Diego Klattenhoff and Charlie Hunnam in Pacific Rim.
When I first saw Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim described as "the thinking man's Transformers", I mentally did some automatic politically correct editing on that phrase and recast it as "the thinking person's Transformers". Then I thought that perhaps the original gender-specific formulation was correct, because this kind of fantasy-action movie gets a mostly male audience. Next thought: "man" is wrong; it should be "the thinking boy's Transformers".
Except, unfortunately, it's not. The thinking that was applied to Pacific Rim has worked chiefly in the realm of visual effect, not in providing the boy (in all of us) who is the film's target market with a more original and coherent script and plot than usual. Pacific Rim fails as almost all such movies do, privileging spectacular action over trying to make the characters more than thumbnail stereotypes and trying to give them something fresh to say.
Del Toro certainly makes the action pump and pop here, but more than mere spectacle is expected of him. He has made such brilliant movies in the past, drawing on the horror tradition for his Cronos and Pan's Labyrinth, enriching it in the process, and making Blade II better than the others. He successfully revisualised the comic-book world of Hellboy. Note, though, that in the second Hellboy instalment it was clear that Del Toro and his scriptwriters were running out of ways to give this storyline and these characters a compelling inner life.
That may be because in the Hollywood action-movie template there are really only so many options. Certainly, add the necessities of such a plot to the strictures of conventional character development and you are probably going to end up having to replicate the forms and clichés with which we are already overfamiliar from umpteen such movies. It's an obstacle course in which the obstacles may be moved around a bit and painted in different colours, but they're all still there.
Sometimes a layer of well-written (or inventively improvised) dialogue can help to veil the repetitive conventionality of such storylines, as in the first Iron Man. But the necessary writers (and improvisers) seem thin on the ground in the land of big-budget movies. They certainly aren't in evidence in Pacific Rim: the action clanks and the dialogue clunks.
The story, basically, is this: a fissure has opened up on the Pacific ocean floor, a dimensional portal to another world, through which giant mutant fish creatures are coming to destroy Earth and all its inhabitants. The year, I believe, is 2025 or there-abouts, so warn your children. The prologue (a full 20 minutes before the credits) sets out some of the first big war against the fish monsters, and then the main body of the movie deals with the next.
Huge Transformer-like robot warriors have been built to combat the fish monsters, but they require human direction from within – two humans, that is. Why? Because, "like the dinosaurs", quote unquote, they are so big they need two brains. Okay, so far we're going with this. But there's a complication: to be able to direct the small-t transformers from within, the two humans need to be telepathically connected via something called the Drift.
The Drift sounds perhaps too relaxing for what this entails, which is some fast whooshing through a few monochrome memories as the two pilot-fighters in the fighting machine achieve a "neural handshake" and then go on from there. The first thing to be noted about this is that it's rather convenient, in narrative terms, to have an instant-flashback mechanism that provides characters with backstory events – for movie characters, as we know, are nothing without a formative trauma that can be referred to in flashback.
The second thing to be noted is that once the co-pilots, inside the warrior-machine's head, have achieved a "neural handshake", what happens in there is very much like a souped-up version of a Wii game played with extra computers, pop-up holographic screens, and some physical machinery to help the pilots to somersault properly and land on their feet, or at least upright. Seems like a lot of fun.
At any rate, these are technicalities, I suppose – except for the geeks and those involved in the game-marketing side of this enterprise. I wish them well. The giant prototypes of these toys, as presented in Pacific Rim, look fantastic (in both senses) and fabulous (ditto); in action, they even look a bit less galumphing than the trolls etcetera of The Hobbit and the blue people of Avatar. They are certainly streets ahead of the Transformers, thinking or not. Some small progress has probably been made in the world of computer-generated animation and is on display here.
Unable, apparently, to give the main characters much individuality, Del Toro has gone a little over the top with the minor characters, in particular two research scientists and a Mafia-like figure played by Ron Perlman. These add oddity, which is enjoyable. But they are not enough, in the bigger picture, to achieve some kind of Drift between the CGI and the human. They are not enough to soften the feeling one often gets in such action spectaculars: that one is being assaulted by teams of machines.
When I saw the most recent Transformers movie, I said felt like I'd been hit repeatedly over the head with a frying pan. Two and a half hours of Pacific Rim has much the same effect, but it must be acknow-ledged that, for all its flaws, it's a better class of frying pan.