Film: Pacific Rim

Director: Guillermo del Toro
Genre: Action
Source: USA (2013)
Rating: PG-13
Location/Format: IMAX 3D
Grade: A

While far from the best movie I've seen this year, Pacific Rim may be the most fun I've had at the movies in quite some time. It's got a silly concept, a joke of a script (I can't explain how much the line "Let's do this . . . Together!" made me laugh given the pains they take in the film to explain the necessity of the two-pilot system), and ludicrous technology. But damn if it wasn't entertaining.

Guillermo del Toro is the fanboy's director for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that he knows how to take the weird and wacky worlds of comic books and the like and turn them into entertaining screen fodder--just out of the mainstream enough to be weird, but in it enough to be massively appealing. Pacific Rim isn't based on any particular pre-existing property, but in a way it's a melding of tropes that have been around for a while: Giant monsters a la Godzilla. Giant robots fighting monsters a la Ultraman/ etc. International team of heroes a la a ton of different anime franchises. And so on and so forth. del Toro doesn't just use these archetypes, he embraces them. The Russians couldn't look more Cold War-era soviets if they had actual hammers in their hands and bearskins on their backs. There's a character named Hercules Hansen. And of course there are speeches and story beats straight out of every World War II and summer movie flick (think Independence Day) ever. 

Again, these aren't bad things. This is del Toro's geeked out nod to what a popcorn movie should be. Comic relief here is not Adam Sandler (whose Grown Ups 2 apparently slaughtered Pacific Rim at the box office) but Charlie Day from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Ron Perlman from being awesome. There's mass appeal here, but there's also a subversion and a nod to the absurdity of the whole thing. And I dug it completely.

Perhaps what made this film stand out most to me was the fact that del Toro pulls a neat trick by actually making the action of giant robots fighting giant monsters decipherable. Comparisons must be made to Transformers, and while in that film Bay seemed to completely lose all sense of point of view in the action, turning sequences into the indecipherable spinning of gears and shots of metal, Pacific Rim uses color, long shots, and gravity (a sense that these things are heavy and thus cannot move at super speeds) to allow us to actually follow what's going on. That is essential to the joy of the movie. Now, at times the action is hilarious ("We're out of options!" "No we're not!" <Presses SWORD buton>) but it goes a long way to realize that you can actually make sense of what's happening on screen. More movies would do well to take a lesson from del Toro on this point.

I realize this is a high grade for a bit of summer movie fluff, and the grade is not because it's the height of quality filmmaking, but because del Toro left me walking out of the theater like a little kid, pumped and enthralled by what he had just seen. In a world where superhero movies have become commonplace, that's a pretty neat trick. Well done.

Alternate Film Title: "Giant Damn Robots Punching Giant Damn Monsters: What More Do You Want?"