi). Both have stereotypical elements to their characters but both have range beyond the stereotype. Any Kaiju movie risks being a testosterone-drenched MMA sweat-fest but other than one scene Pacific Rim largely avoids that. The Aikidoka in me was very happy with the jo scenes - they seemed just right.
The script has other good character surprises. The moment where the tough-as-nails, can't-let-anyone-see-my-weakness male commander turns to the female pilot and says "I need you to protect me now" without any trace of irony or patronization was a stellar moment. Make no mistake, this movie fails the Bechdel test massively. It's a "guy film" but with that said, the script does a remarkably decent job of having its characters be actual humans, not cardboard cut-outs.
A solid 7 or 8 of 10 overall and I hope they do a sequel.
