Over the summer, I managed to catch a few movies in the theater. One of those was Pacific Rim, a sci-fi film stemming from the Godzilla tradition. It was my husband and his friend's pick, but I was definitely willing to give it a shot mostly owing to the involvement of Guillermo del Toro. I loved del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth and The Orphanage, and read his Strain trilogy (perhaps more on that another time), so I'm willing to give him a chance even outside of genres that normally draw me in. And Pacific Rim was pretty fun; it had some interesting characters, in particular the female lead Mako Mori who subverts some traditional movie tropes. But, my nitpick-y self had some issues with it, and after watching the movie I spent a lot of time thinking about where I draw the line in my suspension of disbelief. Spoilers follow.
Suspension of disbelief is necessary to enjoy pretty much any fiction, but you really have to have it in sci-fi and fantasy. If you're just sneering at the very presence of the giant monster, you're never going to enjoy the story. If you're even more behind than I am, Pacific Rim establishes a world in which an inter-dimensional rift has opened in the ocean, and giant monsters called Kaiju are emerging to wreck havok on coastal cities. Okay, we'll go with that for establishment of the world.
Then, humanity has to figure out how to deal with the Kaiju. So they make giant robots called Jaeger which are controlled by two pilots inside the machine who essentially mind meld to each control half of Jaeger, and share their feelings and memories to boot. So far, so good, we can still play along with this I guess.
At the start of the movie, male protagonist Raleigh is suiting up to operate a Jaeger with his brother. They head out into what is essentially hand to hand combat with a Kaiju, but they also have some cannon-like weapons. Raleigh's brother is killed but he manages to defeat the monster with the cannons. Fast forward a few years and the Jaeger program is being shut down due to lack of effectiveness, but its founder recruits Raleigh back for one final push.
It's at this point that things began to go downhill. The Jaegers are being criticized for not getting the job done, and they seem to be struggling in almost every fight scene that's depicted from that point onward. But it's pretty easy to see why: every time someone heads off to fight a Kaiju, their tactic of choice is to walk right up to it and punch it. This seems to work about as well as you would expect slapping a bear on the nose to work. We established right at the beginning that the Jaegers have other weapons besides just big metal fists, so why is everyone so reluctant to use them?
I tried to play along, really I did. I thought to myself, perhaps the cannons use a tremendous amount of energy so they try not to use them right away. Perhaps they emit pollutants. But then, at a critical moment in yet another big battle, Raleigh and Mako revealed that they could transform one of their Jaeger's arms into a giant sword and promptly, efficiently, lopped a Kaiju's head off.
This, I think, was the major downfall of this movie. I have a lot of respect for Guillermo del Toro's drive to take horror and sci-fi elements that really engaged or scared him as a kid (see Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, a film he made after years of childhood terror from a made-for-tv movie of the same name) and try to put his own spin on them with his stories. But it was pretty obvious here that there was a concept from that wheelhouse that was clung to a little too closely. The image of a giant robot and a reptilian monster engaged in hand to hand combat is compelling the first time. But it became pretty repetitive, and then kind of stupid once it was necessary to make it completely ineffective out of necessity to advance the plot.
Finally, once this glaring error was at the forefront of my mind I really couldn't let it go when our heros survived not one, but two nuclear blasts in close proximity, floated in and out of an inter-dimensional rift, and then bobbled to the surface a-okay. I know, I know, it's sci-fi. But can't we keep it just a tiny bit logicial?
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