“Entertaining” has become a euphemism for “crap, but with pretty set-pieces”: a pleading entreaty offered by sci-fi apologists to save face when discussing yet another underwhelming summer movie we were foolish enough to get excited about.
It becomes an ever weaker descriptor as the years go by, cheapening in value with every genre movie that doesn’t quite work. The rush of excitement when the BBFC card appears on screen deflates quicker and quicker each time, leaving only a distracted internal voice that gnaws on plot holes and wonders when it will all be over.
Sitting through Prometheus last year, and then World War Z and Star Trek earlier this summer, that voice was as loud as popcorn. I began seriously wondering whether satisfying genre movies were even possible anymore or whether – worse yet – my brain was burnt out on effects-driven movies, jaded to spectacle and doomed to overthink any piece of simple fun.
During the full 132 minutes of Pacific Rim, however, I don’t think I actually had any thoughts.
Before a single critical neuron could fire, the film grabbed my mental wrist like the ancient mariner and gruffly set out its pitch with a relentless opening montage. “Here” it said, “is a story about people getting in huge robots to have fights with monsters, and it’s going to be loud”. Leaving no time for me to digest this, it proceeded to launch into the most astonishing fight between a robot and a monster.
Then there was more, and more, and more. The film stuck with its preposterous internal logic with complete attention to detail, and was paced in such a way as to never really leave time for reflection.
Director Guillermo del Toro has spoken with open passion about this ludicrous, ludicrous film. His single-mindedness triumphed in the finished product. Rather than the lumpen, episodic structure so familiar from the design-by-committee approach to blockbusting, Pacific Rim successfully maintained a constant escalation of pitch.
The visual storytelling was superb, with fights choreographed and shot more in the manner of a sports movie than a typical effects-led effort. There was no shaky-cam, no loss of spatial awareness or sense of scale, and no confusing, staccato smash cuts to flailing metal of the kind that the Transformers movies were so rightly pilloried for.
The world of the film was relentlessly imaginative, from the way city streets were built around the skeletons of fallen monsters, to the alien skin parasites collected and sold by black marketeers, right down to the patches and insignia on the uniforms of the heroes (yes, heroes. Pacific Rim is not the kind of film that has ‘protagonists’).
Everything could have been generic and still have contributed to something that was just as marketable, but instead reeked of hours and hours of careful design.
In fact, the only thing to give my suspension of disbelief a wobble was Burn Gorman’s demented parody of a bookish scientist. Even though his role was written with the same level of operatic lunacy as the rest of the film, it felt awkwardly off-the-shelf in a way that nothing else really did.
In general, the human drama in Pacific Rim was inevitably going to be its weak point. But everyone involved could act, and the attempt to tackle real emotion was far enough in advance of the genre standard to make it seem mean-spirited to make a meal of the issue.
Certainly, Idris Elba bellowing “we are cancelling the apocalypse” came pretty close to unpardonably silly, but after two hours of gigatonne punching, that level of cheesiness seemed genuinely necessary in a way that I can’t honestly explain after the fact.
And that is, essentially, where any conversation on this movie ends for me. I can’t necessarily explain how del Toro got away with it, nor do I feel any real need to understand why. I simply really, really enjoyed how it felt to be watching the film. As I understand it, that’s entertainment.
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