But even the smaller characterizations like the bumbling, quirky scientists and the other countries jaeger duos are thinly conceived clichés. Raleigh’s need to prove himself to his jaeger nemesis who just doesn’t think he can cut the mustard and Stacker and Mako’s father-daughter surrogacy feel like they could have been ripped straight from the script of a half-dozen recent genre films. With the additional help of a duo of dueling scientists, played with excessive quirkiness by Charlie Day and England’s answer to early 80s Crispin Clover, Burn Gorman, and a pimped out black marketeer, accounting for the pandering and inevitable yet humorous appearance by Ron Perlman, the humans battle the kaiju both intellectually and physically, although it doesn’t take long to realize that Pacific Rim is really only concerned with the latter.ĭespite the relative care taken in the film’s early sequences to set up this vast array of characters and backstories, most of it quickly falls into same broad, clichéd and shallow drama of similarly mediocre big-budget blowouts. The film’s central characters, Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam), a mech fighter struggling in the aftermath of a tragedy, and the aptly named Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), the head of the Jaeger program who, along with Mako (Rinko Kikuchi), his protégé of whom he is exceedingly protective, help lead the battle against the ever-insistent kaiju. The plot is kept relatively simple: kaiju (giant monsters with a variety of different characteristics) are consistently appearing from the bottom of the ocean and, at the film’s start, humanity is battling them with humongous mechs, called jaegers, which must be controlled by a team of two people who “drift” (aka mind meld) in order to control it together. Unfortunately for del Toro, Pacific Rim doesn’t exactly avoid all the pitfalls of these other films yet, as with most of his work, the passion and thought he puts into it is enough to dull the glare of its biggest faults and as a big, dumb summer action movie, this one at least gets the action right. There is not only a dearth of live-action mech/giant monster movies, but even when they do get made (the 1998 Godzilla, Michael Bay’s Transformers films), they’re often insufferably bloated, throwing all their dollars and efforts towards special effects while ignoring characterization, plot or narrative coherence. Guillermo del Toro is right about one thing.
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