Pacific Rim (2013)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Using massive piloted robots to combat the alien threat, Earth's survivors take the fight to the invading alien force lurking in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Nearly defenseless in the face of the relentless enemy, the forces of mankind have no choice but to turn to two unlikely heroes who now stand as Earth's final hope against the mounting apocalypse.
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76 films that influenced Pacific Rim
What critics say influenced Pacific Rim
It would be too easy to write Pacific Rim off as a bad mash-up of the worst components of Roland Emmerich’s alien-invasion extravaganza Independence Day (1996) and Michael Bay’s insufferable Transformer movies had it been directed by someone other than del Toro, the Mexican-born fantasy-horror auteur whose sharply pronounced visual acumen and obsession with everything weird, surreal, and uncanny has made him one of the most fascinating filmmakers of the past decade.
At one point, the squadron’s stern leader (Idris Elba, commanding in a stock role) delivers a pep talk virtually identical to Bill Pullman’s inspirational speech in Independence Day .
“Independence Day,” another Roland Emmerich joint).
There's plenty of strategic talk and grim pronouncements counteracted by inspiring speeches of the "Independence Day" variety, but the real stars of "Pacific Rim" are the set pieces.
Then there’s a kendo sparring match straight out of The Matrix and its kung-fu forerunners, a cheer-inducing pre-battle speech with echoes of Independence Day (“Today, we are canceling the apocalypse!”), and a finale in which a bomb must be placed in the aliens’ lair/cavern/alternate dimension.
See if you can catch those Independence Day and/or Deep Blue Sea moments and you’ll know the sort of “borrowing” I’m referring to.
Del Toro references “Star Wars,” “Blade Runner” and “Aliens” (it’s no coincidence that a character is named Newt), and his Jaeger pilots are more martial artists than flying aces, so throw some “Kung Fu Theater” in there, too.
There’s also a cameo from Hellboy stalwart Ron Perlman, who plays a character with the strangely evocative name of Hannibal Chau, a Hong Kong criminal who lives in a Blade Runner-like portion of the city, where he sells the body parts of slain Kaijus.
There are shout outs to Star Wars (Raleigh's brother tells him, "Don't get cocky," and I swear I saw scout troopers at one point), while the Hong Kong of 2020 is twin to Ridley Scott's dystopian Los Angeles in Blade Runner.
Pacific Rim is a war movie set in a near future that resembles in its combination of high technology with cultural and social dilapidation the grim worlds to come in Alien and Blade Runner .
Mine are Robot Jox , the 1998 Godzilla , Blade Runner , and the 1966 Japanese TV series Ultraman for various details of the scenario and design, all of it yoked to a storyline rather similar to Top Gun , though of course that film didn't invent the idea of the hotshot pilot with demons any more than Pacific Rim did.
Along the way, cinéaste del Toro quotes every movie from Blade Runner to Chinatown.
The visual design recalls “ TRON ,” some plot elements recall “ Inception ,” the crunching action recalls “ Transformers ” and the relationships recall “ Top Gun ,” wherein a group of cocky flyboys try to one-up each other in the name of saving the world.
Oh, the human elements are there—the trauma-laced backstories, the Top Gun-flavored pilot conflict, the occasional comic relief—but it all takes second billing to the battles.
Unfortunately, the script, primarily credited to Travis Beacham and the director, also feels like it was written by a teenager who has only seen humans interact in movies like Top Gun.
Many of them seemingly swiped rather obviously from “Top Gun.” There’s Charlie Hunnam’s maverick character—he’s too unpredictable, doesn’t follow orders and “improvises”—and all the other jarhead teams are worried his incalculable nature will spell their doom.
Like Top Gun, this is an all-out recruitment PSA for the supercool machismo of combat.
Add a prolonged and unnecessary rivalry with an up-and-coming pilot (Robert Kazinsky) and the movie begins to feel like Top Gun with robots.
So stupid that it willfully evokes Roland Emmerich’s much-maligned “Godzilla” remake (translation: overblown special effects combined with base monster movie tropes), along with countless other lumbering summer tentpoles, the best of which are nothing more than guilty pleasures (e.g.
Mine are Robot Jox , the 1998 Godzilla , Blade Runner , and the 1966 Japanese TV series Ultraman for various details of the scenario and design, all of it yoked to a storyline rather similar to Top Gun , though of course that film didn't invent the idea of the hotshot pilot with demons any more than Pacific Rim did.
The problem is that it is never confident enough to be completely camp, crazy or satirical, unlike say Godzilla 2000 (Takao Okawara, 1999) and the other films in the Godzilla Millennium era series.
Even in the 15 years following Roland Emmerich’s poorly executed, genre-dampening reboot of Godzilla (which could have been subtitled “Green Eggs and Hammy”), a few kaiju managed to reach our cinematic shores.
They have the same puerile attention span: Roland Emmerich’s “Godzilla” took plenty of bullets for clumsily staging most of the set pieces at night, an all-too-handy means of obscuring details. “Pacific Rim” falls into the same trap.
Movies like the “Transformers” series, “Real Steel” and even movies like 2005’s “King Kong” and 1998’s “Godzilla” hint at this level of filmmaking.
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His inspirational references include “The War of the Gargantuas,” “Godzilla,” “Transformers,” Francisco Goya’s painting “The Colossus” (depicting a terrifying giant towering over a valley), ‘80s and ‘90s kids TV programs, Power Rangers video gaming and Japanese Mech culture.
Movies like the “Transformers” series, “Real Steel” and even movies like 2005’s “King Kong” and 1998’s “Godzilla” hint at this level of filmmaking.
Unlike Mr. Bay, the untrammeled technologist of the "Transformers" franchise, Mr. del Toro is an imagist, a fantasist and, at his best, a cinema poet of highly charged horror.
If it has exhilarating action sequences, it could have been fun---dumb and shallow fun, perhaps, but at least it would have been enjoyed enough on a purely superficial level a la Transformers.
On the one hand, the cast is notably second-tier and the plot--giant, human-operated robots fighting giant, alien sea monsters off the coast of Hong Kong--seems like a cross between Battleship and the Transformers movies .
For every big budget monster movie like Godzilla and Cloverfield, there’s been a thousand more we’ve forgotten, while Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise has shown that audiences will pay through the nose to see giant robots smash each other, no matter how crude and addled the screenplay.
Del Toro references “Star Wars,” “Blade Runner” and “Aliens” (it’s no coincidence that a character is named Newt), and his Jaeger pilots are more martial artists than flying aces, so throw some “Kung Fu Theater” in there, too.
There are shout outs to Star Wars (Raleigh's brother tells him, "Don't get cocky," and I swear I saw scout troopers at one point), while the Hong Kong of 2020 is twin to Ridley Scott's dystopian Los Angeles in Blade Runner.
Like George Lucas ' original 1977 " Star Wars ", Guillermo del Toro's sci-fi actioner uses high technology to pump up disreputable subject matter to Hollywood blockbuster levels.
A friend mentioned that the two scientists are like the robots in Star Wars, and he's right.
The baldness of the badness that surrounds a lot of the writing and performing of these characters is reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.
Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers cleverly satirises the way that war makes fascists of us all , while the ‘Star-Spangled Man With A Plan’ montage in Captain America: The First Avenger gently pastiches the hokey artificiality of wartime propaganda.
His summer movie is a spare-part contraption, wedging together elements not just from Toho monster movies and giant-robot anime, but also Top Gun , ’90s disaster movies, Starship Troopers , Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind , and Del Toro’s own oeuvre.
We've seen them in the training sequences in "Avatar" and the generic relationship banter of "Starship Troopers" and, more to the water-based point, the "Godzilla"-inspired pictures released in the decades following World War II, when irradiated beings and smog critters and other progeny of humankind's mistreatment of the planet gave us the retribution we so richly deserved.
"Pacific Rim" never bothers to pull apart its juvenile conceits, nor does it take any clever stabs at the allegories embedded in its militant proceedings, a la Paul Verhoeven's ultra-subversive "Starship Troopers."
Del Toro references “Star Wars,” “Blade Runner” and “Aliens” (it’s no coincidence that a character is named Newt), and his Jaeger pilots are more martial artists than flying aces, so throw some “Kung Fu Theater” in there, too.
Pacific Rim is a war movie set in a near future that resembles in its combination of high technology with cultural and social dilapidation the grim worlds to come in Alien and Blade Runner .
Some of the monster sequences have more than a hint of Alien; the hunters often look like reworked Transformers.
It is a special-effects projectile vomit of a film—imagine the final scene of Aliens two hours long and on steroids.
It’s there in James Cameron’s relentless Aliens , the prototype for many subsequent extraterrestrial goo-and-steel-fests (including this one), and one of the first sci-fi-action films to treat the camera like a blunt instrument violently applied.
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It’s there in the short-lived SensurroundTM technology designed to make whole theaters playing the 1974 disaster movie Earthquake rumble in time with the action onscreen; in Harry Smith’s never-realized dream of showing his alchemical cut-out-animation epic Heaven and Earth Magic to audiences seated in chairs modeled after objects featured in the film, including watermelons and eggs; in Abel Gance’s triple-screen Napoleon .
It’s there in the short-lived SensurroundTM technology designed to make whole theaters playing the 1974 disaster movie Earthquake rumble in time with the action onscreen; in Harry Smith’s never-realized dream of showing his alchemical cut-out-animation epic Heaven and Earth Magic to audiences seated in chairs modeled after objects featured in the film, including watermelons and eggs; in Abel Gance’s triple-screen Napoleon .