Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim -- "Today we face the monsters...Today we cancel the apocalypse."  Always good lines to hear in a movie, and auspicious as well.  Guillermo Toro's Pacific Rim is not too bad and, with respect to the sloppy idiocy intrinsic to most summer blockbusters, this is high praise.  In the near future, giant sea monsters, called by their Japanese moniker Kaiju, rise from the sea to devastate the hapless geographical region named by the movie's title. (We briefly see Pres. Obama looking very concerned about the fate of the earth.)  For reasons that are best left inexplicable, the only way to defeat these skyscraper-sized monsters is to deploy 600 foot robots to beat the bejeezus out of them.  This sets the stage for the film's raison d'etre -- a series of old fashioned pugilistic encounters between the robots and the lizard-beasts, combat staged as noisy wrestling matches between men in spiny rubber-suits, whaling on one another chest-deep in vats of syrupy-looking blue water.  It's hard to resist this sort of stuff and Toro's tongue-in-cheek special effects, combining the maximum of impressive scale and pyrotechnics with the maximum of cheesy implausibility gives the film its kinky charm.  The characters are reasonably interesting and their interactions, although predictable, maintain audience interest and, although 20 minutes too long and 15 million dollars too noisy and destructive, the picture never gets boring.  Toros fills the screen with huge, crowded compositions, but your eye is invariably guided to what you are supposed to be looking at and the images make sense graphically.  The cutting is too fast, but this is necessary, I suppose, to conceal the defects in the animation and special effects.  Toros has to stage everything in blue-screen murk and his big climax takes place at the bottom of the sea in a Brueghel-esque hellscape of oozing magma, but the patently fake imagery adds to the film's appeal.  The movie has a few witty moments -- at one point, a man and woman who are falling in love look across a vast hangar highlighted by acetylene torches and enormous shadowy scaffolding to see a robot the size of the Empire State Building; as they whisper to one another, the machine's  huge heart begins to glow.  The monsters, looking like hybrids between sharks and iguanas, with bioluminiscent maws that flicker like the Blue Grotto on the Isle of Capri, emerge into our realm through a series to sphincters identified as dilated to a certain degree -- it's obvious what Toros means by his gash in the bottom of the sea oozing reddish ichor.  The first iteration of the robot war-machines, called Jaeger, are said to be "analog" -- this means you pilot them by imitating with your body the motions you want them to undertake; we see the pilots kicking their feet against steel stirrups that are linked, in steam-punk fashion, through old-fashioned gears and levers to the vast engine of the robot's legs.  For reasons detailed by the script, but unimportant to the movie except as a plot device, the robots require two operators, right and left hemisphere -- a theme curiously echoed in the monsters equipped with two brains; this allows the movie to stage "mind-meld" sequences as the two pilots join in spiritual communion to operate the vast killing machines.  (This mind-meld imagery -- old when it was used in Star Trek -- is the closest the film comes to consummated romance, although the conceit allows for some touching moments of warriorly bonding between the principals.  For all the millions on screen, the movie can't get little details right -- at the bottom of the sea, the combatants bound along as if they were not compressed by thousands of tons of water-pressure.  At the film's climax, a small woman dives into the ocean wearing her combat-pilot's suit, a suit that we have earlier been educated to believe as weighing about 600 pounds.  (The donning of the armor in this film clearly derives from similar imagery in Iron Man, and wrecks the plausibility of the climactic rescue.)  For all its defects, the picture is enjoyable and pictorially impressive -- it's a film that someone should project upside-down and backwards.  In that form, many of the images would resemble Gerhart Richter's huge abstractions, coruscating fields of metal fragments, fire, and blue fog, all squeegeed into a giant shimmering blaze of colors.