Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) has gotten quite a drubbing from film critics. Jonathan Romney in The Independent described it as an example of where “even smart, idiosyncratic directors can make dumb, impersonal movies. And Pacific Rim is the flashiest, clumsiest, most heavily armed in the salvo of Stupid Bombs that Hollywood has been bombarding us with”. He is disappointed in del Toro’s turn away from his “wonderfully eerie Spanish chillers (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, the sublime fairy tale nightmare Pan’s Labyrinth), and two superbly entertaining comic-strip adaptations, the Hellboy films” to a big budget monsters versus robots tale. Justin Chang is more forgiving, but similarly disappointed in his review in Variety:
“With this gargantuan passion project, del Toro means to fashion a giddy throwback to the monster movies of yore and restore a sense of pure escapism to the summer movie landscape, an eminently worthy goal for a genre master of such inexhaustible imagination and knowledge of the B-movie canon. Yet while the director’s love for his material is at once sincere and self-evident, it’s the sort of devotion that winds up holding all but the most like-minded viewers at an uninvolving remove; although assembled with consummate care and obsessive attention to visual detail, “Pacific Rim” manages only fitful engagement and little in the way of real wonderment, suspense or terror. It may not reside in the same crass, soulless neighborhood as Michael Bay’s “Transformers” movies, but its sensory-overload aesthetics are at times no more than a junkyard or two away.”
This paragraph is worth quoting in full because, like Romney, Chang acknowledges del Toro’s form, the critics consequent expectations, makes reference to some of the referents del Toro is playing with, and his disappointment with the resulting film.
One of the few newspaper critics to write positively about Pacific Rim, Philip French in The Observer, did so similarly acknowledging the knowing references, del Toro’s previous films and how his venture into this genre compares to others. He concludes:
“Del Toro generally manages to keep triumphalism at bay, avoids solemnity, gives each nation a fair share of the limelight and cheerfully embraces the mock seriousness that such films insist on. […] He has been greatly helped in the project by his regular cinematographer Guillermo Navarro and the excellent production designer Andrew Neskoromny, both of them highly experienced in this genre.”
Stuart Crawford in the online site Eye for Film was more hyperbolic in his positive assessment:
“If you came looking for complex character relationships or realistic science or a plot that makes any kind of sense whatsoever, you came to the wrong film. If you came looking for a big-budget kaiju movie with giant robots smacking enormous sea creatures up and down Hong Kong with scant regard for property damage, Pacific Rim is going to blow your socks off. And your feet. In fact you’ll be lucky to have anything left below the knee.”
Again, he picks up on the references that he found most compelling from the film in his review, and addresses audience expectations. It seems that positive and negative reviews picked up on the same things but came to different conclusions. Peter Debruge in Variety carried out a survey of US reviews of Pacific Rim and found that the critics dashed expectations were to blame for their dislike (at worst) or ambivalence (at best) towards the film:
‘The explanation is simple: The highbrow set doesn’t especially like movies like “Mimic” — or “Godzilla,” for that matter. Nashawaty’s review went on to complain, “It’s more like a mash-up of ‘Real Steel’ and the ‘Transformers’ pictures,” as if del Toro wouldn’t agree, or wouldn’t take that as a compliment, the same way certain fanboys found a ringing endorsement of the film they wanted “Pacific Rim” to be when Variety’s Justin Chang slammed it as “an extended 3D episode of ‘Mighty Morphin Power Rangers’ on very expensive acid.”’
He concludes by asking the reader to:
“Pause just a moment to consider the ambition here: Whereas most summer movies tentatively attempt to establish a franchise, del Toro and co-writer Travis Beacham dive into a full-blown sci-fi scenario determined to tell the best possible story the first time around. As HitFix’s Drew McWeeny pointed out, “Pacific Rim” feels more like the third film in a trilogy than the opening salvo. In that respect, it’s all the Guillermo del Toro movie you could want.”
It’s not just critics who fail to like the film. Costing $180 plus million it only took in $25-35 million in its opening weekend in the US. This doesn’t mean that it will lose money, but it’s definitely not making the profits the investors will have expected.
So, why did I like this film? I’m not a super-geek of monster movies, nor of films where technology saves the world, what appeals to me is the humanity that was evident both in the quieter moments (I grant that it is very noisy for the most part), and in the collaborative effort to save the world. It is about an international collective. It isn’t another film about ‘American Vs the World’, as The Independent‘s review headline suggests. It is a collective effort of a ragtag bunch of heroic losers, skilled warriors and science nerds from a variety of nationalities who save the day. Many of these are fairly stock characters, with a del Toro twist. I particularly enjoyed two of these characters. Firstly, Ron Perlman’s turn as Hannibal Chau, which was relatively brief and was as much a nod to other characters in del Toro’s own films as it was to those of others. Secondly, Clifton Collins Jr as Ops Tendo Choi. His Latino character is dressed as an oft derided cholo in a style that is familiar from the homies. In Choi del Toro places a Latino in charge of the controls, which is still quite radical. Latinos are rarely credited with technical wizadry. The multi-cultural, multi-national group is an essential and almost invisible element in the plot and characterisation, which means that there is an unusual air of equality among the nations saving the planet. Del Toro de-centres the US as the usual power that must save the world and has this multi-national resistance group taking on the task instead.
There are also references to tropes that del Toro repeatedly employs in his films: a young girl having to face up to terrible and adult circumstances; time as a recurrent central element; dark humorous touches (though fewer than expected) and repeated homage to other films. Like the other critics I enjoyed the multi-layered references and filmic citations, some of whom I recognised and others I learned in retrospect from the multiple reviews. If you want to see a blockbuster this summer, adjust your expectations of what a del Toro film is and go see it – maybe bring earplugs.