Pacific Rim (Del Toro 2013) has a premise that seems like it was imagined by a 12-year-old who watches too much anime. There’s no shortage of movies about robots and aliens fighting one another, especially since this movie was released at the peak of the Transformers epidemic. So how do you make a movie with a cheesy premise in a saturated genre actually interesting and (dare I say) good? By making the fight scenes cool as hell.
In movies about robots and aliens, people come to the theater because they want to see buildings getting destroyed and crazy visual effects because this is obviously super fun to watch. But, when your movie is supposed to show huge robot battles, the plot needs to somehow navigate to as many of these battles as possible. In Transformers (Bay 2007), this is done by taking an everyman character and throwing him in the middle of these giant fights with nothing to do; not very satisfying. We really don’t care what happens to Shia LaBeouf or Megan Fox or his parents because the story surrounding these characters is, aside from being extremely generic and bland in its own right, is completely detached from the fights that got us into the theater. Yes, we have a nice audience surrogate character to run away from explosions and carry the MacGuffin and save the world, but by the final set piece in the movie, we really just want to punch him in his stupid face whenever he’s taking screen time away from Optimus Prime. BUT, even though we want the Autobots to succeed (since, ya know, they’re trying to stop the Earth from being destroyed), we don’t really care about them because they barely have motivation to be saving the world in the first place, let alone character arcs.
Pacific Rim solves this problem by making the central world-saving mechanic the bond between two characters. The Jaeger program conceit is actually genius for this, since it inherently ties the consequences of the plot to the character interactions of the story. Before the titles, we see simultaneously that the Becket brothers have an extremely close relationship and that this strong relationship directly translates into Kaiju-ass-kicking. We learn right away that in order for the characters to make progress toward beating the invasion, they will have to learn about one another and actually have real, human interaction.
The place that we see this happen most effectively is during the midpoint crisis of the movie. By now, we have established that Raleigh and Mako would make a highly effective team, but there are a few huge obstacles in the way. Raleigh is learning to overcome the loss of his brother from the beginning of the movie and learn to work with someone else again. Mako is learning to overcome her past so that she does not get lost in the drift. Stacker is refusing to accept that Mako has grown into not only a capable and skillful pilot, but an adult who can make her own choices.
But then, for the first time, two Kaiju breach at the same time. A double event.
Because of the double event and the subsequent EMP, the story now must be resolved by the action of the plot. Even though it seems like everything has been going wrong with Gypsy Danger up until this point, everyone needs to put aside those problems in order to save Hong Kong. The reason that this fight is the most exciting out of all of the fights in the movie is that you get the satisfaction of all these story elements resolving with the added bonus of watching Gypsy Danger kick some Kaiju ass.
ScreenCafe 