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In the not too distant future, dinosaur-like giant creatures - dubbed Kaijus - crawl out of a fissure in the Pacific and attack cities on the Pacific Coast. This finally causes all countries of the world to set aside their differences and work on a project to fight back the Kaijus - and the Jaeger program is born, a squadron of giant robots, each of which has to be worked by two pilots who need to have perfect mental alignement to withstand the stress and properly make the robot fight. And Raleigh (Charlie Hunnan) and his brother Yancy (Diego Klattenhoff) are two such pilots, and in fact the top pilots earth has to offer - until their Jaeger is brutally attacked by a Kaiju, an attack that kills Yancy, and makes Raleigh quit the Jaeger program.

7 years later, the Jaeger program is discontinued in favour of a wall to ward off the Kaijus - but the Kaijus are getting more intelligent and stronger, and soon learn how to deal with the wall. Now it's up to Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), head of the Jaeger program, to come up with a strategy to defend earth despite the fact that he can only relie on old Jaegers with production being halted. So of course, he gets Raleigh back, despite his protests and the claim that he has no partner - and yet he finds a partner, Mako (Rinku Kikuchi) in Jaeger headquarters, whom Pentecost doesn't want to employ though as he has fatherly feelings for her. But somehow Raleigh manages to convince him to let her do a test run with him, and while at first, everything goes smoothly, she eventually has some kind of panic attack, and almost destroys the whole hangar of Jaegers ... and from here on, both Raleigh and Mako are grounded while all the other Jaegers are sent on missions - with varying success. And eventually, the Kaijus seem to have developed a way to disrupt the digital circuits of the Jaegers, and now Raleigh and Mako get their second chance as their Jaeger's the only one that works analoguely. But by now the Kaijus have become more dangerous than ever, and the number of Jaegers is down to a handful ...

Now in general terms, Guillermo del Toro is a director who can turn slightly formulaic genre stories into something highly original and artful, even Oscar-worthy - see The Shape of Water as the best example. Pacific Rim on the other hand is no such film. Now don't get me wrong, del Toro is on top of his game here at a directorial level, everything looks breathtaking in a del Toro sort of way, even though the film's quite obviously inspired by Japanese giant robot and monster movies, it looks much more like a mix of gothica and steampunk, with not one scene that doesn't ooze of atmosphere, and it contains more visual ideas within its genre limitations than you can shake a stick on - but then there's the story that's a bit too clichée-riddled and filled with flat characters one doesn't care half as much about as about their giant robots, and the situations they go through are a bit too predictable. That all's not to say the film isn't much fun, there's plenty of battle scenes that are adrenalin-pumping, the world created for this movie looks much more real and tangible than anything seen in any of Michael Bay's Transformer movies, and as said before, the film looks fantastic - it's just not even close to a masterpiece.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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