Pacific Rim - Film Review

*CAUTION: This review contains spoilers for Pacific Rim. If you haven't seen it and wish to do so, proceed with caution.*

Do you ever get the feeling of being saturated by apocalypses?

A lot of this year's big film releases have been big sequences with vast destruction, with on-screen creatures destroying cities easier than they might go through the enormous servings of popcorn and soft drink bought from the concession stand.

Man of Steel was pinpointed as the nadir for the destroy-everything movie, with the final 45 minutes devoted to Superman and General Zod throwing skyscrapers at one another. But there's been other apocalypses, ranging from the colossal scenes in World War Z where zombies piled through cities, to Star Trek Into Darkness, where Benedict Cumberbatch crashed a spaceship into 23rd century San Francisco.

This is also not forgetting Oblivion and After Earth, which are set long after the apocalypse in desolate, human-free landscapes. Hell, one of this year's most successful comedies is This Is The End, where Seth Rogen and James Franco make pot and masturbation jokes to the backdrop of LA being swallowed by the Devil.

After all of this comes what has been trailed as the big daddy. The trailers for Pacific Rim have shown hugely ambitious sequences where monsters chomp their way through entire cities before fighting humungous human-controlled robots in the ocean and dark, rainy cities.

Epic stuff, yes, but its easy to feel apocalypse fatigue at this stage without even seeing the movie. So how does it fare?

The film has a sound premise. In the near future, a trans-dimensional rift opens deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. Out of this rift comes several kaiju - the fearsome monsters of Japanese film legend. They duly head to the big cities peppered on the Pacific Coastlines and wreck up the various places. The film has barely begun and already monsters are flattening the Golden Gate Bridge on one side of the Pacific and the Manila skyline on the other.

To combat this problem, a human race that doesn't quite want to be squished by kaiju set up Jaegers - huge robots about 25ft fall and controlled by two synced-up human pilots. A neural connection known as 'the drift' unites the two pilots, as the operation is too much for one human.

All before the opening titles comes the fact the Jaegers are able to repel the early onslaught and humanity begins to relax, but then the kaiju's A-squad begins to head for the portal. This is bad news for US Jaeger Gipsy Danger, with brothers team Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and Yancy Becket (Diego Klattenhoff) being defeated in a poor defence of Anchorage and Yancy killed.

5 years on from this crushing defeat and the kaiju are running riot. The world's governments have duly lost confidence in the Jaegers and have isolated them to a designated depot in Hong Kong Bay, with massive walls favoured instead. Indeed, the broken Raleigh is now a construction worker on a planned wall lining the North American Pacific Coastline.

Naturally, this coincides with a kaiju breaking through a giant wall around Sydney and Aussie Jaeger Striker Eureka is what stops it.

Raleigh is approached to return to the program to help it operate from its new base and figure out a way to end the war once and for all in his favour.

After this bang-bang-bang intro, the film sort of just... stops. The film runs into the sort of personal squabbles and training that is usually found in a sport movie, which is quite disappointingly cliché.

There's the fight between the old guy and the young contender (Chuck Hansen, played by Robert Kazinsky) and the arguments with a reasoned, semi-understanding big boss (Stacker Pentecost, played by Idris Elba).

Stacker is probably the best character. Idris Elba delivers each of his lines with a bombastic commitment and passion its hard not to get swept up in his speeches.

Some reviews have felt the characters are hard to relate to but they do offer some interesting scopes on the usual story-telling cliché within this dramatically different environment. Obviously, Raleigh - the main character by this stage - is going to feel fairly traumatised by the ordeal of having his brother killed while sharing his neural cortex.

Certainly, its an interesting issue for a film maker to look at the implications of sharing somebody's physical and neural senses, and its an intriguing way. This is a plus point.

Its also refreshing for a female character that is more than the equal of the main man, in the form of Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi). She is introduced as Stacker's helper but has a strange role, being depicted both as longing for Raleigh and then flooring him in combat. But its certainly a favourable comparison to Transformers, which just uses women in the similar way a pin-up calendar might.

Anyway, it has some plus points in its long development of character but not all of it works. There's a weird counter-balance in the form of two preposterously weird scientists - one a kaiju obsessive (Charlie Day) and one with a barely believable German accent (Burn Gorman, who has come a long way from Torchwood). It feels weirdly out of place - obviously a bit of light relief can go a long way but it just feels like it isn't right for this movie.

Although they eventually find a big and important revelation for their fight, their mannerisms just feel out of place and their roles lacked the humour to work properly.

The scenes between the CGI mega-squabbles drag on a little, but soon enough there is a scene of such description to wake everyone up. Literally. Amped-up by the cinema sound system, the noise generated during the battle sequences is deafeningly loud, to the point where it dwarves certain concerts. This acts a little to the film's detriment, as its hard to focus when your ears are being bombarded.

Not that its easy to lose focus, particularly when the battle sequences come along. The scope of the battle sequences is astounding. Guillermo del Toro has clearly put a lot into this film, given he has written and directed this, and that the Japanese fiction that inspired this like this.

The scope of both Jaegers and Kaiju is immense. They have been extremely well realised, down to the last pixel, and the battle sequences are gigantic. The scene of the Jaeger clobbering a Kaiju with a container ship being wealded like a baseball bat, for instance, is enormous but its hard not to be swept up in awe of it.

It also perfectly realises the horror of it - there's something almost mentally shocking about a scene when the Kaiju flattens half of the refugee bunker. This is a brief glimpse of what felt like a moment too far, where it threatens to go from big film to harrower.

Nevertheless the film is happy to carry along with its action. And boy does it. The action consistently pushes the scope all the way to the final showdown at the fissure, with battle scene after battle scene feeling impressive.

It feels more like a complete film in this style than other movies where you pay to watch cities being levelled by gigantic titans of both artificial and natural hues. Obviously, these scenes have had attention paid to them. Del Toro has obviously wanted to pay the biggest homage

Its certainly a lot more impressive than Transformers, which looked poor in the trailers - nevermind the actual film. Obviously its similar to it with the idea of giant robots fighting everything, but it feels a lot more delightful.

Nevertheless there's a few flaws that could have been ironed to make it a massive film. Obviously, it could partially be down to apocalypse fatigue and this makes no bounds. This is a huge film attempting to throw metal at metal.

But it still feels there's a little something missing that could catapult the film from being merely rather good to being a majestic example of the art.

It is still a film worth seeing on its battle sequences alone - and lets face it that is the principle reason most people will come - and it has better characters than what others have given it credit for, but something could well be there to give it a little bit more.

3/5