“Pacific Rim” struck me as a blow-up of the Japanese horror
films of the 50s, especially “The Giant Behemoth”. It seemed odd to me that Guillermo del Toro
would spend his talents on something on a premise that is less promising than
even a story for a typical comics-based movie.
The title reminds me of Arthur Honneger’s tone poem “Pacific 231”.
The big idea is that enormous sea monsters (a kind of takeoff
of “Alien” and “Predator”) hatch in undersea vents and storm through coastal cities. Humans have terraformed the Earth to the
point that aliens (perhaps Earth’s first colonists a billion years ago) are
expected to return and colonize the Earth with more of these creatures. So the world’s militaries have invented these
huge fighting robots, into which human soldiers enter, to be sealed off. They fight in pods of two, and somehow the
robots join their thoughts – as brothers (Charlie Hunnam and Diego Klattenhoff)
or lovers (with Rinko Kikuchi).
The geeks in the film have dissected one of the creatures
and isolated its two-part brain, which looks a bit like the floating guild
creature from “Dune” (1984). There is
Dr. Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman, no place here for Anthony Hopkins), and the
sidekick Dr. Newton Geizler, played by Charlie Day. Now this actor, otherwise a conventionally
attractive young male, appears with both forearms heavily tattooed – out of
character, and meaning he can have no “hair”.
Maybe the actor wore a tattoo sleeve as a makeup prop (these do exist in
Hollywood); it’s hard to tell.
The overlong, bloated film goes into some other clichés,
such as monster pregnancy, and the destructive behavior of the carnivorous
larva, which can eat someone up.
The official site from Warner Brothers and Legendary is
here.
The film showed distant shots of Sydney, Hong Kong, and
Singapore.
I saw this in Imax 3-D at the AMC Tysons, before a moderate
Wednesday night crowd. IMDB lists the aspect ratio as standard, but the presentation looked wider. The music score
by Raman Djawadi reminds one of the music of Hans Zimmer.
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