For years after first watching my
favourite Toho kaiju movie, Destroy All
Monsters (1968), I wondered what a blockbuster version, with
While the wildly different
perspectives of British picture Monsters
(2010), and very American game-derivative, Battleship
(2012), examined - somewhat blindly - the big feet and head of such an imaginary
movie-elephant, Pacific Rim (2013),
as directed by genius Guillermo del Toro, is a valiant attempt to depict the
whole mega-animal in a native cinematic habitat of comicbook colour and
magnificently spectacular action. A winningly off-beat combination of Independence Day pulp sci-fi heroics and
weird science, wearing the fan-boy credentials of its 50th anniversary
Harryhausen-tribute on its sleeve. With tongue-in-cheek appeal, Pacific Rim focuses upon Top Gun styled pilots of the Jaeger
machines as its warrior elite, unlike Marvel’s Iron Man 3 (2013), where the unacknowledged true hero is Jarvis -
surely the most undervalued A.I. of recent years, despite orchestrating combat systems
in that busy movie’s battle scenes.
The various alien behemoths are
amusingly reminiscent of many other designs from creature movies. Whether in
coastal defence or pre-emptive nuclear strike mode the smack-down encounters
between Jaegers and kaiju are vividly depicted without a hint of the crazily
edited havoc popularised by Transformers
(2007) and its sequels. And yet, del Toro’s epic skates happily over the highly
implausible, and completely ignores the physically impossible (even eight
Chinook helicopters would be quite unable to airlift such massive robots!).
When the screen shows us this much fun, it’s easy to overlook the bad SF
content, and accept
