Pacific Rim, the new film by Guillermo del Toro, is very loud and silly and we enjoyed it. We like to think of it as Guillermo’s Revenge, and as the movie got louder and sillier we made up this litany in the voice of Guillermo del Toro.

“You didn’t hire me to make Alien Resurrection, so here’s a bunch of vicious aliens!

“You didn’t hire me to make Transformers, so here’s a bunch of giant robots!

“You didn’t hire me to make Avengers, so here’s a portal between worlds!

“You didn’t hire me to make Godzilla, so here are giant beasts laying waste to an Asian city!

“You didn’t hire me to make Battleship, which is just as well because that was idiotic, but here’s a horde of monsters coming from the bottom of the sea!

“You’re not hiring me to remake Top Gun, so here’s a reenactment of Maverick vs. Ice Man!

“You didn’t hire me to make King Kong, so here’s a monster rampaging through the streets of a big city! (Hmmm, Del Toro was supposed to direct The Hobbit until his falling out with Peter Jackson, who remade King Kong.)

“You never made a live-action version of Voltes V, so let’s volt in! (Stop that. There’ll be no singing of that theme ever again.)

“Let’s set it in the Pacific Rim to get that lucrative Asian market. And let’s mention Manila because the audience in Manila will cheer when they hear “Manila”! (And we did! Hey, we clapped during Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy’s plane flew over the Philippines on a map.)”

Of course he got a five-rating from some of us five minutes into the movie, when we are introduced to Charlie Hunnam and his abs. That’s it, we have to watch Sons of Anarchy. In the near future the earth comes under attack from Kaiju, monsters rising from the deep, and the earthlings defend themselves by building huge robot fighters called Jaegers. (Every time someone said jaeger we thought we were required to take a shot.)

Jaegers are operated by pairs of muscular gesture gamers (not exactly, but sort of). The neural interface requires the pilots to do a kind of mind-meld called “the drift” which requires them to get in each other’s heads. But the monsters get smarter, the jaegers are defeated, and before long the fate of the planet rests on a motley band of fighters led by Stringer Bell from The Wire and featuring Rinko Kikuchi and cast members of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, True Blood, Homeland and The Unit. Go earth! (Now that Hollywood really needs the Asian market to guarantee profitability, we can expect more Asian faces in blockbuster movies. That’s why there are Asians and Anglo-Africans in Thor’s Asgard.)

Idris Elba shouts, speechifies, and gives probably the hammiest performance of his life, but by default (No one else says anything memorable) he is the star of the film. And we like Charlie Day, more so when he’s the resident geek/kaiju groupie.

One of our friends would not get into the spirit of the movie and kept questioning the logic of building giant robots to fight the monsters. Fine, they’re not efficient. Okay, they’re kind of dumb. Here’s a serious question: If you were the President of Earth and hordes of monsters attacked human populations, how would you fight the monsters? Apart from sending fighter jets with nuclear warheads. Any ideas?

Share this: Twitter

Facebook

