Title: Pacific Rim
Release Date: 2013
Directed by: Guillermo del Toro
Written by: Guillermo del Toro, Travis Beacham
Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Diego Klattenhoff, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman and Max Martini (among many others)
My Grade: A-
This movie was recommended to me by several people as a good movie. I’m actually writing this part before I watch it, hence the weird tenses compared to what I will write after I watch it. Supposedly this movie has good gender dynamics, as well as a diverse cast and a good story. I’m hoping to find all of that. Although I must admit by looking at the casting list on IMDB, its looking fairly non-diverse, particularly on Gender. SO far I’m only seeing 8 female actors mostly in minor character parts, unless someone has a gender neutral name and no picture. Only two actually seem to have named parts. But we shall see. IMDB can be a bit deceiving at times.
On the bright side, it also has IDris Elba and Ron Perlman who are always worth seeing. Now onto watching the movie (A DVD. Alas, no blu-ray yet.)
(…intermission music…)
So in the end, I really enjoyed it. The lighting was dark in some areas, which might have been my TV set, but it made it hard to really see what the Kaiju looked like. However the concept was pretty good. The basic backstory of the movie is that along the Pacific Rim (also known as the Ring of Fire due to the tectonic plate activity) there opens up a breach between two dimensions. Ours, and that of the Kaiju. They start attacking us and in an attempt to fight them off we decide to build giant robots. Only it doesn’t always work, because if it did we wouldn’t have a movie.
Charlie Hunnam plays the main character, Raleigh Becket, who is a Jaeger (the robot) pilot. The robots need 2 pilots and he used to pilot with his brother but his brother died and he ended up in Alaska building a wall. Idris Alba plays the head dude of the Jager program Pentecost and basically drags Raleigh back to the robots in a last ditch effort to save the program.
Rinko Kikuchi plays the female lead (and sadly only one of two named female characters, all other female characters are background and barely have lines if any at all) Mako Mori. She is Pentecost’s adoptive daughter and the person Raleigh decides should be his new partner.
Charlie Day – who I spent half the movie calling Sam Rockwell Jr – plays Newton Geiszler, a biologist who works on understanding the Kaiju. He is accompanied by Burn Gorman, who plays Hermann Gottlieb who is basically a Nerdy Owen Harper who managed to retain the anger.
Ron Perlman plays a Blackmarket dealer who basically profits off the corpses of Kaiju.
The cast was fantastic, and I really liked the fact that they made a point to incorporate different nationalities into the story. Not all of the characters are American – actually most of them aren’t. It didn’t shy away from having characters speak in accents or their native languages. They choose actual asian/asian decent actors to play asian characters for the most part which is sadly not always the case in Hollywood.
The story was pretty good as well, though I wish there had been more time with the various Jaeger pilots other than Raleigh, Mako and Chuck. There is so much to this world unexplored, which should be interesting to see when the sequel comes out. Perhaps we can get more exploration of the Alternate universe Pacific Rim created.
So essentially my only issue with this movie that I can think of while writing this review is the lack of female characters outside the leads.
Sokorra Lewis 