Written By Peter Osmond
I
like to pride my self on my knowledge of cinema, I think I have a
pretty good brain for films and the history of film but one genre and
aspect of cinema that I'm pretty much a noob too is Japanese monster
movies and Anime. Now I have seen a bit of anime, mostly stuff like
Tenchi Muyo, Excell Saga and High School OF The Dead when it comes to
anime shows and I've seen the majority of Studio Ghibli flicks and
stuff like Akira and Ghost In The Shell, but the mech stuff, not so
much. My brother is the anime expert and he would probably be in a
better position to write a review of Pacific Rim but as he doesn't
write reviews, it falls on me to give my uninformed opinion.
First
off let me just say...This movie fucking rocks. I do have a sort of
knowledge of the japanese Kaiju flick, obviously i'm aware of
Godzilla, Mothra, Gamera and the like and i've seen a few of the
movies, but I really went into Pacific Rim without the reference
points and I think it really worked to my advantage because what I
saw was simply giant robots beating the living crap out of giant
monsters and like I stated previously it fucking rocked.
What
I liked about the plot was there was no origin story, no 45 minutes
of attacks leading up to the starting point of the movie, Travis
Beecham and Del Toro drop us right into the middle of a war with only
a few lines of narrated dialogue at the beginning setting us up for
the film. Let me set up how these giant robots called Jaegers work.
Firstly you need two pilots, they tried it with one but due to some
issues with the 'drift', a sort of mind melding technique to control
the jaeger. Two pilots are melded together via this 'drift', one the
right side of the brain, the other the left side of the brain, this
is done so the two can pilot the Jaeger successfully. Raleigh Becket
and his brother Yancy are two of the best pilots there are, they
control this beast of a machine called Gypsy Danger (all the Jaegers
have names like this like the WW2 bombers had), after they get
defeated by this hulk of a kaiju and Yancy in killed, Raleigh takes
off, becomes a drifter and starts working as a welder on the massive
anti-kaiju walls that protect the cities. Idris Elba shows up looking
for Raleigh and asks him to control Gypsy Danger as the kaiju threat
is getting worse. He's easily persuaded and next thing we know we're
in Hong Kong, the Jaeger's base of operations. He meets Rinko
Kikuchi's sort of secretary to Elba called Mako, but she's also a bad
ass martial artist and aspiring Jaeger pilot. So of course Raleigh
and Mako are teamed together and during their first 'drift' into each
other's mind's he find that Mako is holding a grudge against the
Kaiju for killing her family and that she wants revenge. Raleigh
calms her down with a pillow and a mug of hot chocolate (not really)
and they try again, which takes us to the epic battle of Hong Kong.
Gypsy Danger kicks the shit out of the attacking Kaiju and even uses
an ocean tanker as a baseball bat. The battle was freakin' epic.
I
don't want to say too much more about the plot because I think there
are enough spoilers in the synopsis i've posted, there are a couple
of scientists, one played by some guy from Torchwood and one played
by some guy from Horrible Bosses who I think was based on J.J Abrams,
Ron Perlman plays a black market dealer in dead Kaiju parts and there
are multiple huge battles between the robots and the monsters and a
pretty cool final battle under water, but go and see the film to bask
in all of it's epic awesomeness.
Being
a staunch advocate of practical VFX, I wasn't bothered in the
slightest by the CGI on display in Pacific Rim as it is a film that
would be virtually impossible to shoot without using CG. Del Toro
could have shot it all practically but it would have ended up looking
like the Intergalactic music video from the Beastie Boys so CG is
needed for a film like this and I have to say, the VFX are
incredible, witnessing marauding beasties attacking cities and
gigantic monsters using boats as baseball bats is the thing of
dreams. The design of the Jaegers, while retaining some sort of
reference to the whole Mech genre of anime still have their own
unique look, a bit more like the Iron Giant than Gundam and more
streamlined than the Transformers. Del Toro shoots the battle scenes
with a control that is missing from the Transformers movies, where as
Michael Bay shoots fast and edits even faster so you can barely make
out what the fuck is going on, with Pacific Rim Del Toro stays on the
battle, lots of continuous takes where were can actually see what's
happening and this is really what sets the film apart from crap like
Transformers, that and the fact that film has characters that you
find your self caring for unlike Shia Labouf in those Bay movies.
These characters while ultimately Clichéd are still relatable and
you can understand that they need to do this thing, they need to
fight these monster otherwise humanity is over, this is something
that is missing from the majority of big budget summer movies.
Another thing that makes it stand out against other American summer
movies is that it's not one of those pro-american film, where 'we're
fighting for 'merica man, we gotta do this to save 'merica man”
type of movies, it about doing it to save the world, it's a global
battle.
To
accompany the battles we have a really awesome soundtrack from
composer Ramin Djwardi,who if you don't know, composed the music to
Game OF Thrones including it's awesome theme song. Here he's mixing
rock with orchestral and sounds incredible. It's very epic and
doesn't have a hint of patriotism in it which is usually found in
these big budget summer movies.
So
to finish my review, Pacific Rim is an epic portion of popcorn
action, it doesn't rely on politics or current social issues, there
is no critique on the shape of the world as it is, it's pretty much
just about Giant robots fighting giant monsters, and this is what
makes this film so awesome, is that it knows exactly where it's
coming from and doesn't pretend to be anything other than badass
spectacle. I loved every minute of it so it's getting 5 stars....
The characters and script kind of blow, but the action is always there to save the day. Nice review Peter.
ReplyDelete