Pacific Rim – Review

Honestly, we are tired of these movies with big bots and machines, fighting and moving in an unrealistic world. Someone has gotta put a stop to it; if not, at-least include some animal robots. That should be a bit different, if innovativeness is something that the film-makers are looking at these days! And by the look the movie Pacific Rim, it seems that the answer would be NO.

Hollywood mind-set seems to have got tired running a conflict between the human species and the creatures of an imaginary ‘other’ world. What’s there in a name, call the creatures ‘Kaiju’ or Dinosaurs or give the monster robots of imagination a more weird nomenclature, it’s all the same.

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They all are fiercely pitted against the human species. And the desperate attempts to save mankind from an apocalypse invariably result in man’s triumph. Bah Humbug!

In Pacific Rim, a war rages between monstrous sea creatures named Kaiju and the human race.

The Kaijus are legion and mushroom out of the depths of the ocean intent to take man head on. Adept at survival, they are there to gobble the human species as also the dwindling earth resources.

Ingenuity steps in. The result: Jaegers are built by member nations of the Pacific Rim, ie the lands around the edges of the great Pacific ocean.

Being complicated these Jaeger Robots have to be manned by two pilots having their minds in synch with each other as they ensure control over them.

But – and a real pity that, the Jaegers fail to supress the Kaiju onslaught – and by 2025 the frustrated Authorities of the Pacific Rim begin building giant coastal walls, discarding the Jaegers.

As the destruction of mankind seems imminent, choice falls on a retired Pilot Raleigh Becket [Charlie Hunnan] and the uninitiated Mako Mori [Rinko Kikuchi], the adopted daughter of the Commander of Jaeger forces, Stacker Pentecost [Idris Elba].

And being the protagonist they are confronted with the task of a victory.

The end of the film sees them managing to escape successfully into the Pacific, safe enough to embrace each other. Awesome! Well, not quite.

So what is the peculiarity of this big budget film? Maybe blazing the trail of a locale that leaves a wide enough berth for future cine products world wide, the cast of Pacific Rim by itself being an amalgam of the British-Asia Pacific-and-Russian regions with characters imbued with semblance of American accent.

One saving grace goes to Pacific Rim: the film is not grey, brooding or sinister like its cousins in the adventure genre.

But some emotive bonding amidst characters could have lent the film a real charm as by imparting emotive quality to Mako.

But ‘No’, the Director Guillermo de Toro is so obsessed with contriving computer generated effects that too in darkness or submerged in water—both of rain and seas—that he forges to see daylight!
Barring the astonishingly super visuals in the initial confrontation between Jaeger and Kaiju as also in the real fabulous imagery contrived at the near end of the film, events in Pacific Rim move so lingeringly as the tedious plot unfolds that the audience feels cheated of its time and money.

Rating 1.5 Stars

By Joseph Rana, Editor-in-chief, His Master’s Review

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