'I proclaim that the hour is nigh when men with broad temples and steel chins will give birth, magnificently, with a single thrust of their bulging will, to giants.’
— Filippo Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto
It’s about immensely big things hitting other immensely big things.
That the words of this fascist buffoon should have occurred to me about thirty minutes into Pacific Rim, the latest from writer-director Guillermo del Toro, came as no particular surprise. Even more than most contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, with their single-minded insistence upon magnitude and scale, this is a display of literally monumental proportions—a summer tentpole release in which giant aliens battle 25-storey-tall robots for dominion of a planet that’s almost destroyed in the process. The result is so excessive, so cacophonous and intransigent, it makes Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon look like My Dinner With Andre. And, somewhat to my own surprise, I mean that as a compliment.
Much of what story there is, is delivered, via voiceover, in a breathless, seven-minute-long opening montage. One day something—an inter-dimensional portal? a wormhole in space?—opens near the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, disgorging a succession of violently aggressive creatures (known as kaiju, from the Japanese word for 'strange beast’) intent on laying waste to coastal cities. First San Francisco is hit, then Manila is devastated; further catastrophes follow. When conventional human weaponry proves inadequate to the task of repelling them, massive fighting-machines are built—called Jagers, from the German for 'hunter’—to combat this new enemy.
It’s soon discovered that the neural burden of controlling a Jager is too much for a single human mind; two pilots are required. And given that they must merge consciousness, in a process called 'The Drift’ (the fragmentary, spectral visuals of which, flashing back through significant moments in their subjects’ lives, practically beg for a second viewing), there will ideally be a close bond between them. Brothers are good. Lovers, too.
For some time, this works just fine. Lumbering and ungainly, and seemingly none too bright, the kaiju are no match for the Jagers, and humanity learns to cope with these occasional, random fits of destruction. So much so, in fact, that a certain complacency has taken root: the Jager pilots are treated like rock stars; kids collect kaiju toys; and the newly-formed world government is considering shutting down the Jager Program altogether, in favour of erecting huge coastal walls to defend their cities. But unknown to them, the creatures they’ve encountered to date are just the beginning. Far bigger beasts are on their way . . .
In an early, teasing quote to the press, the director described the film—his first since abandoning The Hobbit—as 'a beautiful poem to giant monsters’ . . . and satisfyingly, this is precisely what it is. Like most modern Hollywood releases, it aestheticises carnage—yet in this case, the result is unusually satisfying, simply because del Toro is such a freakishly gifted maker of visual images. He has an unusual sensitivity to colour and shading, a highly refined design sense, and a painterly compositional eye; his frames are always perfectly balanced, and exquisitely lit.
Here, working with his regular DoP, Guillermo Navarro, he produces shot after shot of jaw-dropping beauty. The palette—flared-out whites; powdery, slightly desaturated blues and greens; jaundiced yellows; deep wells of black—lends the action a distinctly artificial look, reminiscent of bleach-bypass or reversal-stock cinematography. It’s an aesthetic co-opted, these days, by the likes of Instagram, but no less powerful for its newfound ubiquity. And his typically meticulous detail, his rapt fascination with assembly—those shots of the Jagers being prepared, all inter-locking pieces and industrial filigree—signals that it’s a film made for anyone who’s ever thrilled to assemble a model kit, or designed a superhero's costume.
Which is to say, any satisfactions here are entirely aesthetic ones. The dialogue is not only banal—pure exposition, with no hint of anything deeper beneath it—but also handled remarkably badly; of the main actors, only Idris Elba acquits himself with any credit. Rinko Kikuchi at least has the excuse of acting in an unfamiliar language (and many of her lines sound, anyway, as if they were added in ADR), while Charlie Day and Burn Gorman play their scientists as little more than walking cartoons; likewise, del Toro regular Ron Perlman, in a cameo as an unscrupulous kaiju dealer in Hong Kong.
Leading man Charlie Hunnam, though, has no such excuse, and the drama dies a little every time he’s called upon to deliver a line or project a human emotion; as our ostensible hero, he’s no more than adequate. The machines dwarf the human element in every respect, it seems. (Of Max Martini and Robert Kazinsky, meanwhile, playing a supposedly Australian father and son, the less said the better.)
Yet watching, one is struck by how incredibly unnecessary most of the talk here is. So ravishing are the visuals (and so unrelenting is Ramin Djawadi’s score) that whole swathes of dialogue barely even register; they’re background noise, lost amid the clamour of visual elements. And ironically, they’re not missed in the slightest—not least, because the narrative is so formulaic as to render it all but superfluous.
And in this respect, it should be acknowledged that the film’s basic premise, that whole giant-mechanoids-fighting-aliens thing, is ripped more or less wholesale from Neon Genesis Evangelion—just as its final act more or less replays the end of Independence Day, right down to the ingenious, world-saving solution. But then, the entire script (from a story by co-writer Travis Beacham) might most generously be described as a collection of homages, ranging from small genre-clichés (the scientist who loses his glasses at the most dangerous moment; the nuclear device that, owing to a pesky system malfunction, must be triggered manually) to larger, architectural issues. There’s not a single surprising or original beat in the entire thing.
So, to recap: it’s derivative and badly acted and could just as well be a silent movie, so broad and simplistic are its emotions. And I didn’t care a bit.
Why? Because it’s a monster movie. And as such, not actually about character or morality or values at all. (Indeed, it’s barely about human beings.) It’s about immensely big things hitting other immensely big things. Which, if you pause to think about it, is kind of an idiotic way to settle any dispute, much less save a planet; you might as well have trade tariffs decided by Mexican wrestlers. So don’t think about it. The film’s physical action, like its token attempts at characterisation, is merely a by-product of the design sensibility that is its real raison d’etre. The surface is everything.
Most modern blockbusters make me feel old; this one, somehow, did the opposite. By cleaving so closely to the templates of the monster movies of my youth, the kaiju-eiga of Godzilla and Mothra and Rodan, it left me almost comforted—awed by its beauty, amused by its (too-rare) flashes of visual wit, tolerant of its lapses into bombast and idiocy. In terms of scale, if not of stakes, it might be the ultimate blockbuster: a wholly digital spectacle, almost as intent upon erasing human life offscreen as on. But in its place it asserts something else: the purity of images, and the excitement of destruction. As the Futurists understood, machines can be magnificent, speed and velocity are thrilling, and devastation is cathartic, whether we care to admit that or not. Even fascism can occasionally make something beautiful.
