Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim is a movie built on a simple, generous promise: giant robots punching giant monsters. It delivers that promise with scale, weight and a straight face. It is also, for long stretches, a movie that mistakes size for feeling. The 2013 film runs 131 minutes and lands at 6.5 of 10 — a spectacle worth seeing once, and a story that rarely earns its own stakes.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
The Breach and the Jaegers
The premise is set out cleanly. In 2013, colossal extraterrestrials called Kaiju emerge from an interdimensional portal called the Breach at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and begin to attack coastal cities along the Pacific Rim. Humanity responds by constructing massive mecha called Jaegers. Each Jaeger is co-piloted by two or more people who share the mental stress of piloting the machine through a link called the Drift.
That is a strong hook, and del Toro knows it. The Drift is the film’s best invention. It turns a piloting mechanic into a character mechanic: two people have to be inside each other’s heads to move a machine the size of a skyline.
A Brother Dies in Anchorage
The film opens in 2020. Brothers Yancy and Raleigh Becket pilot the Jaeger Gipsy Danger to defend Anchorage. A Kaiju severely damages Gipsy and kills Yancy. Raleigh kills the Kaiju, but the death and the stress of solo-piloting leave him broken, and he quits the program.
Charlie Hunnam plays Raleigh as a man running on fumes. Del Toro cast him, the director said, because “I saw him and I thought he had an earnest, really honest nature.” Hunnam described the starting point of the character plainly: “When you meet me, in the beginning of the story, I’ve suffered a giant loss.”
That loss is the film’s engine, and Hunnam plays it with an earthy quality that keeps Raleigh from turning into a generic action lead. It is not a deep performance. It is a steady one, which is what this movie needs.
Pentecost, Mako and the Shatterdome
Five years later, world leaders divert funding from the Jaeger program to coastal defense walls, because Kaiju attacks are rising and Jaegers are being destroyed faster than they can be replaced. A Kaiju breaks through the wall in Sydney before Jaeger Striker Eureka, piloted by father and son Herc and Chuck Hansen, brings it down. The remaining Jaegers move to the Shatterdome in Hong Kong under Marshal Stacker Pentecost.
Idris Elba plays Pentecost as a commander with no give in him. He is a firm believer in the Jaeger program and will stop at nothing to see it succeed, but the film gives him a compassionate streak under the hard exterior. Elba sells both halves without raising his voice.
Raleigh, now working on the wall, is convinced by Pentecost to rejoin the program. In Hong Kong he meets Mako Mori, director of the Jaeger restoration program. Rinko Kikuchi plays her with a controlled stillness that makes her the most interesting person on screen.
Pentecost lays out the plan: destroy the Breach by detonating a tactical nuclear weapon inside it. Only four Jaegers remain, including Gipsy Danger and Striker Eureka. Raleigh searches for a co-pilot and finds Mako is compatible.
The Drift Test and the Plasma Cannon
Their first test in Gipsy Danger goes wrong. Mako loses alignment while recalling a Kaiju attack in Tokyo that almost killed her, and she nearly discharges Gipsy’s plasma cannon inside the Shatterdome.
This is the best scene in Pacific Rim. It is a scene about memory, not machinery, and it is the only time the film’s central mechanic produces real dread. A weapon that can level the base is one button away, and the reason it nearly fires is grief.
The rest of the cast fills out the war room. Charlie Day plays Dr. Newton Geiszler and Burn Gorman plays Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, the two scientists studying the Kaiju. Ron Perlman plays Hannibal Chau, a black-market dealer in Kaiju parts. Robert Kazinsky plays Chuck Hansen, Max Martini plays his father Herc, Clifton Collins Jr. plays Tendo Choi, and Robert Maillet and Heather Doerksen play the Kaidanovsky pilots.
What the Robots Get Right
The action is the reason to watch. Del Toro shoots the Jaegers as heavy objects. They move slowly, they take damage, and they leak. When a Kaiju hits one, the film sells the mass. The Hong Kong fight in particular has a clear geography, which is more than most films at this scale manage.
The film is set in a future at war, and it treats that war as a logistics problem: funding, attrition, walls versus robots. That is a sharper frame than the genre usually bothers with. The walls fail. The robots are running out. Pentecost’s plan is a last throw.
The screenplay is by Travis Beacham with del Toro, from a story by Beacham. It is the first film in the Pacific Rim franchise. Principal photography began on November 14, 2011, in Toronto and lasted through April 2012.
Where the Movie Sags
The problem is the middle. Pacific Rim has a great premise, a great mechanic and a great final act, and it spends a lot of its 131 minutes on characters who are defined by one trait each. Chuck Hansen is angry. Hannibal Chau is shady. The scientists bicker. None of it is bad. None of it stays with you.
The film’s tagline is “To fight monsters, we created monsters.” That line promises a movie about the cost of building your own monsters. Pacific Rim mostly does not deliver that movie. It delivers a very good fight movie with a better idea sitting inside it.
Del Toro’s casting instincts are sharp, and his visual instincts are sharper. The film is regarded as an homage to kaiju, mecha and anime, and it wears that inheritance openly. The nostalgia is the point, and it works.
The Box Office and the Legacy
Pacific Rim was released on July 12, 2013, in 3D, RealD 3D, IMAX 3D and 4DX. It was produced by Legendary Pictures and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. It received generally positive reviews, with praise for its performances, direction, storyline, action sequences, visual effects, musical score and nostalgic style.
It underperformed at the box office in the United States but was highly successful in other markets, and became a box office success overall. It earned a worldwide total of $411 million, including $136 million in China alone, its largest market. That made it del Toro’s most commercially successful film.
The numbers explain the film’s afterlife. A movie that flops at home and wins abroad gets a franchise, and this one did. The first film in the series earned its sequel on foreign screens, not domestic ones.
Our Verdict
Pacific Rim is a good movie with a great movie trapped inside it. The Jaegers have weight. The Kaiju have scale. The Drift is a genuinely clever way to make two pilots matter, and the scene where Mako nearly fires the plasma cannon is the one moment where the film’s machinery and its emotions are the same thing.
Everything around that is thinner than it looks. Pentecost is a speech. Raleigh is a wound. The supporting cast is a set of labels. Del Toro directs the hell out of the fights, and the fights are worth the ticket, but a film that asks you to care about the end of the world has to give you more than four people and a countdown.
“To fight monsters, we created monsters.”
That tagline is the film’s best idea, and it is also the film’s missed one. The monsters humanity creates here are only machines. The film never really asks what it costs to build them, or who pays. It asks whether the robots can punch hard enough. They can. That is enough for a good night at the movies and not quite enough for a great one.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
