A paradox lies at the heart of Pacific Rim, the newest (and loudest) addition to director Guillermo del Toro's filmography. It's a movie that is determined to be both outsized and small-scale, to be enjoyed both ironically and sincerely. It's this paradox that makes me feel as affectionately towards the film as I do, and yet, it's probably what will also keep a lot of folks from liking it at all. So basically, if you can embrace this paradox, you'll have a great time. If not, well... you might want to go to Redbox instead (or hey, how about Monsters University? I hear its a good 'un).
On the one hand, in terms of sheer size, Pacific Rim looks like it's trying to be the biggest, baddest summer movie it can be. If Jaws made the summer blockbuster's promise of "You're gonna need a bigger boat," Pacific Rim takes the promise to its logical conclusion by supersizing everything. I mean, the whole premise of the movie is that robots the size of the Empire State Building fight extra-dimensional kaiju monsters on the open sea, and the film's creative team makes full use of that size. The movie ain't called "Pacific Rim" for nothing; given the size of the combatants, it doesn't take much for the action to involve the entire Pacific Ocean. To get much bigger than that, you're gonna need a bigger planet.
As soon as the camera fixes on its first robot (roughly one minute into the movie), we know we aren't in the world of subtlety or realism anymore, just pure blockbuster logic, and it's refreshing that Del Toro's direction acknowledges what only a few such enlightened blockbusters realize, that hey, this isn't the real world. In one of the movie's most deliciously outsized moments, for example, one of the robots picks up a battleship and wields it as a club. Forget momentum, center of gravity, principles of acceleration, or fuel economy; it's a giant robot using a less-giant thing to hit a more-giant thing. This movie is, at its best, about the beauty in the blockbuster formula's potential to transcend the plausible for the sake of the visceral and the huge. And when Pacific Rim does just that, it's glorious.
On the other hand, though, Pacific Rim can feel frustratingly small in the context of some of the more notable action blockbusters of recent years. That's to say, while the action and concept and scale are huge, the human plot and emotional stakes of the film are straightforward and by-the-numbers—often boringly so—especially when compared to the superhero epics that have come to dominate the summer season. Unlike most recent action blockbusters, Pacific Rim is a standalone movie with no explicit connection to a prequel, sequel, or character mythology to draw depth from. It has no Themes-with-a-capital-T like Nolan's Batman trilogy, and it pays only the faintest lip-service to the Whedon-esque (or, in the case of The Avengers, Whedon-created) quippy-yet-angsty heroes from the Marvel films. Its characters broadcast their motives with unambiguous sincerity and have backstories explained by brief montages or flashbacks. There are no antiheroes, only heroes. In short, very little goes on under the hood of Pacific Rim when it comes it its characters, so it can't help but feel small comparatively.
Which is a little ironic. So much of the ethic in modern superhero movies has to with making the heroes seem small, incompetent, and petty. Look at the middle section of Thor when Thor has lost his powers and bumbles through everyday life on Earth; the movies makes a point of turning the hero into a fool. Or think of any of Nolan's Batmans, where a major idea is how blurred the line between hero and villain is—again, a "hero" turned small and criminal. And I haven't seen Man of Steel yet, but I'm told that movie tries to make Superman into a similarly ambiguous hero who doesn't always live up to the larger-than-life tropes of the character. Yet for all their undermining of larger-than-life-ness, these movies still end up feeling "epic"—in the sense that they have a sweeping tone and have big stories to tell, not that they're necessarily good.
Pacific Rim actually does go the larger-than-life route with its characters; the good guys are actually purely good, and there is no ambiguity that the bad guys (who aren't really characters, but oh well) need to be exterminated. It is, in a sense, a return to the traditions of the '80s action heroes or even epic heroes like Beowulf. And in a lot of ways, that's a very charming idea. I'm getting tired of angsty superheroes. However, in a blockbuster with the scale of Pacific Rim, it doesn't take long for "charming" to morph to quaint and then dull. So it's somewhat disappointing that the movie spends as much time with its protagonists as it does. Not that Pacific Rim is a character study or anything, but the broad, unencumbered human drama feels increasingly superfluous and small as the movie goes on.
In re-reviewing 2001: A Space Odyssey for his "Great Movies" feature, Roger Ebert observes that 2001's dialogue "exists only to show people talking to one another," to prove that human society does indeed exist in the mostly silent and isolated 2001. This may be the only thing Pacific Rim and 2001: A Space Odyssey have in common. Pacific Rim's characters often feel like plot placeholders, only there to provide humanistic, logical reasons for the action to go on and to ensure the audience that yes, humanity is still human despite the fact that they use skyscraper-sized robots to fight their wars.
I would say that the boring characters are a weakness in the movie, but that's where we get back to the whole "paradox" thing. It pretty much is a flaw that Pacific Rim has boring, generic characters; in narrative filmmaking, character is one of the primary concerns, so if your film has unengaging characters, yeah, there might be something wrong with it. But with Pacific Rim, it's a little bit more complicated.
The problem is, it could not be the movie it wants to be with more fleshed-out characters. The movie's main attraction is no-doubt the ridiculously oversized robot-kaiju action and Del Toro's gung-ho embrace of that oversizedness in his direction, but this main attraction would deflate if the "flaw" of simplistic characterization were fixed. If the movie gave us more intricately designed characters, it would stumble on the host of ethical questions that regular dramas run up against whenever they encounter violence, such as the human toll of such violence, the bleakness of war, etc. Such ethical questions would only make the over-the-top direction seem callous to the human cost of the ridiculous action, which would, of course, only undercut the sincere joy we feel from the action sequences' visceral beauty*.
Instead, Del Toro is smart enough to give the humans just enough humanity to justify the action scenes, but not enough to distract from the thrills and kills. It's directing that's aware enough of its wide-eyed commitment to single kind of movie experience—the no-holds-barred action movie—to enhance that experience. Brilliantly, Pacific Rim manages to land at the point right before self-awareness becomes parody or, worse, nihilism. And in that way, you can sincerely enjoy the spectacle.
See, so on one level you have to view Pacific Rim with the ironic detachment of knowing that the movie is kind of dumb and therefore not worth deconstructing for flaws, while at the same time you have to be able to buy into the central idea that there is something beautiful at the heart of the bigger-is-better action aesthetic. You need to ignore its premise so the flaws don't bother you, but you also need to embrace the movie, hook, line, and sinker, to let the direction amaze you. And sometimes that's kind of hard to do.
And yeah. That's about all I have to say about that. You may have noticed that I didn't even bother trying to parse out Del Toro's influences, the kaiju and mecha genres of old. I'm afraid my experience with those genres is limited to one viewing of Godzilla ten years ago, my childhood obsession with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and this SNES game. I'll leave the influence-spotting to the experts. Other than that, thanks for reading! Let me know what you think in the comments. That comment box is there for a reason.
Until next time.
*This is, I think, one of the many problems with Michael Bay's direction. His movies flirt so much with antiheroes and human flaws that they make the over-the-top action feel misanthropic rather than exuberant.
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