Guillermo del Toro delivers on spectacle but struggles to find content in this Japanese-inspired mash up. An advert for a toy range yet to be invented, this displays the director's customary visual flair but lacks his usual talent for distinctive characters and casting.
Choosing its starting point midway through the larger narrative of the human-Kaiju war, we follow a group of hardy types whose job it is to pilot the Jaegers - massive robots designed to take on the Lovecraft-inspired Kaiju creatures in a pub fight-stylee. When this unnecessarily elaborate line of defence is disbanded in favour of a series of giant walls, the last remnants of the Jaeger pilots are assembled by commander Idris Elba for one last assault on the monsters’ dimensional gateway beneath the sea.
The human element has a stoic, war movie feel, and is based around the idea of the Jaeger unit as a kind of family. There are some emotional scenes but as with many movies of this kind these are a bit by the numbers. The movie benefits from Charlie Day and Burn Gorman as a scientific double act. Gorman’s performance is the most ludicrous I’ve seen in a while, but it gives proceedings a much-needed splash of colour. When Day is despatched to the dazzling neon lights of Hong Kong the film adopts a garish, Godzilla-esque tone, which it could have done with more of. Baker, a cross between Seth Green and Bobcat Goldthwait, plays well against Ron Perlman, whose alien entrails dealer is the film’s standout character.
Intended as an introduction to the Kaijus vs mecha genre, this is the sort of film Michael Bay could direct in his sleep . While Del Toro brings certain aesthetic qualities to the table, he is fighting a losing battle and eventually has to yield to the lack of depth. The fights quickly become repetitive and the Kaiju all look alike with their dingy hues and globulous shapes. I attended a 3D screening and found the ocean-based face-offs too murky to register effectively, with the city-based conflicts working much better.
A more interesting take could have been how the war began, but this is shoehorned into a short introduction which is clearly designed to cut straight to the action. This may please fight fans, but leaves the end result rather insubstantial, with the actors and their journeys not strong enough to hold the film together for the duration. Crucially as the Kaijus are frequently blown to smithereens you can’t help but think that maybe humanity would have been better off investing in bigger armaments as opposed to the cumbersome robot + psychic link system that was eventually devised.
The end product is a rung above many blockbusters of its type, but overall I felt Pacific Rim's gain was ultimately The Hobbit's loss.
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