The simple pleasures of watching Godzilla or Ultraman doing battle on Saturday-afternoon television have proved difficult to recreate since their heyday in the ’70s and ’80s. Big-budget Hollywood attempts to replicate the experience tend to not just be failures, but disastrous, highly polished failures on an epic scale: Roland Emmerich’s 1998 take on Godzilla, for instance, or Michael Bay’s Transformers series.
But director Guillermo del Toro knows that the charm in the clash of scale- or armor-plated titans isn’t necessarily tied to the low budgets and laughable production design of those guilty-pleasure TV shows. And with Pacific Rim, he cracks the code.
It was probably only a matter of time before del Toro tackled this genre; his career, on the one hand, has been largely devoted to monsters of one kind or another, and their place as stand-ins for the things that scare us in the real world. Japanese movie monsters, on the other, were little more than atomic-age fears of mass destruction made flesh — made rubber suits, anyway.
In this modern-day update of the genre those monsters launched, del Toro and writer Travis Beacham trade in nuclear anxiety for more top-of-mind worries about climate change. The monstrous creatures rising from the deep in Pacific Rim are even assigned categories according to their size and power, mirroring those we give nowadays to hurricanes; a Category 4 beast can easily take out a major city, and a rarely seen Category 5 is a destructive force of nearly unimaginable proportions.
A speedy prologue wastes no time setting things up, which (thankfully) allows the movie to avoid the 2.5-hour-plus running times currently plaguing event movies at the multiplex. The Kaiju — this near-future society is pop-culture-savvy enough to have used Japanese movie-monster nomenclature for the creatures — come from an interdimensional portal on the ocean floor known as The Breach. And like rising sea levels, they’ve been taking out coastal cities. As the periodic appearances of these creatures have shown no signs of abating, humanity has banded together to create “Jaegers” — 25-story battlebots operated by dual pilots who must temporarily merge minds to drive the things.