SUMMER MOVIES 2013 – PACIFIC RIM This is the 4th of my 5 most anticipated movies of the summer. I can’t say that I was disappointed by it, though I was hoping for a great movie, and this is not a great movie. But it’s good and it’s a fun summer blockbuster and a must see on the big screen. BEWARE OF SPOILERS BELOW! First of all, I have to say that the line “To fight monsters, we created monsters” is stupid and completely inaccurate. This movie is giant monsters fighting giant robots. So the line should be, “To fight monsters, we created robots” or “giant robots”. Simple, there’s the concept. They didn’t create monsters. They created robots and they have men and women operating them. I absolutely hate that tag line. Secondly, The Battle of Hong Kong is unbelievably amazing and by far the best action setpiece of the summer. Del Toro said it’s 25 minutes long and I could watch that 25 minutes over and over and over and over again. It’s so good that it really outshines the rest of the movie. It’s a monumental piece of action/sci fi filmmaking. From the beginning, I was a little turned off. The movie opens with voice-over by Raleigh and a clip reel summarizing the initial Kaiju attacks, the military response, the devastation on Earth and the creation of Jaegers who finally began defeating the robots and winning the war. And in the midst of it, I thought, I want to see that movie first. That sounds like a great movie complete with a third act full of kickass robots who finally beat the crap out of the Kaiju! Instead we get this huge chunk of exposition upfront (and there’s way too much exposition in the first act of the movie) and then we’re thrown into what essentially feels like a sequel. Imagine if you saw THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and there was no STAR WARS preceding it. Instead, you had Luke tell you the story in voice-over for a few minutes with a highlight reel. You wouldn’t be nearly as invested in the characters and the movie wouldn’t have the emotional impact that it does. Now it’s a disservice to EMPIRE to compare it to PACIFIC RIM, but there’s so much back story that I really wish there was a movie that set up the conflict better than just telling us everything. In fact, I wish that whole opening would just be cut from this movie and then we would be thrown into it. We would pick up a lot of that information anyway and it wouldn’t be lazily spoon fed to us. It’s just a really boring way to introduce an original sci-fi premise to the audience. Unfortunately most of the characters in this movie are not very memorable. And that is really the fault of the screenplay. You can make an argument for a few of them, especially Mako. And Ron Perlman’s Hannibal Chau is a really fun standout. Ron is a riot in that role. But these are not iconic characters who you would want to follow in a series of movies. Ever since I heard the line in the trailers, I was never impressed by the “We are canceling the apocalypse” and the speech in the movie is so by the numbers and so not inspiring that I wished it would have been one of those moments that is in the trailer and not in the movie. In a lot of ways, the movie is overly complex and has way too much exposition throughout, none of which is particularly interesting. And it tries way too hard with virtually all of the characters to try to force emotions at us. I really wish Beacham and Del Toro had watched ALIENS again while writing this because this movie has several mess hall and barracks scenes that are so average and unmemorable. When you look at the similar scenes in ALIENS, they are so sharply written and do so much to establish their cast of characters in the same amount of screen time. Obviously the focus was on monsters fighting robots and it seems like most of the people scenes were rushed and were afterthoughts during the writing process. Charlie Hunnam is one of my favorite actors of his generation from UNDECLARED to COLD MOUNTAIN, GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS to SONS OF ANARCHY and DEADFALL. But he’s really given almost nothing to work with here. If this was your first exposure to him, he would not be very memorable. I did enjoy some of his scenes with Idris Elba, though Idris was given the better and more memorable dialogue. The whole military decision to end the Jaeger program and build these giant walls didn’t make any sense to me, especially after a Kaiju walks right through a wall and destroys it. There is no follow-up scene to discuss a new strategy. The Jaegers have limited time to carry out a final mission and apparently in the meantime, the government is going to continue making these walls? Maybe we should have seen discussions about a new plan? Maybe they should have just began building more Jaegers? And why did they let it get to the point where there were only 4 Jaegers left? Apparently Del Toro wanted to tell a story where the Jaegers were the resistance, the underdogs, but the setup really doesn’t make sense to me. In the Q&A after the movie, Del Toro talked about how he didn’t want a romance in the middle of the story. He wants movies that his daughters can watch and aspire to be equals to the boys in movies. I’m fine with that idea. Except here Mako clearly has a huge crush on Raleigh. He’s not aware of it at first, but once they drift together, he would totally be aware of it and it would be really logical for them to have that connection and then develop feelings for each other. The movie just ignores all of that and it was actually a disappointment, because it could have been really sweet and had it been developed at all, would have really raised the emotional stakes in the climax. If Del Toro didn’t want the romance, he should have left out Mako’s crush on Raleigh. The search for Raleigh’s co-pilot was pretty poorly handled. Somehow it comes down to a stick fight against Raleigh? And then when Mako completely loses it during her first drift experience and goes haywire and almost destroys the base, she’s still allowed to be his co-pilot? Really? There is a whole list of potential candidates to replace her. They could have at least tried to solve this with a montage of Raleigh testing other co-pilots and clearly not being as compatible with them. Or showing Mako go through some more crash training to be able to actually function in the drift. It really makes no sense why they would let her back in as a co-pilot. It would have been better if they disobeyed Stacker and had her gear up instead of whoever he chose and then had her prove herself in the Battle of Hong Kong. See, there’s an easy fix. He assigns someone else. Raleigh disobeys him, gets Mako into the Jaeger with him and they go into battle. Then it wouldn’t have made Stacker such a poor decision maker who doesn’t acknowledge how terribly she handled it the first time. He’s supposed to be making decisions to save mankind, not to empower his adopted daughter. The two scientists in the movie are so cartoony and over the top that they were like fingernails on a chalkboard. Screeching is the best way to describe them. I expected a title card to come up during their scenes that said, “Guest directed by Michael Bay”. They get way too much screentime and most of it is just spinning their wheels until they can make a third act reveal that informs the final plan of the Jaegers and gives them a new strategy. This could have been done so much more simply and efficiently. Especially since their big reveal is communicated to the soldiers, but unless I missed something, it’s not actually carried out in the final sequence. They just do what they planned to do all along. Suffice it to say I hated the scientists and how they were portrayed. And it was really strange that dinosaurs were tied into the concept and were essentially the early Kaiju. Dinosaurs really look nothing like the beasts in this movie. I enjoyed Hannibal Chau’s black market operation of Kaiju parts and mostly how his team acts in the field when there is a dead Kaiju that they need to harvest. And the pregnant Kaiju and its baby were a great surprise! Though I really though the twist would be that the baby wasn’t trying to eat Charlie Day, but to communicate with him or even mistake him for a parent since he had drifted with the Kaiju. Maybe even to sniff him or lick him or rub him affectionately. And what I got out of some of Charlie Day’s screeching was that the Kaiju were a collective that essentially all shared a kind of drift. If I got that right, once the Kaiju rips open Gipsy Danger’s head and kills Raleigh’s brother, wouldn’t they all know that the head is the Jaeger’s most vulnerable spot and immediately focus there and kill the human pilots? Maybe I got that wrong. Something that really seemed to be lacking with the scientists and all of the military personnel that would have made sense would be an analysis of the Kaiju and a discussion with the pilots of a plan of attack – where the brain is located, where the Kaiju are vulnerable, etc. Since this plays like a sequel, you could argue that a lot of that is understood and would have been discovered and discussed years ago. But none of us ever saw the “first movie”. The pilots here just basically duke it out with the Kaiju with no real plan of attack that we are made aware of. Sometimes they are effective and sometimes they are not. I really appreciated that unlike MAN OF STEEL, there were no 9/11 parallels here. While many people died in the prologue at the beginning in the initial Kaiju attacks, once the world understands the threat, cities are evacuated, people take refuge in concrete bunkers and when cities are decimated in battle, they are unpopulated and it’s just material destruction. There were no irresponsible pilots carelessly killing people in battle. And in fact, Gipsy Danger goes out of its way to try to save a small fishing boat full of men, even though it is against orders. I had a really hard time understanding a lot of the dialogue, and my friend had the same experience. I don’t know if it was the sound system at LACMA or the sound mix of the movie. I know they rattled off all of the pilots and the Jaegers’ names and they named each of the Kaiju, but very little of it stuck with me. I blame the movie for that. When I’ve walked out of a great action/sci-fi movie, I vividly remember all of the names of the major players. It has been a struggle to remember the names of this movie and most of them I can’t remember. The fights between the Kaiju and the Jaegers are pretty spectacular. But the photography is so dark and it’s always raining so sometimes I really struggled to follow the action. And it’s actually often really difficult to see the Kaiju and get a sense of their design and anatomy. The Battle of Hong Kong is the exception. All of that was executed amazingly well. But unfortunately it’s so good that the final battle pales in comparison. In these kinds of movies, you expect the action to keep ramping up, but that final battle was pretty underwhelming. And speaking of the final battle, earlier in the film, Kaiju acid easily eats through a Jaeger. Yet in the end, somehow a severely damaged Gipsy Danger is able to withstand a nuclear blast at almost ground zero. Huh? That makes no sense. Gipsy Danger just plunges its sword into the ocean floor to anchor it and seems to easily withstand the blast. And then we get set up for the big sacrifice where Gipsy Danger has to plunge through the portal and become a nuke to destroy it and seal it off. Iron Man did the same thing last summer in THE AVENGERS, but that was so much better setup there with the selfish Tony Stark having to be the one to make the sacrifice play. Here, we’re setup to lose Mako and Raleigh for the greater good, yet all of a sudden, the Jaegers have handy escape pods and Mako is saved! And then we think Raleigh is making the sacrifice. But then Raleigh escapes in a pod! Did I miss something? Were those pods setup earlier in the movie? Like I said, I had trouble with a lot of the dialogue. But to properly set that up, that’s something that we should have seen visually earlier in the film. When Raleigh is near death after the opening battle in Gipsy Danger, he brings the robot to the beach and staggers out as opposed to using an escape pod. Make sure you stay through the credits for a fun little final scene! While I really admire Guillermo Del Toro, I find that his Spanish language movies are far better than his English ones. The special effects on display here are astounding and I’m glad to see him get such studio support on a film of this scale. But I really hope in the future he is able to write or develop a far better screenplay to match his genre creativity. I hope PACIFIC RIM is a huge success so that we can get great Del Toro movies for decades to come.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 19:05:11 +0000
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