Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Country: USA
Genre: Action | Adventure | Fantasy | Sci-Fi
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Notes: Pacific Rim is now opened in wide release. For an alternate perspective on the film, see Mel’s review
A few months ago, my friend drove me to the Art Center College of Design. After many winding roads up the mountainside, we passed under Craig Ellwood’s bridge-building and came into the parking lot. It was our last stop that day, in what had been an impromptu city tour through which my friend succeeded in convincing me that Los Angeles hid many architectural riches amidst its sprawl. Ellwood’s modernist 1976 building was impressive, an elongated block of dark glass and black steel trusses spanning across a ravine, but what I found inside was equally impressive. It was early December and students were preparing their final projects, using the white hallways as a gallery space. There were display shelves with futuristic models of military rovers, very much in the muscular, tank-like spirit of the tumbler from Nolan’s Batman. There were entire walls converted into black-and-white drawings, and in one of them a masked man, drawn with simple curved lines like a child’s doodle, ascended a staircase in a two-dimensional composition like a cartoon version of ancient Egyptian art. There was one particularly gorgeous project, a snowy, rural landscape occupied by German timber-framed houses, a fountain, and a water well, all standing on either a black road or river snaking through a white background. This landscape was, in fact, fragmented into 18 individual frames, 3 by 6, and on each frame the same young girl in a pink dress could be seen walking aimlessly or sleeping on top of a polar bear or playing with some scissors or looking into the distance, a single presence in 18 frames experiencing various stages of solitude. An only child looking for lonesome fun in square-ruled Bavaria.
Some human characters get involved, but this is primarily about director and writer Guillermo Del Toro tunneling his way through millions of dollars in order to finally come out the other side, into the memory-image of his six-year-old self playing with plastic creatures and futuristic vehicles in his bathtub, splashing away at a narrative until his fingers wrinkle up like an old man’s.
Each of these projects displayed the inner universe of a student, who unloaded his or her imagination into a painting or sculpture. Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim is a very expensive version of this gallery space. The story doesn’t matter, but it provides the context. Earth is invaded by monumental monsters from the sea, Kaijus, which in fact have emerged from a dimensional portal deep in the oceanic crust. To combat this otherworldly aggression, the countries of the world unite and build hulking, anthropomorphic mechas, named Jaegers, and successfully drive back the assault. That is, until the monsters become stronger and wiser, and the Jaeger program, no longer as effective, begins to shut down, as government funding is diverted towards the building of weak, useless protective walls. Only a last Jaeger outpost remains operational, and it will have to prove its worth. Some human characters get involved, but this is primarily about director and writer Guillermo Del Toro tunneling his way through millions of dollars in order to finally come out the other side, into the memory-image of his six-year-old self playing with plastic creatures and futuristic vehicles in his bathtub, splashing away at a narrative until his fingers wrinkle up like an old man’s.
But he’s not alone. He has hundreds of craftsmen and women, computer wizards, costume and set designers, and concept artists at his disposal, meticulously laboring over each suit, machine, weapon, mechanical contraption, and alien movement. This is techno-porn, like that enjoyed by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove’s opening vision of copulating planes or 2001’s spaced-out observation of dancing crafts courting in orbit. When the pilots enter the Jaegers, it’s erotic. Each giant robot needs two pilots, because the neural overload required to operate them is so intense that two brains must be jacked into it at once, to share the effort. In order to board it, the pilots step into and link up to the Jaeger’s detachable head, and when everything is ready, the head falls down a shaft, sustained by rails on either side, until it reaches the body, where a series of rapid, interlocking mechanisms, like a suctioning vagina, latch the head onto the torso. Our main characters and copilots are Raleigh, still grieving the loss of his brother during one of their Jaeger missions, and Mako Mori, whose Japanese family was murdered by one of the Kaijus. Coping with their respective losses, they not only share the space of the robot head but also the memories in their human heads, since their neural connection means both know about the other’s thoughts and memories. As for us, we only get to know a crude outline of each character. An hour of material was cut by Del Toro in order to make Pacific Rim more palatable to popcorn audiences, and most of the scrapped content had to do with the characterizations. In an interview (1), he explained: “We cannot pretend this is Ibsen with monsters and giant robots. I cannot pretend I’m doing a profound reflection on mankind.” Maybe he should have tried. At any rate, in its current form, the film focuses largely on the “monsters and giant robots,” presumably to retain the innocence of the genre, according to Del Toro.
At any rate, in its current form, the film focuses largely on the “monsters and giant robots,” presumably to retain the innocence of the genre, according to Del Toro.
In another interview (2), the Mexican director reflected that “there were a couple of designers that all they did was design details and markings for the robots to make sense, like machines. You know when you see submarines or helicopters or a tank they are full of little markings. A little port, little connectors.” Indeed, the amount of detail is staggering. “We had to dive deep into their joints and make sure everything in there moved as it logically would for a machine,” recalled Hal Hickel, part of the Industrial Light & Magic team that crafted the Jaegers (3). “Every rivet and plate had to make sense. And all the battle damage also had to be reflected on those panels,” pointed out Alex Jaeger, the senior visual-effects art director (4). “Levers, pneumatic tubes, joints – it’s really fucking amazing,” said Del Toro (5), who has made it a point to praise his collaborators, people like the aforementioned and Wayne Barlowe, Oscar Chichoni, Francisco Ruiz Velasco, David Meng, and Simon Lee, artists and sculptors who conceived the creatures and machines. For almost a year, they all got together and brainstormed. Hundreds of models and sketches were made, and those deemed the best were then retouched and recolored.
Like the hallways in the Art Center College, Del Toro’s movie is a digital museum, built for the director and his team to showcase the fruits of their imaginative labor. On every corner of every frame, there are emblems and markings, tubes and switches, scars and damage. Drunk on the visual overload, we no longer pay attention to the narrative as we hope to capture as much sensory information as possible, like rushing tourists in the Louvre, sprinting from one painting to the next, ultimately fainting from the exhaustion. The digital projects in Pacific Rim surround and trap the characters, and like the projects in the Art Center College, they provide windows into the minds of various artists (6). In Pacific Rim, innumerable works of design await at the margins, all incorporated into the logic of the film and yet independent of it, affecting each other and also capable of being isolated from each other. This is not at all new in cinema, which has always combined different art forms. What I think is new is that audiences are no longer expected to notice most of it. Or rather, they are supposed to notice, but unconsciously. Beneath a nighttime blur of quick punches, sprayed ocean water, and neon lights, the obsessive, maniacal detail is aimed at our guts. We know it’s there, we just can’t actually see or remember it. Not only does the movie not pause over its artistry – which contributes to its narrative nimbleness – but events happen so quickly, fights are so kinetic, and the lighting is generally so dark, that our senses never stand a chance.
Beneath a nighttime blur of quick punches, sprayed ocean water, and neon lights, the obsessive, maniacal detail is aimed at our guts. We know it’s there, we just can’t actually see or remember it. Not only does the movie not pause over its artistry – which contributes to its narrative nimbleness – but events happen so quickly, fights are so kinetic, and the lighting is generally so dark, that our senses never stand a chance.
Mr. Beaks, interviewing Del Toro for Ain’t It Cool News, pointed this out: “Once we get this thing on Blu-Ray, we’ll be able to pause and study everything you’ve packed into the frame. But that detail is also something that will read for regular moviegoers without their knowing it.” Indeed, much of what went into Pacific Rim cannot be appreciated by simply watching it. To really do so, we have to purchase or rent the Blu-Ray, check out the making-of featurettes on YouTube, read interviews on the Internet, look up blueprints and photographs online, maybe play the videogame or buy one of the promotional posters with illustrations of individual Jaegers or Kaijus. The actual film has become little more than a nexus where various visual and aural media converge. Making-of featurettes are no longer (or at least not only) about how the incredible effects were accomplished. Now they’re about letting us know what effects and designs were there in the first place. The sheer volume of craftsmanship doesn’t fit into the movie. It overflows and seeps into other venues, almost as if the excess had been planned from the start to facilitate the production of extra multimedia material.
I likened Pacific Rim to a kind of gallery space. It is not really a traditional movie with a story, but a virtual hangar covered in art, a Sistine Chapel devoted to science-fiction. But in a gallery space, like the Art Center, I can stand in front of square-ruled Bavaria and spend hours charting a lonely girl’s progress. Film is more ephemeral, as scene follows scene. Pacific Rim suffers the continuous vanishing of its creative currency, as our eyes vainly run behind its visual treasures. This breathless pursuit will no longer be necessary when Pacific Rim is released on home media. Then, we shall freeze and inspect whatever we want. Films like these have outgrown movie theaters. We have to manipulate and interact with them in other ways, and maybe they’re not really even supposed to be movies. They dream of being videogames, but videogames are better at showing off their intricacies. They are architecture and landscape, surfaces we can move about, finding beauty in the most unsuspected cavities. And once we find it, we can pause and consider it. To do the same with film, we have to stop and fragment it, like movie critics and historians used to do running celluloid through a Moviola, and how contemporary cinephiles and bloggers do, snapping pictures through VLC Media Player. Film images have always been excessive. A shot of a room can contain infinite amounts of texture. But, in this case, the texture has been meticulously conceived by a team, and apparently, it has largely been conceived to be missed. Million-dollar drawings on the sand. We’re left with the suspicion that, on top of the Pacific Rim we actually saw, there is another shadow version with all that slipped past us, waiting for us, instead, on our computer and television monitors back home.
[notification type=”star”]69/100 ~ OKAY. I likened Pacific Rim to a kind of gallery space. It is not really a traditional movie with a story, but a virtual hangar covered in art, a Sistine Chapel devoted to science-fiction. But in a gallery space, like the Art Center, I can stand in front of square-ruled Bavaria and spend hours charting a lonely girl’s progress. Film is more ephemeral, as scene follows scene. Pacific Rim suffers the continuous vanishing of its creative currency, as our eyes vainly run behind its visual treasures.[/notification]
- Mr. Beaks Talks PACIFIC RIM, World Building And Gargantuas With Guillermo del Toro And Travis Beacham! Part One Of Two!: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/63167
- Exclusive Sneak Peak of the Costumes From Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim and Interview: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-scheidt/pacific-rim-costumes_b_1663227.html
- ‘Pacific Rim': A monster challenge for special effects: http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2013/07/09/pacific-rim-industrial-light-magic-del-toro-special-effects/2480799/
- ‘Pacific Rim': A monster challenge for special effects: http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2013/07/09/pacific-rim-industrial-light-magic-del-toro-special-effects/2480799/
- Mr. Beaks Talks PACIFIC RIM, World Building And Gargantuas With Guillermo del Toro And Travis Beacham! Part One Of Two!: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/63167
- Back when I regularly contributed to the Rotten Tomatoes film forums, a user named Bazarov would often talk about this, usually in relation to CGI movies. For instance, in a post from 2008, he pointed out: “I think that Hollywood is not a bad thing precisely because its most expensive works are becoming devoid of individualism. They are becoming collages of different designs and inventions - tens and hundreds of contributions coming together to make something that occasionally works wonders. Creative, agile groups. Like Pixar. Many brains. The story almost ceases to matter. It’s almost a distraction. Almost.”
