The Mexican cinéaste Guillermo del Toro is a brilliant writer, producer and director of horror, fantasy and supernatural movies, one of the most gifted to have emerged in these fields since Tod Browning and James Whale in the 1920s and 30s. His finest films to date have been made in Spain, most notably two subtle gothic fables set during the civil war and its aftermath, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth. But he's also made the highly popular American horror flicks Hellboy and Hellboy II aimed at a younger audience and both starring Ron Perlman as the eponymous comic-book superhero, and his new picture, Pacific Rim, which he co-scripted with Travis Beacham, belongs to this category.
Pacific Rim is a holiday blockbuster, a $180m bag of popcorn as unpretentious as it is expensive, designed, del Toro says, for family outings, his own included. Exactly the same honest claim was made by Richard Burton when explaining, if explanation was needed, why he was making Where Eagles Dare back in the 1960s. He said it was far too long since he'd made a picture that his own children could (or might want to) see. Indeed if you look at the 15 pictures he'd made after Cleopatra (rereleased this week to mark its 50th anniversary), you can see his point. I remember my own children, then aged 10, eight and six lapping up Where Eagles Dare back in 1969, the same year they also loved The Valley of Gwangi, the British monster movie by the great special effects maestro Ray Harryhausen, the co-dedicatee of Pacific Rim along with Ishiro Honda, who made the series of Japanese monster flicks that began in the 1950s with Godzilla and Rodan.
Pacific Rim is a war movie set in a near future that resembles in its combination of high technology with cultural and social dilapidation the grim worlds to come in Alien and Blade Runner. The opening narration tells us that for too long we've been looking to the heavens in awed anticipation of visitors or invaders from above when in fact we should have been keeping an eye on gateways to hell that admit unwanted strangers from below. Some seven years earlier creatures known as Kaiju, the size of tower blocks and far less friendly than King Kong, slipped out of Pacific troughs due to shifting tectonic plates and began setting about states bordering the ocean. Nothing new about this of course. The human response, however, was new. Giant robots known as Jaegers were created, each the size of the Statue of Liberty. They're manned by pairs of operators who need to build a neural bridge between their minds so they can work together in a way that the machine can mimic and replicate in battles against the Kaiju.
After a spectacular fight in which large boats are flung around like corvettes in the Lilliputian navy, the Kaiju appear to be winning, and some years later the Earth is moving to the desperate Plan B, which means investing everything in a giant containing wall around the Pacific rim. We also learn, for those who like moral explanations, that these monsters thrive in our polluted atmosphere, and that they're controlled, as they have been for millennia, by malevolent colonial powers. Then comes that familiar apocalyptic moment when a great leader, a former four-star general, is given "one last chance". Called Stacker Pentecost, his very name is resonant enough to make you shake even without the formidable presence behind it of Idris Elba, shortly to play Nelson Mandela in The Long Walk to Freedom. He's allowed to form a final Jaeger team based in Hong Kong to confront the ever bolder, more ferocious enemy in an ultimate showdown.
He recruits an international team of ace pilots from each edge of the rim, to be led on this do-or-die mission by a Chinese woman, two Australians and an American who's lost his brother in action and has the equally resonant name of Raleigh Becket. All have their own demons to contend with and they're united (and divided) as fathers, sons and daughters. To provide a sort of comic relief there is a pair of dotty scientists on hand (one of them with a gammy leg and called Gottlieb, in honour of Kubrick's Dr Strangelove). Also present is a maverick entrepreneur called Hannibal Chau (played by del Toro regular Ron Perlman), a not unfamiliar science-fiction character who wears gold-plated shoes and collects remnants of the monsters for sale to dubious international clients.
In addition to Blade Runner and Alien, the movie touches several other bases, among them Christopher Nolan's Inception as well as RoboCop, Iron Man and Independence Day. It imitates the last named right down to Stacker Pentecost gathering his band of brothers around him to deliver an uplifting prose version of King Harry's eve of Agincourt speech, which, as a result of Laurence Olivier's Henry V, is forever associated with D-day in 1944 by my now dwindling generation.
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 also plants a little joke halfway through the final credits both to reward the few people who haven't removed their 3D glasses and left the cinema, and to let them know that a sequel is a strong possibility. 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.
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