Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim wears its heart on its sleeve, and is emphatic about being exactly what it is. Watching the trailer, we laughed at how it was clearly a Gundam film, but watching it, it soon becomes clear that it’s not pretending to be anything but a straight rip-off of Japanese monster films and mecha anime. The Godzilla-like creatures are even called Kaiju.

On the other hand, it is also still rooted very obviously in the Hollywood story. And the mecha subgenre in anime has grown to be very much centred on coming of age. From Gundam to Evangelion, Fafner to Gurren Lagann, the main characters are adolescents, sometimes with a time-skip to those adolescents being young adults. Piloting giant robots becomes a kind of metaphor for paternalistic control and early sexual tension abounds – as well as the sexualisation of the pilots themselves. Whereas in Hollywood, you get the action man who despite a trauma that makes him turn his back on his talents returns to kick butt and look macho. And while the latter is perhaps safer, it’s a whole lot less compelling and identifiable, and makes this for me very much a secondary experience to watching a mecha anime.

But that is not to say it is not at the same time a whole lot of fun and spectacular in a way that only a big-budget Hollywood film can be just now. The robots and monsters here are big and the CG is very impressive. There’s a great adrenaline rush from seeing a robot using a great long boat as a baseball bat, and even if the guy from Queer as Folk as a tough-guy American hero left a big hollow space at the heart of the film, especially alongside a very ordinary Japanese girl with a sad past that had to be fleshed out through flashbacks in a zero-chemistry romance, the minor players were fantastic. The two silly academics who had a peripheral but increasingly influential role on the story – essentially two up-and-coming actors channelling Rick Moranis and Lee Evans – were entertaining and crucially likeable, Del Toro of course gets his friend Ron Perlman in for an amusing cameo and best of all, Idris Elba from down the road in Canning Town is further cementing himself as a powerful Hollywood presence, perhaps doomed to always play powerful soldier types in genre films, but stealing the show every time and bringing with him a genuine gravitas that makes me want to see him play Othello.

Ah, I see he is to play Nelson Mandela soon. That ought to be something heavyweight to take him to the major leagues.

So while this didn’t feel like breaking new ground in terms of story or even Hollywood writing, it was immensely fun, a novelty to see in such a high-budget and realistic style and of course fills the quota on stuff being blown up and huge explosions. I liked how understated the Alice in Wonderland references were, too.

Some questions remain, of course, if we allow spoilers at the end here: were the sacrifices made by the Russians and Chinese really so irrelevant that nobody even acknowledges their deaths? Could Pentecost really not have packed the Aussie into an escape pod and set off his explosion himself? And making the newer robots entirely digital and able to be shut down by electromagnetic pulses – really?