10. The Beginning Of The End
I can't believe we got an American made, $185 million kaiju movie that didn't star Godzilla (though we have that to look forward to next year). It's unbelievable that del Toro was allowed to make Pacific Rim into anything but a franchise-building origin story. What del Toro delivers is anything but an origin story. The opening montage is still the big info-dump we expect these days, but there's enough action, world-building, and subversive ideas on display to make this rather long piece of exposition work. Once the film begins in earnest, it feels like one long, satisfying third act. I'm not the first to say that Pacific Rim plays like the last film in a trilogy. We get the first two movies in the first fifteen minutes. Humanity building the Jaegars and winning their first victories against the Kaiju is A New Hope, the escalation of the kaiju attacks and the death of Raleigh's brother is The Empire Strikes Back, and everything after is Return Of The Jedi. (As I'm writing this, I can't help but imagine a giant robot/kaiju fight on Endor, with lots of Ewok collateral damage. Picturing that, I'm going to take back some of things I've said against disaster porn.) I'm glad we skipped over the first act, but I almost wish we started with act two instead of act three. There are some pretty challenging ideas going on in Pacific Rim's "second act", once humanity becomes able to fight but not eliminate the kaiju threat. Everyone seems to have a "mission accomplished" complacency about them - with children playing with kaiju toys and the kaiju becoming a joke on the evening talk shows. It's a pretty potent parallel of where we are now: our society has become accustomed to being afraid, and we're now more comfortable making light of ours fears than actually confronting them. I'd love to see that film, but it would defeat the whole purpose of Pacific Rim, which is to tell a fun, kick-ass story for kids. I admire the true sense of finality about its ending. It's the first big release in awhile that's content to tell a complete, satisfying story. I enjoyed Pacific Rim, but there's no reason to come back for a sequel.