Pacific Rim

Year 6, Day 238 - 8/26/14 - Movie #1,829

BEFORE: I've blocked out the remainder of the year's films on the calendar, and I'm pleased with the result.  I sort of forgot that I should skip NY Comic-Con in October, and I'm also regretting I didn't save these sci-fi films for that time of year.  I think I'll be watching Bette Davis films around Comic-Con, and that just doesn't make any sense.  But the linking has led me here, and I'm making progress on the films of 2013, so I'm just going to keep going.  Speaking of linking, Gary Oldman from "Lost in Space" was also in "The Unborn" with Idris Elba (last seen in "Thor: The Dark World").

THE PLOT:   As a war between humankind and monstrous sea creatures wages on, a former pilot and a trainee are paired up to drive a seemingly obsolete special weapon in a desperate effort to save the world from the apocalypse.

 

AFTER: God, where do I start with this one?  I have a feeling I could spend 6 hours tearing this plot into pieces, and then nitpicking it into even smaller pieces, and never completely do it justice.

Let's start with the premise: giant monsters are rising up from the ocean's surface, through some kind of dimensional portal, and they eat humans and destroy cities.  Conventional weapons are (apparently) useless against them, so humanity's best choice is to build giant robots - but not real robots, robot-LIKE machines that are controlled from within by two humans apiece.  Humans that are expert fighters, and also mind-linked together in pairs to be even better fighters.  

Part 1: giant monsters are attacking.  And they can't be killed, and they're destroying everything.  If you hear this on the news, the natural response is to jump out the window, because at least then you won't get eaten.  But since we can't kill them and we can't destroy the portal, perhaps a better response would be to start working on that ark to get everyone to another planet. Nope, instead people sit around and watch as the monsters increase in size from category 2 to category 3, and so on.  How do people even know what a category 4 kaiju looks like, if it's the first time they're seeing one?

Part 2: conventional weapons are useless.  So we try something else, that's what we humans do.  If the redcoats are cutting us down when we line up, we hide behind trees and stone walls.  If it's too costly to take the Japanese islands back one by one, we drop an atom bomb.  We're told at the beginning of the film that nothing so far has worked, INCLUDING the giant robots - so why the heck are they still being used?  TRY. SOMETHING. ELSE.  Nope, let's keep using the thing that doesn't work, in the hope that it will.  Cause that's smart.

Part 3: the giant robots.  or Jaeger, or whatever you want to call them.  The shape of a bipedal human is unique, the product of millions of years of evolution, to do the tasks that helped keep us alive - which did not include battling giant demon beasts.  In fact, if a human was as big as a building, his shape would probably be a detriment, he might not even be able to stand up.  There's a reason that buildings and mountains have the shapes that they do, because that's what works at that scale.  A building-sized robot?  Not possible.  And its center of gravity is way too high, for starters.

Part 4: controlled by humans.  Why?  They never really explain why someone needs to be inside.  If we can build a giant fighting machine, why can't it be completely robotic?  If it needs to react to the moves of the kaiju, why can't it be controlled remotely, like in "Real Steel"?  This set-up just puts people at risk, and the whole reason to fight the demons is to protect people, right?  Why can't it be a drone of some kind?

Part 5: two humans apiece.  Why does it take two humans to run each Jaeger?  Because they say so, I guess.  You would think that having one person in control would mean faster reaction times and smoother moves, and you'd be right.  But the plot says they tried making robots controlled by one person, and one person couldn't do it.  So make the robot interface better - am I to understand human technology only goes exactly this far, that it can make a giant robot, defying all rational machine logic, but it can't fix whatever design flaw is preventing it from being piloted by one user? 

Part 6: the mind-link.  Another seemingly unnecessary complication.  The Jaeger needs two pilots, but they need to be mind-linked so they learn each other's complete history, secret fears and internet passwords.  This is so they'll function perfectly as a unit, hmm, almost like one person would - damn, I really wish we could make these things piloted by one person, but nope, it has to be two people acting as one, because we say so.  And also, you'd think that all this excess drama of dealing with not only one's own fears but also someone else's would really get in the way, but nope, this is the complication that somehow makes the whole thing possible.  Right.  

I think I'm starting to see the problem here - the government is using outmoded technology that has been proven to not work, refusing to invest any money to fix design flaws, or take any steps to properly protect the soldiers in harm's way, defiantly unable to develop strategies that work against an enemy it doesn't understand.  So, business as usual, am I right, people?

Then we reach the point that tells me that fighting the Kaiju with the Jaeger causes much, much more damage to our cities and the people living in them than if we had just let the Kaiju run wild to begin with.  I think giant robots falling down killed a bunch of people, and robots punching and missing destroyed more buildings than the demons did, so we would have been better off as a species by just giving in and not fighting back at all. 

Beyond all this ridiculousness, there's a lot of overacting.  Or maybe it's just yelling.  A lot of the dialogue in this film is delivered at top volume, because the actors need to compete against loud robots and louder monsters.  But that made nearly everything difficult to understand, in more ways than one.  It's a big, loud, overly complicated movie that makes no sense, so I bet it made like a billion dollars last year.

Also starring Charlie Hunnam (last seen in "Cold Mountain"), Charlie Day (last seen in "Horrible Bosses"), Ron Perlman (last seen in "Season of the Witch"), Clifton Collins Jr. (last seen in "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"), Rinko Kikuchi, Diego Klattenhoff, Max Martini, Robert Kazinsky, Burn Gorman.

RATING: 4 out of 10 neural handshakes