Back in 2013 I saw Pacific Rim in the theater. Twice. And until it became something of a joke on Criticless, I hadn't really given it much thought since. The first time I saw the movie it was because a friend and I had an afternoon to kill. But that was also the summer I was helping at a summer camp for aspiring journalists (they exist! Or they did, anyway), and I suggested we go see it so I could teach the campers how to think critically about film.
For the record, they all hated it.
Now that it's on Netflix, I thought it might be fun to give it another look. Movies have changed quite a bit, as have I, in the last eleven years. So it can be good to go back and reassess the things we once enjoyed, or were at least found mildly amusing. Also, I'd just seen the original Godzilla and had kaiju on the brain.
Not as headache inducing as you might expect.
But first, let's talk conspiracy theories. People in that sphere love to talk about the revelation of the method, which is the idea that popular culture sometimes disguises truth as fiction. Back in 2013 nobody I knew was talking about that. Watching it now, in 2024, not only am I all too aware of how The Simpsons predicted the future (or warned us in ways they knew we wouldn't understand), but also all the thoughts around extraterrestrials.
Now much of this stuff is common knowledge.
Spend any time at all listening to current paranormal podcasts and you'll hear about UFOs coming out of the ocean and/or through portals. Where do the kaiju in Pacific Rim come from? A portal in the ocean. There's a theory that the atomic bomb tests opened a portal to the spiritual realm, which makes sense when you realize how deeply into the occult those scientists were. In the movie, the monster attacks stop after a nuke is dropped through a portal to close it.
Literally no one was talking about those things in 2013. Except this movie. Weird, huh?
Anyway. Pacific Rim gets off to a promising start. After a brief prolog, slickly done, we meet the Hero, in his Ordinary World, who basically Saves The Cat before acquiring a Wound. He gets a Call to Adventure and Refuses it before Accepting. Why anyone would refuse a Call to drive a giant robot that smashes things is beyond me, but I guess that's why we suspend disbelief. At any rate, we're in familiar Story territory.
Joseph Campbell and Blake Snyder would approve.
But the longer the movie drags on, the more muted the familiar elements become. Sure, we're still having a good time with the giant robots smashing kaiju. We're distracted. It's only later that we find ourselves unfulfilled, and wonder why such an awesome movie failed to land. There's every reason to like this movie for someone willing to surrender to its silly concept.
But it's about as satisfying as Big Mac value meal when we were expecting a gourmet burger.
Simply put, the majority of Pacific Rim is spent sorting through the plot at the expense of the story. Stopping the kaiju is the puzzle. Figuring out how is the focus. Other things get sacrificed. It's the Christopher Nolan effect (sorry, not sorry). Back in film school my classmates and I would have thrived working out a story with this level of complexity. And to be honest, I'm not sure we could have done any better.
Or worse.
Of course, there's also studio interference. Today we love to talk about studio interference. It happens, though it should never be an excuse. Director del Toro may have had some misgivings, and if so, dug in his heels a little. The studio obviously wanted a movie that would play well at home and in the Asian market. Problem is, when you try to please two audiences one side will receive favor over the other.
As usual, US audiences got the smaller piece of the pie.
More than anything else, this movie needed some sexual tension. Some romance. I don't particularly like Starship Troopers, but it got this right. You can have soldiers and smooching without it being weird. Our hero Becket needed to go through the meat grinder and keep going out of his love for Mako to discover who he really was. Then he needed to find that love reciprocated. I don't need an actual sex scene, but notice that they never kiss. Maybe an interracial romance wouldn't have played overseas, but us Americans expect "a little bit of sex," as Sullivan's Travels points out so well.
No one ever came back from the dead because of a true friend's hug.
If Pacific Rim had been allowed to explore that one thing and thread it through the story, it would arguably be more satisfying. Our Hero's Journey would have run deeper and been complete. As it is, all we get is a fun (if simple) puzzle and giant robots wrecking stuff.
I don't mean to sound down on this movie. What's there is really, really good. But what it's missing keeps it from being anything that resonates.
