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Created Jul 13, 2013 02:27PM PST • Edited Jan 19, 2024 08:20AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   The matchless mind of Guillermo del Toro comes through on his biggest canvas yet. His Pacific Rim is perfectly attuned to the neural frequencies of 13 year-old males. Yield to it, be one with it, drift inside its richly envisioned adolescent outlook, and the movie is a near continuous tickle. Reject it – as most females and adults surely will – and it’s so much loud, clanging crap.

   It helps if you’re the kind of person who entertained a dream of being a fighter pilot. If not, the movie’s probably not for you. Of course, those two sets often intersect. Boys who want (or wanted) to be fighter pilots dream of saving the world at the controls of awesome fighting machines, a vision easily transposed to piloting 25-story tall Rock’em Sock’em Robots.

   I saw the movie with a mighty appreciative audience on America’s Pacific coast (in one of Silicon Valley’s Winchester 22 domes). No doubt it’s gonna do mega box office in Tokyo, Osaka, Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore and Sydney. Adolescent outlook – real or inner – exists all around the Pacific Rim.

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   The human cast isn’t the thing in a mecha-vs-monsters movie like Pacific Rim. Still, they generally don’t bring the production down.

   • Charlie Hunnam as the studly leading man.
   • Rinko Kikuchi as his cute copilot. Kikuchi proves herself a beguiling actress, with a world class smile and understated charisma. Global stardom beckons.
   • Idris Elba as their big chief commander, a stock role that Elba doesn’t do much to elevate.
   • Max Martini as his second-in-comand. Martini is nails in military roles, as he’s proven time and again, for instance as Mack Gerhart in The Unit.
   • Robert Kazinsky as his son, a cocksure asshole.
   • Charlie Day and Burn Gorman as a pair of wild-eyed scientists, stock roles that they do elevate.
   • Clifton Collins Jr. as the mission control guy. Collins should work more. He first impressed me in Sunshine Cleaning.
   • Ron Perlman as … well, does it matter? Del Toro pretty much always casts Perlman. Who can blame him. The guy rocks, here as an underworld dealer in illicit substances.
   • Mana Ashida as Rinko Kikuchi’s childhood character. Very affecting turn from this little girl, called upon to play a very traumatic part.

5. Male Stars Good 3.0

6. Female Stars Very Good 3.5

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

   Mana Ashida

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Guillermo del Toro and his confreres create a dream world deftly amalgamated from icons, archetypes, legends and action figures. Mythos meets Megatron as it were. Sea monsters are a central part of it, especially of the Godzilla variety, Kaiju in Japanese parlance. In fact, the entire production is strongly influenced by the Asian side of the Pacific Rim, from the Kaiju to the mega martial arts.

    4 Interesting Credits:

    • 2 Data Wranglers. What kind of data does a Data Wrangler wrangle?
    • 55 stuntmen
    • Countless FX shops
    • Blake Perlman wrote and performed Drift, a song from the movie. Who’s she? Ron Perlman’s daughter.

    The Most Interesting Credit

    • The lead FX Designer’s last name? Jaeger. Alex Jaeger to be precise. No mention anywhere that he designed Pacific Rim’s “Jaegers”, the fighting machines used to combat the Kaiju monsters. Then again, the naming commonality seems more than mere coincidence. He’s the Jäegermeister!

11. Direction Really Great 4.5

    Guillermo del Toro can add Pacific Rim to his canon, alongside Hellboy II and Pan’s Labyrinth.

12. Play Good 3.0

    Travis Beacham wrote Pacific Rim along with Guillermo del Toro, both of them drifting in perpetual adolescence. The dialog is short and often stilted, just as teen boys might imagine it.

13. Music Great 4.0

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.0

    Lots of brutal violence, yet almost no blood and guts. That’s how you keep it PG-13 and easy to cheer.

17. Sex Innocent 1.5

18. Violence Brutal 2.6

19. Rudeness Salty 1.8

21. Reality

    Fantasy 4.6

    Circumstantially? Not completely batshit crazy. Physically and Biologically? Completely batshit crazy.

22. Circumstantial Supernatural 3.8

23. Biological Fantasy 5.0

24. Physical Fantasy 5.0