Pacific Rim 3D is definitely not the sort of film to get your intellect racing, but if giant robots beating the living crap out of enormous alien monsters straight out of the Oligocene tickles your fancy then this is definitely something for you!
The Plot: great big monsters called Kaiju emerge from the deep to destroy 'everything in their path', especially coastal cities on the pacific rim. They emerge from an 'interdimensional portal' somewhere in the ocean and are detected making their way in double time to San Francisco, Manila, Lima, Sydney, etc. Only one thing can stop them – man's only hope, the human-controlled metal fighting machines called Jaegers.
Of course, this is an old theme that pays homage (actually in the credits) to the splendid ideas of Ray Harryhausen and to Ishirō Honda with his magnificent Godzillas. Their films wowed audiences through spectacle that came perilously close to camp farce, be that stop-frame animation, men in rubber suits or even CGI. Their eminently watchable films are predictable precisely because they are format-based and entertaining –hurrah!
The production values of Pacific Rim are high, especially the all-encompassing CGI, but I won't go into the acting skills necessary for such an outing. Suffice it to say, Charlie Hunnam is the shattered reluctant hero brought back to lead the ultimate fight, Rinko Kikuchi (magnificent in Babel) puts some actual meaningful effort into her supporting part and the wonderful Idris Elba (of the brilliant TV series Luther) is the superior wise older man figurehead.
The theme of epic monster battles, of course, goes back much further to Greek and other heroic tales. We need our heroes, whether they be Hercules, David, Gilgamesh, Rama, Beowulf and James Bond. All the stories are pretty much the same, beginning with a startling opening – Argh! M...M...M...Monsters!! – that moves on to the call for the hero – M to Bond: "You're booked on the 8:30 plane in the morning" – the hero's near-defeat – Beowulf's near defeat at the hands of Grendel – and final vanquishing of the foe – Rama returns home with his beloved Sita to a magnificent reception.
The second half of Pacific Rim takes place in Hong Kong, the sort of fantasy dystopian Hong Kong of little boys' imagination. It borrows, at least, from Blade Runner in the rainy over-crowded street scenes and from the Matrix Reloaded's restaurant scene in Hannibal Chau's suave hidden store of enormous Kaiju body parts – I'm sure you could find a whole host of other similarities with sci-fi and grand movie traditions. Apart from the linking 'busy street' scenes, Hong Kong is portrayed in moody panoramic harbour scenes or as glittering backdrops for the action out at sea. Certainly the canyons and highways of the Gloucester Road corridor are the perfect smashing locations for spectacular messy monster vs metal men fights. Street signs may be realistic enough, but don't look for any sort of continuity if you are a native Hong Konger; e.g. the north-facing harbourside faces out to southerly seaborne monster invasion.
One cannot help but wonder why Hong Kong was chosen as the location for such a mega-fight. Seeing the city get smashed up is splendid enough, but maybe the location has more to do with the film's wooing of mainland Chinese audiences (and future investors in the franchise).
I also couldn't help wonder about the film's HK people and their demolished homes. If you have ever been to HK then you may not be surprised to hear that it has some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. As this excellent BBC piece explains, many people are forced to squeeze themselves into smaller and smaller 'apartments' to the point where prison cells compare like spacious condos. Where will this end? As written previously in a post, and suggested in this WSJ article from two years ago, in one way or another this housing pressure simply has to give. The HK government has sought to build more public housing, but this is little more than a finger in the dyke. The city has to address rampant price rises (18% per year since 1989) in some way. Morality plays no place in this open market as folks get squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces to maximise the almighty dollar.
So the city is trashed by angry monsters (no doubt to be built again by happy investors) and its people are killed whilst the rest of the world looks on. I couldn't help but wonder, however, whether this may already have happened – the old Hong Kong, the Pearl of the Orient that was a place of refuge, civilisation and freedom in the East being swept away by its own home-grown, voracious and victorious bellowing monsters. The problem is, in real life there doesn't seem to be anyone powerful enough to stop them.
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