To fight monsters, we created monsters of our own.
It's been five years since Guillermo del Toro graced us with Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Now, at long last, he has returned with Pacific Rim, which is the first mega-budgeted action film I've actually felt like seeing this summer. Even then, I managed to pick one that didn't top the box office, having been beaten out by the execrable Grown Ups 2 and the second weekend of Despicable Me 2. If the size of the audience for today's 5:15 screening is anything to go by, though, chances are good that Pacific Rim will have legs and continue to hold its own against the competition. And then, of course, there's the overseas market, where I expect it will do rather well, especially in countries more familiar with the vagaries of space monsters battling giant robots (and vice versa).
As for the specifics of this film, del Toro and his co-writer Travis Beacham (who also came up with the original story) posit a future in which a transdimensional rift opens up in the floor of the Pacific Ocean, allowing all manner of mighty monsters -- Kaiju to us old-timers -- to come through and wreak havoc on our heavily populated coastal cities. Mankind's response is to band together and built big manned robots -- dubbed "Jaegers" after the German word for hunter -- to beat back the invaders. When we pick up the story we're in year seven of the war (which began ominously enough in 2013), which finds hotshot Charlie Hunnam teamed up with his brother, who dies a hero's death when they go up against a particularly fearsome foe off the coast of Alaska. Five year later, the Jaeger Program is being phased out in favor of building ineffective Anti-Kaiju Walls, as Hunnam is doing when he's recruited by his old commander (Idris Elba) for a risky mission to stop the Kaiju menace at the source.
As exhilirating as it is, Pacific Rim falls into the trap of hitting all the expected story points, from the scrappy warrior (Rinko Kikuchi) who has to prove herself after a temporary setback to the asshole rival (Robert Kazinsky) whose grudging respect has to be earned on the battlefield. Elba even gets his St. Crispin's Day speech when the time comes to rally the troops, but del Toro and Beacham throw a few curve balls -- and some welcome levity -- into the mix with the inclusion of bickering scientists Charlie Day (an unabashed Kaiju fanboy) and Burn Gorman (an insufferable know-it-all), and Ron Perlman's opportunistic black marketeer. Because really, if you can't have fun with your giant-robots-pummeling-space-monsters movie, what are you doing making it in the first place?