Movie Review: Pacific Rim (2013)
Posted By Iain McNally on July 15, 2013
The big question that’s been hanging over Pacific Rim has been whether or not the portions of the film between the giant robot and monster fights would be worth sitting thorough to get to the next scrap. From the pre-release footage shown, it was assumed that in Guillermo Del Toro’s hands, the battles would at least be competently handled.
In my opinion, that question can now be put to rest. Even though these sections won’t win any awards, the non-combat parts of the film are, at the very least, not as dumb as what passed for drama in the Transformers series of films. Plus, the action scenes more than make up for any shortcomings.
Opening with one of the longest (and least promising) pre-title sequences in history, Pacific Rim quickly introduces the monstrous Kaiju with Rayleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnan) explaining how they come from a dimensional breach on the floor of the Pacific, can withstand concerted attack by conventional weapons for days, how the world banded together after the first few attacks to create the giant robots called “Jaegers” to defend humanity and how Rayleigh and his brother Yancy (Diego Klattenhoff) became Jaeger pilots thanks to their brawling skills, and that the Jaeger requires two minds to be linked via a neural connection called The Drift in order control these giant machines.
Rayleigh and Yancy pilot the Jaeger “Gypsy Danger” to defend the Alaskan coastline from Kaiju attack, but go off-mission to try and protect a fishing boat in the area. Things don’t go well for the Beckets and Yancy is lost while still connected to his brothers mind, leaving Rayleigh traumatized as he feels his brothers fear, shock and eventual death.
Cut to a number of years later, the Kaiju attacks are increasing in frequency. The Jaegers aren’t holding them back, so the world’s governments have deemed the Jaeger program a failure and are retreating behind giant sea walls instead. Of course, things could never be so simple and Marshall Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) gathers the remaining Jaegers and pilots to the “Shatterdome” base in Hong Kong to try and execute a plan to save them all.
And then giant robots fight giant monsters…and it is glorious.

Cue choir
The brawls between the Jaegers and the bioluminescent Kaiju leave those of the smaller ‘bots in the Transformers movies to shame, with the action much, much clearer and rarely any doubt over who exactly is punching who.
While most of the action is portrayed at night, or in the rain, the light from the Kaiju’s skin, spotlights from passing choppers and lights from the Jaegers themselves make sure that you can see what’s going on at all times and Del Toro makes certain to frame the “cool” shots of each fight so that they aren’t missed.
The designs of the Jaegers are also instantly identifiable, although the Kaiju can get a little confusing. It’s also nice for once to have our main heroes’ ride not be the newest or most up-to-date member of the Jaeger fleet.
The macguffin of The Drift and two pilots (one for each hemisphere of the Jaegers brain) allows the film-makers to give the Jaegers the speed and reflexes necessary to go head to head with giant monstrosities, and Del Toro keeps each engagement fresh. The sight of Gypsy Danger holding a Kaiju by a head frond with one hand and pounding the other into its horrid face over and over again in Hong Kong harbour is truly a sight to be seen.

The Gypsy Danger
These clashes are undoubtedly the high point of the film and the effects are magnificent throughout. I found myself tensing in excitement during some of the scenes and flinching as our heroes took the brunt of heavy knocks. The decision to actually build the cockpits of the Jaegers as physical sets, mount them on hydraulics and burden the actors by physically connecting them to the heavy Jaeger controls pays off as the action outside and inside the cockpit seems fully integrated, with the whole space (and actors within it) rocking with each impact from the Kaiju’s blows.
In contrast to Michelle Ealey’s review, I may have enjoyed the film more due to lowered expectations going in. In all honesty, while I liked Del Toro’s Hellboy films, I wasn’t as blown away as I wanted to be. His Hellboy was not my Hellboy, the Hellboy of the comics. The world famous, world weary hero with a penchant for pancakes, a quip and a punch for every major mythological figure that crossed his path and lollipops for the kids. I’m sorry to admit that while I enjoy many of his other films, they had left me a little cold, but the action in Pacific Rim swept me up and almost had me punching the air at points.
It can be dumb, but it’s good dumb.
There are, of course, some nits to be picked.
I agree with Michelle on the woeful female representation in the film. While the male Jaeger pilots are pretty much all lugheads, they are at least confident swaggering lugheads that face danger knowingly and confidently on a regular basis, and can be somewhat looked up to as role models.
As the lone female presence in the film, the female Russian Jaeger pilot, like her male companion, barely registers at all. Rinko Kikuchi has a thankless task portraying Mako Mori, who is initially shown as completely out of her depth around these “gods of men”, losing all concentration and composure when dealing with Rayleigh and deferring to Idris Elba’s character almost without question .
While she does get to kick Charlie Hunnan’s ass in combat training and later shows her prowess in combat, her actions in most other scenes border on simpering. It’s 2013 already. Would it have been so hard to create a female character who was confident in conversation as well as in battle? Or even just add more female characters?
Thankfully, while there are allusions to a romantic sub-plot between her and Rayleigh, this is only ever hinted at (unless Malaysia is missing scenes again à la THAT Carol Marcus scene from Star Trek Into Darkness), it would have felt pretty tacked on anyway.

Jaegers Crimson Typhoon and Cherno Alpha take to the stage
Some of the plot points and science are a bit iffy as well, including some nonsense about the relative resistances of digital versus analogue Jaegers to electromagnetic pulses, the comparative buoyancy of escape pods in an unknown medium, one way breach passwords, a method of deriving a foes motivations that can only be a homage to Independence Day and the wisdom of providing some pilots of machines that spend 90% of their active operational lifecycle in water with helmets with no face masks.
These don’t detract too much from the film and most of the cast do a fine job. Charlie Day and Burn Gorman provide a great scientific comedy double act, Idris Elba sure knows how to tell someone how to “Shut up”, and Ron Perlman IS Ron Perlman. However, for me, the undoubted stars of the flick are the Jaegers and their struggles.
Check out our other reviews for Pacific Rim:
Michelle Ealey’s Reivew
Ryan Morrissey-Smith’s Review
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3 Responses to “Movie Review: Pacific Rim (2013)”
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I was a tad disappointed, First, it was not science fiction, just fiction. Del Toro scarified too much brains for visuals. You summarized the problems fairly well in one of the last paragraphs, but there is more. Let’s accept for a moment that a jaeger is the best way to fight kaijus; but then how come that they developed so many different ones? It would have been much cheaper for humanity to mass produce one (or two) different models per generation, than each country pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into their own jaegers. Why could not the jaegers be remote controlled if the communication works even through portals? Etc., etc. The whole movie is just a decoration around a few fights which are the 2013 version of Mortal Kombat or something more weird Japan-only console game. At least there should have been a glorious self-sacrifice at the end, but no, Raleigh did not know when is the appropriate time to die. And then they send 15 choppers to rescue 2 people, but wait, the coppers do not stop for them…
I am now really happy that Del Toro eventually did not direct the Hobbit. I can’t imagine how it would have turned out, but surely I would have liked much less than PJ’s rendering.
BTW, the my favourite element in Pacific Rim was the jaeger AI voice for obvious reasons. I mean, I think with Portals.
Didn’t they say that that each country DID pool their resources to make the Jaegers? Weren’t they all different versions/marks hence the major differences?
From a storytelling point of point of view they were all different to make it easy to see at a glance who’s fighting (think of the silhouettes in Team Fortress 2).
As for remote control, if they’d done that there’d be no tension and Drama as there’d be no risk to the Jaeger pilots. Del Toro built the Jaeger cockpits and pilot rigs so that you the audience could tie the fighting action to the human pilots inside (also he seems to like blasting actors with thousands of litres of water).
Sure they could have made things a little more technically correct, but it would have been a MUCH less fun movie
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