Pacific Rim is the movie of the summer. It’ll turn you into a kid again, smiling from ear to ear as you leave the theater.
Written and Directed by Guillermo del Toro, this film has everything I’ve ever wanted in a summer movie: Robots battling monsters. And it’s glorious.
When monsters, called Kaiju, start coming up from the oceans destroying city after city, the world bands together to create the only thing that will rid us of the deadly beasts: Jaegers. Named after Jagermeister, that wonderful alcoholic concoction I drink on occasion…
It’s not actually but I like to think that they are.
Jaegers are massively huge robots that have to be controlled by two people at once. The reason is that they are so big, so technologically powerful, one humans brain can’t handle the overload. So, they need two people, two people who’s minds are locked together in what they call a neural bridge. And you can’t lock just anyone’s brains together. You must be a match. Father and son, brother and brother and so on work perfectly.
The hero of the story, former pilot Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam), fought alongside his brother but after an early battle, his brother is torn away and he leaves the Jaeger program. The story move on a couple of years and with the Jaeger program on its last mechanical legs, the commander of the group, the always amazing Idris Elba, brings him back into the fold.
We also get Charlie Day as a scientist who has a theory on how to beat the monsters, Ron Perlman as a one-eyed opportunist and, in what may be a first, Rinko Kikuchi, an Asian woman as the heroine of a big-budget action movie.
There are some issues I had with the film, namely some of the horribly cliched dialogue. Some of it was actually groan-worthy. But the story and sheer joy of what del Toro was putting on the screen won me over. I’m not a huge horror fan so I’ve only seen a couple of his films – the Hellboy series – but what he did with the battle sequences was thrilling. And unlike Man of Steel, I could actually see the action. I could see what was happening every second of the film and it wasn’t turned into some cartoony, video game.
This film is so much fun I almost wanted to see it again. And see it on the big screen… it deserves the scope and sound that you won’t get at home.
