Pacific Rim (2013)

Pacific Rim starts with the word “Kaiju” on the screen, along with a definition: Japanese, meaning, essentially, monster. Beneath that is the word “Jaeger,” defined as German, meaning hunter. Then we get narration from a dude who will turn out to be the protagonist. The first thing you notice is that this dude has a weird, unplaceable accent, sort of like a British guy doing an American accent but not quite nailing it because he is in a movie that, notwithstanding what must certainly be a colossal special effects budget and enough extra scratch lying around to hire the much-celebrated Idris Elba, seems to have run dry when it came to dialect coaching. I sort of wonder what made anyone think they needed this guy to be American, given the fact that the whole premise of the story is that all the nations of Earth have rallied together to fight a great menace and there are lots of supporting characters who are not American, the aforementioned Elba being just one, but who knows – maybe market research showed that American audiences simply wouldn’t connect with an English hero (Notting Hill notwithstanding). Anyway, our Anglo-American hero, whose name we will later learn is Raleigh Becket, tells us at the beginning that as a kid, he would feel alone and small, and so, to make himself feel better, he would look up at the stars and imagine that maybe there was life out there somewhere. On the screen, we see a starry night sky. Before we have time to ponder what sort of terrible, isolating childhood would make someone forsake all worldly connections for the remote promise of extraterrestrial connections, Raleigh tells us that it turns out he was looking in the wrong direction. As he says this, we realize that what we thought was a starry sky is actually silt floating in a dark underwater scene. Nice! Raleigh tells us that aliens started attacking by coming through an interdimensional portal between two tectonic plates at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and we see some lava coming up through the sea floor and rocks breaking, and then BAM! We cut right to an awesome and enormous lizard-type creature wrecking the Golden Gate Bridge, and you’re like, “Yes! I came to see huge monsters fight robots, and within a minute, we have enough backstory to see half of that wonderful cinematic equation!”

So the monster wrecks San Francisco for a while and knocks some fighter planes out of the sky, and eventually gets killed, and Raleigh tells us the horrible toll: 3 cities wrecked, a bunch of people dead, etc. That happens a few more times (Manila, some other cities) and then mankind realized that this wasn’t going to stop, and that fighter jets and tanks aren’t the best way to fight these monsters. “So we created monsters of our own.” Yes – two minutes in, and we are seeing enormous fighting robots! As an aside, that line would have been a great moment for this movie to take a totally different turn, into a dark meditation on how power corrupts – the mighty kaiju-fighting robots could have been used as tools of oppression by the newly coalesced alliance of world governments, and this could have been a dystopian future with huge fighting robots, cool monsters, and compelling politics. But no.

Raleigh narrates that the robots – called Jaegers, because that means hunter and so that the movie can be full of lines that seem like cautionary tales about college binge drinking – are so enormous that it’s too hard for one human brain to control them, which we learn by seeing a dude looking frazzled and having a nosebleed, because nosebleeds are what happen to movie people when their brains are overwhelmed. So a system is developed where two pilots are used, one for each hemisphere of the enormous robot’s brain, and the pilots do some kind of mind-meld called a drift. Apparently it helps the functioning of the drift for the pilots to be kin, because as Raleigh narrates about how these Jaeger pilots (ha ha) become celebrities, there’s a clip of some of them on a talk show, and they are twins. We see more footage of the Jaegers in action, and basically what they do is engage the Kaiju in huge-scale fistfights. There are a lot of reasons why this doesn’t make any sense, since these fistfights mostly seem to take place in cities and smash a lot of stuff (and presumably kill a lot of people). I mean, we have nukes, and we have missiles, so why wouldn’t we just shoot nuclear warheads at the Kaiju as soon as they emerge from the sea? I mean, sure, there’s all that radiation, but is that so much worse than smashing the shit out of all these cities? On the other hand, a pretty good reason for defeating huge sea monsters in cities with huge fistfighting robots is, well, defeating huge sea monsters in cities with huge fistfighting robots. So yeah.

Fast-forward to the moment from which Raleigh is narrating. An alarm goes off and he is climbing out of a military type bunk and rousing another dude from another bunk. A Kaiju has just come through the breach! It is bigger than any of the preceding Kaiju (Category 4!), and Raleigh and his brother are Jaeger pilots who must get up right away, put on cool-looking costumes, and go fight! I don’t remember the brother’s name, but disappointingly, it is not Durham. Anyway, Raleigh is super excited to fight Kaiju! His brother is not so excited, and also not so handsome, and when they walk dramatically down the worn and shoddy bunker hallway, Raleigh has tremendous swagger – almost too much, almost comical – while his brother just walks like a guy on his way to a dangerous monster-fighting mission. We learn that they are in Alaska, and that the commander of the Alaska Jaeger unit is the preposterously named Marshal (that’s his rank) Pentecost (that’s his surname). He has a first name that we learn later, but I didn’t catch it. He is played by Idris Elba, which is confusing because, well, Stringer Bell from The Wire.

Anyway, we get to see the brothers Becket suit up in their cool suits, do their drift, which involves a brief series of quick-cut, black-and-white memories, and then strap into the standing position inside a room-sized capsule whence they will do their fighting. The capsule is actually the robot’s head, which then goes down a big elevator shaft to get plunked onto its body. When they’re all ready, they punch one of the robot’s fists into its other palm, tough-guy style, and then a whole bunch of helicopters carry the robot out and drop it in the ocean, where it is waist deep, because it is a very big robot. As they wade out toward destiny, Idris Elba tells them there’s a fishing vessel in the area (oh, and it’s nighttime and super stormy), but that they shouldn’t worry about saving those ten lives because they are protecting a city of two million (which, um, I don’t know. Anchorage has about 300K and Vancouver, BC, has 600K. Anyway). Almost immediately, the brothers Becket decide that they will save the boat, which they do by picking it up and moving it to another spot in the ocean. In addition to being really neat, this tells us something about the insubordinate, Tom-Cruise-in-Top-Gun ethos that prevails among the Jaegermeisters. Then they fight the kaiju, and it is definitely cool, but apparently the fact that this kaiju is bigger than any that preceded it proves problematic. It rips one of the Jaeger’s arms off and eventually pokes some tentacly appendage into the robot’s head and tears Raleigh’s brother right out! Raleigh mans up and controls the crippled Jaeger on his own and eventually kills the kaiju. Then he stumbles to shore and the whole robot collapses on the beach in exactly the way a person would, falling first to its knees, then face-forward on the sand. Luckily, an old dude with a metal detector and a little kid are there to render assistance (predictably, the metal detector goes crazy as the huge robot approaches).

Five years later, the world coalition of annoying dudes in suits has decided that the Jaeger program isn’t good enough for the ever-increasing size of the Kaiju, and they’ve started phasing Jaegers out in favor of the Wall of Life, which is a huge-ass wall constructed along, I guess, the whole Pacific coastline. Raleigh, once an elite pilot, is now an ordinary welder on the wall in Alaska. We see a gathering of the men working in this punishing endeavor, where a foreman tells them there’s good news and bad news. The latter is that three men died the previous day working at the top of the wall, and the former is that, hey, three job openings at the top of the wall! We learn that rations are only given to those who work, and there’s another hint of the dystopian, Blade Runner future that could have been the essence of this movie if it were District 9 instead of Pacific Rim. We see that the workers don’t have safety harnesses and that they get down from high heights by sliding down the sides of I beams like firemen on a brass pole, and we’re like, whoa, no OSHA in the kaiju future? But whatever. The workers are suddenly all watching a news report that the wall around Sydney, which had been billed as impregnable, was easily breached by a kaiju (this having apparently been the wall’s first test), and that only the deployment of a Jaeger ultimately saved the day. The workers are all disgruntled and shout, “What are we building this wall for, anyway?”

Is Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro offering us a cutting criticism of calls in the United States to build a border wall to keep out immigrants, and signalling the ultimate futility of such a tactic? Maybe. But what alternative is he proposing? That we build robots to engage illicit border crossers in fistfights in the Arizona desert? Or maybe that’s too literal. Maybe American workers are like the hapless city residents, caught between the kaiju, representing downward wage pressure created by the presence of undocumented immigrants, and the jaegers, representing both mechanization, which has brought about the loss of skilled and unskilled manual labor employment, and globalization, which has spurred the loss of domestic manufacturing employment to overseas sites where labor is cheaper. And the ultimate resolution to the kaiju problem [SPOILER ALERT] – exploding a nuclear bomb in the kaiju home world that destroys the portal through which kaiju come to Earth – represents a radical upending of the stratified economic schemes that cause so much of the world’s proletariat to see immigration to the U.S. as the only viable way forward. Del Toro is telling us that we shouldn’t build a wall to keep undocumented immigrants out or punish those immigrants once they’re here. Instead, we should stop endorsing economic aide plans that prop up third world elites at the expense of the working class, and in this way undermine the very system that spurs transnational economic migration. Brilliant! Also, robots fighting monsters.

Anyway, right before the scene at the wall, Idris Elba was on a video conference to a bunch of world leaders, who told him the Jaeger program would be defunded in six months and he should take his remaining Jaegers to the Hong Kong base. He grumbles about it, and then the Canadian government dude says something in a sneering voice that struck me as decidedly un-Canadian.

So after the workers see the kaiju break the wall in Sydney, Idris Elba shows up at the Alaska wall in a helicopter, now in a very sharp suit, rather than the brass-buttoned uniform he had before. The odd thing is that the suit will prove just as out of place in the non-uniformed, frequently insubordinate Jaeger base as the spiffy admiral costume did. When the helicopter lands, Raleigh somehow knows that it’s Marshal Pentecost and walks right out to greet him as he gets off. They have a surly exchange in which Raleigh initially resists going back to robot driving, but is persuaded by Idris Elba, who suggests that if the world is going to end, Raleigh might as well be in the thick of the fight.

In Hong Kong, they are met by Mako Mori, Idris Elba’s diffident assistant. Everyone speaks a little bit of Japanese. She has a pageboy haircut with the bottoms of a few locks in the front dyed blue. That seems like it wouldn’t comport with military regulations, but, you know, brave new world, I guess. We learn that Mako has been studying Raleigh’s fighting style and stuff to determine who will be the best copilot for him. There are many candidates for this job, but of course, she secretly hopes to have the job herself, because she has trained as a Jaegermeister and is 51/51 in simulations, which is apparently really good. But Idris Elba feels protective of her because, we learn, he adopted her when she was little after her family was killed by a kaiju – later there will be an amazingly cheesy flashback where she is hiding from the rampaging kaiju, then it gets killed by a Jaeger, and Idris Elba emerges from the Jaeger and removes his helmet with the sun shining from behind him and terrorized child Mako inexplicably smiles.

Part of determining Jaeger pilot brain drift compatibility apparently involves some kung fu fighting with sticks on a gym mat, so a series of dudes fights Raleigh and he beats them all handily while Idris Elba and Mako look on. Then Raleigh is like, Stringer, you should let her fight me, and all the cadets start to chant their approval, and Stringer Bell is like, OK, why the hell not? (Where is the military discipline in all this?) So they fight and she is very good and they also have sort of a moment as they are kung fu fighting, plus we see her in a tight-fitting tank top, establishing that she is hot enough to be the love interest. Despite the fact that she is way better at stick fighting than any of the other cadets, Stringer says no, he won’t pick her, he’s made up his mind, etc. She is crestfallen.

Along the way, we have learned who the other remaining Jaegermeisters are, and the Jaegers they will pilot. There’s a Russian brother-sister team who are both impossibly tall with dyed-white hair. They fight in an old-school jaeger that looks like it's going to say "Danger Will Robinson" at any minute. There’s a team of Chinese triplets called, I think, the Wei Tang family (presumably, they ain’t nothin’ to fuck with). Because they are triplets, they have a cool three-armed Jaeger. When they are not piloting it, they are ALWAYS playing basketball or holding the basketball – even in the base mess hall, you see them in the background with that goddamned ball. Then there’s a father-son team of Australians – the ones who defeated the kaiju after it breached the wall in Sydney. The father looks exactly like Lance Armstrong and is cool. The son is the classic, cocky movie asshole. If this were Karate Kid, he’d be the blonde kid from Cobra Kai. If it were Back to the Future, he’d be Biff. They have a bulldog that follows them around and is beloved by people on the base, and their is nothing distinguishing about their jaeger, it's just cool.

Also at the base are two scientists who are researching the kaiju to figure out how to defeat them. One is a kaiju fanboy (his disdainful partner uses the term “groupie,” but he’s definitely a fanboy), with a tattoo on his arm of the kaiju that killed Raleigh’s brother. That makes for an awkward elevator ride! The other looks amazingly like Willem Defoe, always wears a labcoat, has a plummy British accent, and moves in the stilted, limping manner of Dr. Strangelove. He is all about numbers and computations, which he does mostly on huge blackboards, even though everyone else has 3D touch computers and other cool stuff. The fanboy thinks the key to defeating the kaiju is in their biology. Willem Defoe thinks there’s some mathematical model. They bicker incessantly. The fanboy one is a cross of Rick Moranis in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters, but only the part where he’s the keymaster.

So, surprise, Idris Elba does pick Mako to be Raleigh’s copilot, which Raleigh doesn’t find out till he’s in the robot’s head, waiting for someone to show up for their first test run. But! Mako has to do a mind drift for the first time, and something happens to her that is, I guess, a known problem, because she just spaces out and all the technical people watching from their little control room, including Idris Elba, are like, “She’s chasing the rabbit!” Then we see her remember the time when a kaiju killed her parents, except Raleigh is there in his cool Jaegermeister suit (it’s like interlocking black armor, sort of like Iron Man) trying to calm her little kid self. Then she kinda bugs out and starts to arm the plasma cannons on the Jaeger and WHY DID YOU DO A TEST RUN WITH LIVE GUNS? But whatever, the manual override button in the control room isn’t working and they have to unplug a massive cable, which is hard to do, and eventually everything is OK. Afterward, Mako is understandably disconsolate and Raleigh tries to comfort her, and then they are in a base hallway and the asshole Australian son is there talking shit, and Raleigh punches him and tells him to apologize to Mako for whatever rotten thing he said, and they fight a bunch, with Raleigh getting the upper hand, and then Idris Elba calls Raleigh and Mako into his office, where he tells her, not surprisingly, that she can’t be Raleigh’s copilot. Idris Elba’s office is super weird, with a walkway suspended above a pond, and a door at the back that is open to a skyscraper view of Hong Kong, as if you could walk out the doorway and plummet to your death.

So while all this has been going on, the scientists have been working on their competing theories. Willem Defoe has a chalkboard full of algebra to prove that the size and frequency of kaiju is just going to go from bad to worse. Rick Moranis has been doing all sorts of experiments with kaiju remains, including a still-living kaiju secondary brain (because, by the way, they’re too big to have just one brain, so they need two, like dinosaurs). He gets the idea that if he could do a drift and mind-meld with the kaiju brain, he’d figure stuff out. Idris Elba says no, you’ll die. Willem Defoe is like, yeah, told you so. So Rick Moranis cobbles together a drift set-up from garbage and does it anyway. He does not die, but does get a nosebleed and bursts some blood vessels in one eye, and comes back with the knowledge that the kaiju attack different planets and drain them of resources, that they are constantly evolving to be more badass, that they have one connected consciousness and the same DNA, and that they started on Earth a long time ago (the dinosaurs!) but the atmosphere wasn’t right, but thanks to all of man’s environmental degradations, “we’ve practically terraformed it for them,” and now they’re back and they’re going to keep sending bigger and badder monsters.

Stringer Bell's plan for the remaining jaegers has been to send them into the breach to detonate a nuclear bomb that will destroy the breach so that kaiju won’t be able to come from other dimensions. Apparently, the world coalition of governments has tried shooting nukes into the breach before, without success, which makes me wonder (1) why they think it will work this time and (2) why this movie doesn’t once contain the words, “once more, into the breach.” The answer to the first question is that Idris Elba thinks maybe if a jaeger goes through the breach and delivers the nuke to the kaiju world, that will work somehow. There is no good answer to the second question. So just as this plan was meant to get underway, and shortly after Raleigh and Mako’s disastrous try at working together, two kaiju come through the breach. The other three jaegers are mobilized to deal with the threat, while Mako sulks privately and Raleigh stands around with arms crossed and a grim expression on his face. The Russians and their jaeger are quickly torn to shreds. The Wei Tang Clan does an awesome thing where the three hands on the three arms of their jaeger turn into whirling blades – this is called Thundercloud Formation (they say a long sentence in Chinese with the English word “thundercloud” in the middle, because China doesn’t have thunderclouds, I guess) – but the kaiju spits acid on them and that’s the end of them. The Lance Armstrong and Son Australian jaeger is having a pretty good go of it till one of the kaiju emits some kind of crazy electrical wave that disables all of the power and operations of the control room back at the base and of the jaeger and maybe of some of Hong Kong too. The Australian jaeger is left standing in the water doing nothing. A tech dude in the control room explains that the electric pulse affected everything digital, and it will take him two hours to “reroute the auxiliary” and get the control room running again. None of the jaegers can work, he explains, because they’re all digital. “Our jaeger is all analog!” says Raleigh, a fact that was (1) conveniently never mentioned heretofore and (2) demonstrably not true, based on all the crazy stuff they did to control it, if I understand at all what the difference is between digital and analog. But whatever, now there is a reason for Mako and Raleigh to suit up! They do the drift and this time she does not chase the rabbit, so it’s all systems go. Helicopters airlift their jaeger to the battle. In the mean time, the Australians have climbed up on top of the head of their robot and are shooting flares into the kaiju’s face. This is not a good long-term survival strategy, but luckily, Raleigh and Mako get there and beat that kaiju with tough moves.

Before these kaiju made the scene, Rick Moranis had told Idris Elba about all the stuff he learned from his mind meld with the secondary kaiju brain, and Idris Elba was like, do it again. But the mind meld ruined the kaiju brain, so Moranis needed a new one. Stringer sent him to see a Hong Kong underworld kaiju body parts dealer named Hannibal Chau. It would have been great if he were played by Malcolm MacDowell, but actually he’s probably too old now. Anyway, it was actually Ron Perlman, who was almost as good, especially because he had on those kind of glasses that are round and super dark, like for welding, and gold-plated shoes, and he explained that he took his first name from his favorite historical figure and his last from his second-favorite Szechuan restaurant in Brooklyn. Anyway, Rick Moranis connects with Chau in an area of Hong Kong where kaiju parts are bought and sold, called the Bone Slums (and Harmony!). Moranis tells Chau why he wants a kaiju brain (because Chau is like, they’re useless – no phosphates, just lots of ammonia!), and Chau looks at his bloodshot eye and is like, YOU ALREADY DID A DRIFT WITH A KAIJU BRAIN, YOU DAMN FOOL!

Just then, they hear the sounds of the kaiju attack (because one stayed in the bay to fight robots while the other headed for the city) and Chau is like, drifts are a two-way street, so now they know all about you and they’re coming for you! And with that, Chau repairs to his “kaiju bunker” while sending Rick Moranis to the street to fend for himself. Chau proves right, as the kaiju homes in on Moranis in a public underground kaiju shelter and breaks through the ceiling trying to get him. Just then, luckily, Raleigh and Mako finish with the other kaiju in the bay and start fighting the remaining one, distracting it from Moranis. A massive, Hong Kong-destroying donnybrook ensues. The robot hits the kaiju with a huge cargo ship. The kaiju hits the robot with a construction crane. The robot hits the kaiju with shipping containers. At one point, the robot punches at the kaiju and misses, and its enormous fist goes into an office building and slows down just in time to barely tap one of those suspended-ball, perpetual motion desk toys and set it gently in motion. There was probably symbolism in that.

Eventually, the jaeger defeats the kaiju. There is a point when it seems like the jaeger can’t win because it has exhausted all its useful weapons and the kaiju has suddenly revealed that it has wings and is carrying the jaeger up into the sky, and then Mako is like, oh, I do have one other thing, and it’s a huge Voltron sword that slices the bejesus out of the kaiju and makes the audience say, why in hell didn’t you pull that shit out twenty minutes ago and spare Hong Kong a bit of mayhem? But you know how it is – as with Voltron, robots that fight for good must slowly escalate their use of weaponry before finally winning with the sword.

Rick Moranis goes back and gets Chau to deploy his team of kaiju organ recovery specialists to get the secondary brain from the recently slain kaiju while it’s still alive. Unfortunately, while walking around in hazmat suits inside the carcass, they find out that it is pregnant, and the fetus burst out and kills them, and also Chau, before choking to death on its own umbilical cord. But it’s the perfect opportunity, and Rick Moranis and Willem Defoe get their brain drift equipment to the scene and find out from the kaiju fetus brain that the reason all previous attempts to send bombs down the interdimensional breach have failed is because the breach only allows passage to kaiju by reading their DNA, so the jaeger that delivers the death blow will have to go through with a kaiju!

OK! Final mission! Raleigh and Mako are in their jaeger. The Australian jaeger was recovered and fixed, but Lance Armstrong hurt his arm in the battle and can’t pilot it, so Idris Elba suits up to go with the asshole son. By the way, all through the movie, Elba has been seen to take pills periodically from an Altoids-type box. We’ve also noticed him to be having some nosebleeds. What we learn in the scene right before the final mission, when Raleigh and Idris are talking in Idris’s weird office, is that Idris has radiation poisoning, because the early models of jaegers that he piloted in his heyday didn’t have adequate radiation shielding, and he’s been told that even one more jaeger mission would kill him (I remember waking up from a binge my junior year of college and thinking the same thing, ha ha). Also, we learn that he was the only other person ever to pilot a jaeger solo. Anyway, the point is that for Stringer Bell, this is a suicide mission. He is a badass. He has an Iron Man jaeger-driving suit and he makes an inspiring speech to everyone at the base, something about postponing the apocalypse.

The plan is for the two remaining jaegers to go into the breach and initiate the process that all huge robots powered by a nuclear reactor have, whereby they can self-destruct and make a huge nuclear explosion. The pilots will get away at the last minute in escape pods. Easy. But! Three more kaiju show up at the breach just as the jaegers are getting there, the last of which is a Category Five! The biggest ever! Underwater battling ensues. Idris Elba and the asshole son, their systems badly compromised from many ferocious monster punches, blow themselves up to dispatch a kaiju.

Willem Defoe and Rick Moranis rush breathlessly into the control room just in time to tell Raleigh and Mako that they have to use a kaiju to get through the interdimensional breach. This time, Mako and Raleigh don’t hold back on the sword, and manage to beat the kaiju and jump into the breach with the kaiju's body impaled on their vorpal blade. They fall through to the kaiju world, which is smoggy.

The battle somehow damaged Mako’s access to oxygen, so Raleigh connects his oxygen supply to her while they are falling, then puts her in her escape pod and launches it up into the breach (no kaiju DNA this time, but she goes through just fine anyway). Then he’s all gasping and running out of air and he has to initiate the reactor core meltdown, which for some reason can only be done manually, which involves descending into the torso of the jaeger, almost falling into the maw of its whirling machinery, and opening up some sort of hatch and turning a knob. He manages this, of course, and gets into the escape pod and gets through the breach. Then a kaiju notices this huge robot falling in slow motion and makes some kaiju monster sounds that seem to be saying, WTF, and this kaiju goes toward the jaeger and is making more kaiju screeches, and we see the core meltdown countdown clock just as it gets to zero and then we get one last look at the perplexed kaiju and then BOOM! Cut to the cool 3D rendering of the interdimensional breach, back at the control room, and it just sort of disappears, and everyone cheers! Ding dong the breach is dead!

But what about Mako and Raleigh? Her escape pod comes to the surface of the sea and automatically opens up, and she is OK, aside from being on a tiny raft in the Pacific. Then Raleigh's pod comes up, but it doesn’t open automatically, so Mako swims over to it, rather impressively, given the crazy body armor she’s wearing. She gets the pod open and looks if Raleigh is OK. He is nonresponsive. She has radio contact with the control room and says she can’t find a pulse. Everything is tense, and instead of doing CPR, she just sort of lifts him to a sitting position and hugs him. Then we hear him say, “Youre squeezing me to hard.” Hooray! He is alive.

They get back to the base and everyone is happy. Did I mention that there was a huge clock in the base with numbers that flipped over mechanically like old-time alarm clocks? There was, and its purpose was to measure the time between kaiju attacks, like those signs at factories that say “138 Days Without an On-the-Job Injury.” So Lance Armstrong is now the Marshal (that was Idris Elba’s rank, remember, but he’s dead now), and he gets on a microphone and tells the base, rather ceremoniously, “Stop that clock!” Everyone cheers. Earth is saved. The end.