"Today at the edge of our hope, at the end of our time, we have chosen to
believe in each other. Today we face the monsters that are at our door!
Today we are cancelling the apocalypse!"Pacific Rim is the latest film sci-fi film by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, so if you are familiar with del Toro's work you'll know to expect, a film that's not only visually stunning but one that also has an interesting story that weaves everything together. Pacific Rim takes it inspiration from the Japanese genres of Kaiju movies (i.e. Godzilla) and blends it with another Japanese (mostly anime) staple the mecha genre (think power rangers/transformers except bigger robots) and made them its own.
The story is set in the not to distant future, when monsters (Kaiju) rise from an inter-dimensional portal in the Pacific ocean, at first they overwhelm our conventional military forces and are barely taken down after days of fighting. As the Kaiju attacks start to become more frequent the worlds leaders come together in order to come up with a solution to fighting these colossal beasts, they're solution are Jaeger's immense robots designed to fight these monsters. The Jaeger's require two pilots working in tandem in order for them to function, as it is too much strain for one individual on their own. For a time the Jaeger's work and seem to stem the advance of the Kaiju, but this is short lived and as the Kaiju keep coming they seem to adapt to the Jaeger's and grow in size, this leads the worlds leaders to instead pursue a giant wall blocking off the pacific ocean. Now I do realise there are a few spoilers in the previous section but this is only the first twenty minutes of the film and are given away in the trailers.
I'd rather not spoil the rest of the film, but I will say the story is very well thought out and makes you care for the characters and also their struggle to save the world.
I have to mention the CGI simply put its amazing, the character design's are all unique and extremely different, each Kaiju is unique and so are the Jaeger's seen in the film. The most impressive part of the CGI though is the fact it tricks you into forgetting that these things don't exist, it shows a great understanding of the ability of CGI by del Toro and the amazing things those animators can do when given time to do their job properly, in fact I believe that the CGI sections were all decided in advance of the film even shooting so as to give the animators the time to truly make everything look believable and add in those small details that really help to sell the shots.
The gamer in me loved the fact the GLaDOS (Ellen McLain from the Portal games) was the voive of Gipsy Danger's (the main Jaeger) AI, even if I did feel a little uneasy trusting her. Acting wise Idris Elba steals the show, I even used his speech as the introduction, Rinko Kikuchi is also good as Mako and Charlie Hunnam is fine as the main character despite what I've heard others say, everyone else do a great job as well with their characters.
So weighing everything up about the film would I recommend it? Yes its an amazing film, but I cannot say that everyone will like it. If your a fan of summer blockbusters definitely go see it, you'll love it, if your a movie fan who can appreciate a film for what it is and likes to read into things you'll enjoy it too, but if sci-fi's and summer blockbusters aren't your thing I don't think you'll like the film, which isn't the films fault and is your loss but if you don't like these kind of films you don't like them. So score wise I'd give Pacific Rim 9/10, pretty much the perfect summer block buster but won't convert those who don't like the genre.
